DeFlock's mission is simple: to shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.
This app makes it easy to view and report AI powered surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), and other surveillance infrastructure near you.
Sharing information about where cameras are located is terrorism now?
e: important clarification, by rich I mean billionaires who own the majority of everything and not successful doctors, engineers or movie stars. Know your classes, kids
That's partly the point. Use words that accurately describe your evil group to incorrectly describe other groups and all of a sudden the words lose meaning and nobody can call you that anymore. Hooray!
In the UK the term is defined by the government as anyone who is deemed by the government a threat to the government or the people or someone's property or the predominant local religion. But recently it's been exclusively used for the first one.
In this country state law is valued higher than corporate, moral, ethical and religious laws, so YMMV
"
Terrorism: interpretation. (Terrorism Act 2000)
(1)In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where—
(a)the action falls within subsection (2),
(b)the use or threat is designed to influence the government [or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and
(c)the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious [, racial] or ideological cause.
(2)Action falls within this subsection if it—
(a)involves serious violence against a person,
(b)involves serious damage to property,
(c)endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action,
(d)creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or
(e)is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
(3)The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
(4)In this section—
(a)“action” includes action outside the United Kingdom,
(b)a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated,
(c)a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and
(d)“the government” means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.
(5)In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.
"
The UK isn't the US (at least in this context) almost nobody has guns.
In very limited situations the police can, but it's not the norm.
Don't get me wrong, ACAB, they just don't generally use guns a as a pretext, perhaps a knife, or perhaps there is more than an arbitrary number of people grouped together so they can claim an 'illegal' protest.
I didn't mean they really thought a camera were a gun. I mean UK cops will "suspect" people filming with a camera of being a terrorist (as if aiming the camera were like pointing a gun).
Fatal police shootings in the UK are getting more common. In 2019 one man was "lawfully murdered" because an officer said the victim's mobile phone looked like a handgun. In 2024 it was announced the officer would not be prosecuted. Not one police officer has been found guilty of illegal murder as of yet.
It's so broad, they can accuse anyone of it, and that's the point. Both parties have long supported these over broad laws too, because they are not on our side, they want the ability to bring the power of the state on the heads of any groups that might not be breaking the law in a way any reasonable person would condemn but still scare those aritstocrats.
It never had meaning. To instill deep fear. Doing violent acts with the purpose of achieving a political end.
It's always been super broad and just waiting for a domestic party to adopt the tactics of Israel's occupied territories here in the US, that's where this was always heading.
It's accelerated: In 2001, technology companies were forced to collect user data and realized it could be a goldmine. Today, technology companies are being forced to collect people's IDs... I'm sure this will end up just fine.
Since Flock CEO wants to give this movement some press
Here's Benn Jordan, he's done a series of videos on the cameras, demonstrates their vulnerabilities, and talks about how Flock has been deploying secretly by co-opting local municipalities to subsidize their national rollout.
Not as directly related, but he discusses a way to use generative AI models to create noise masks for your specific plate that will disrupt the OCR process that ALPRs use. (Key term: Adversarial Noise)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk
This dude also has some solid videos on flock (and other things). Everyone should know that cities and towns are kicking flock out left and right. Use this momentum to organize against them in your town too!
Can someone explain how this makes any sense? They were ordered legally to deactivate and remove, unilaterally decide to put them back up and reactivate, the authorities (whomever those are) resort to covering them instead of removing and destroying them because "removing them is illegal"?
This is why when my city installed them (with a 3-2 vote from Council) they required them to all be installed in the Right-of-Way, which gives the city more authority to remove them if the contract is terminated (which it likely will be soon).
Same for me. In addition to deflock.me and haveibeenflocked.com, are there any community resource sites for finding others in the same city that would be willing to start pushing on the city to cancel their contract?
A question to nobody in particular: would it be possible to make license plate covers that are made out of the same material as those anti-facial recognition glasses?
It's not just license plate readers anymore. They have cameras that perform facial recognition and other identifying recognition.
Your car is in many ways uniquely identifiable by its markings and its model that vehicle with many pictures of it and that license plate are already in a database. If you have stickers, if you have big dents or additions and changes from the base model of your vehicle than you are quite identifiable within a particular geographical area depending on the urban density.
There’s YouTube video out there, the name escapes at the moment, where he figures out how to basically insert “noise” over his license plate that can lead to flock cameras not recognizing it. Fascinating stuff.
Two big issues IMO. 1) maybe it fools cameras now, but who knows if it continues to. 2) it’s illegal to cover your plate, probably doubly with the intent to obfuscate. My solution is bike rack. “Oops, didn’t meant to cover my plate” is good plausible deniability.
Also, the way they catalogue info is not just license numbers, but any unique combinations of bike racks, bumper stickers or the like. So your bike rack would make you very trackable in a way, but at least your identity would be harder to pinpoint
And about the intentional obfuscation, all kinds of princess pavement trucks and entitled BMWs deliberately use smoked license plate covers, and nobody bats an eye. So if there’s a law against that, it either has no teeth or is not enforced
That guy is just the coolest person ever. Every time I hear his name its some new fucking based shit. His music as The Flashbulb is my favorite music of all time. He has unbelievable range and creativity as an artist and was one of the first people to fight against music labels going after torrenters/downloaders. He uploaded all his own torrents to a private tracker. Just an awesome fucking person who obviously just wants the best for everyone.
Ya, he mentioned the “identifiable” thing in the video. I’m not really how much truth is in that. Even if true, I feel better about being logged as “unidentifiable [color] [make] [model] with bike rack,” over [license plate number] which can be used to look up my name and address.
Even if his license plate trick worked under his conditions, there’s no way of knowing if it’s tricking Flock cameras or if it is, if it confines to do so with updates. And you never know if it fails, you’ll continue to think it’s working while it’s not.
Neither way is perfect, so perhaps the better solution it to assume your vehicle is always tracked and to take alternate forms of transportation when engaging in something you don’t want logged.
He points out in one of his videos how many Flock systems are not fully secure. You can access these systems and check to see if your vehicle was logged.
I believe the collection of the information is inevitable. What I would push for instead of driving them to make the cameras and databases more clandestine than they already are is for the information that they collect to be made openly available to all.
As things are, it's a very asymmetrical power tool for the advantage of the (government) operators.
When ALL the information is available to everyone, we can talk about where the cameras do and do not need to be. And any unapproved cameras can be suppressed as evidence against private individuals.
No, that's like saying that it's inevitable that indoor plumbing and air conditioning will continue to spread and be adopted by everyone who can afford them. Or that the police will use national computer databases to track criminals, and helicopters for urban surveillance and pursuit. Or that the military is going to use more drones in the future.
So we've moved on from Woke finally and just calling everything terrorist now? At least I won't have to ask everyone saying "everything is so woke now" to define woke and watch them sputter.
Notice how a lot of these subservience CEO often come across as quite skittish and oddly concerned about what other are doing while obfuscating their own actions, kind of reminds me of a someone I used to know with diagnosed paranoia...
It's a wonder people haven't started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that's not a trend?
I think a drone with a remotely-actuated spray can of black paint would be more fun. Come down from above so nothing is caught by the camera. Control it by a fiber link so that there's no signal to identify the drone.
Funny you should ask, yeah, I was discussing this the other day with some fellow techies down the pub.
I would've guessed that wireless would be the way to go since a fiber cable is quite literally a physical trace to your position. Are drones that easily identified by their wireless signal?
So don't do it from your house, go to a remote, unrelated location. By the time they get the video, analyze it, track back the signal, the camera is painted, and you're long gone.
Of course there may be cameras near that remote, unrelated location, so be careful of anything identifying, like a vehicle or your face.
I don't know why I thought of this, but they make telescoping poles for wasp spray. I wonder if any other type of aerosol can would fit in them, or why you would even want to do that?
Paintball guns are very effective in (temporarily) blinding these cams and you can keep your distance.
Also harsh cleaning chemicals like Windex with Ammonia will degrade the IR/anti-glare coatings horribly and will lead to unusable shots within a season or two.
The word 'terrorist' has lost all meaning at this point.
I had to double-check what Deflock was for:
Sharing information about where cameras are located is terrorism now?
🙄
Careful! I think logic and questions are the new terrorist things to do! Oooo scarey!
Shit I just had a thought
Better ask chatgpt what to do about that.
You jest but this is my default behavior now
"Things you couldn't get me to publicly admit for $500, Alex"
That is not healthy, and you should stop doing that.
That's really concerning. Like, if a loved one told me that I'd express serious concern for their mental health
What is this pic from exactly?
Believe it or not, jail
Don't turn off your telescreen
Shit from the title I thought they were going around smashing the cameras and that it was an exaggeration, but I was clearly wrong on the scale
It's a surveillance company, stoking fears of terrorism is just good business, especially if it's not true
Be the change you want to see in the world
Eh no I'd rather stay out of the US at the moment
We have such sort of cameras in Europe as well. Some even use a Service provider from china; literally Surveillance as a Service.
This is just a play out of the rules for radicals playbook: accuse others of what you are doing.
DARVO
It lost all meaning the second Bush declared the "War on Terror".
It means 'Enemy of the rich' now
e: important clarification, by rich I mean billionaires who own the majority of everything and not successful doctors, engineers or movie stars. Know your classes, kids
That's partly the point. Use words that accurately describe your evil group to incorrectly describe other groups and all of a sudden the words lose meaning and nobody can call you that anymore. Hooray!
In the UK the term is defined by the government as anyone who is deemed by the government a threat to the government or the people or someone's property or the predominant local religion. But recently it's been exclusively used for the first one. In this country state law is valued higher than corporate, moral, ethical and religious laws, so YMMV
"
Terrorism: interpretation. (Terrorism Act 2000)
(1)In this Act “terrorism” means the use or threat of action where— (a)the action falls within subsection (2), (b)the use or threat is designed to influence the government [or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (c)the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious [, racial] or ideological cause.
(2)Action falls within this subsection if it— (a)involves serious violence against a person, (b)involves serious damage to property, (c)endangers a person’s life, other than that of the person committing the action, (d)creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public, or (e)is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.
(3)The use or threat of action falling within subsection (2) which involves the use of firearms or explosives is terrorism whether or not subsection (1)(b) is satisfied.
(4)In this section— (a)“action” includes action outside the United Kingdom, (b)a reference to any person or to property is a reference to any person, or to property, wherever situated, (c)a reference to the public includes a reference to the public of a country other than the United Kingdom, and (d)“the government” means the government of the United Kingdom, of a Part of the United Kingdom or of a country other than the United Kingdom.
(5)In this Act a reference to action taken for the purposes of terrorism includes a reference to action taken for the benefit of a proscribed organisation.
"
Link
In the UK it means the cop wants your ID and is willing to pretend your camera is a gun to get it.
The UK isn't the US (at least in this context) almost nobody has guns.
In very limited situations the police can, but it's not the norm.
Don't get me wrong, ACAB, they just don't generally use guns a as a pretext, perhaps a knife, or perhaps there is more than an arbitrary number of people grouped together so they can claim an 'illegal' protest.
I didn't mean they really thought a camera were a gun. I mean UK cops will "suspect" people filming with a camera of being a terrorist (as if aiming the camera were like pointing a gun).
and I’m saying it's not a common occurrence, intentional or not.
Guns aren't common enough in the UK for "they've got a gun" to be a go-to for the police.
"They've got a knife" or "They’ve got a sign the ruling class don't want people to see" are more likely.
As another poster pointed out, it has happened, but it's by no means the norm.
"anonymous" downvotes aren't a good replacement for an actual response, but you do you.
Fatal police shootings in the UK are getting more common. In 2019 one man was "lawfully murdered" because an officer said the victim's mobile phone looked like a handgun. In 2024 it was announced the officer would not be prosecuted. Not one police officer has been found guilty of illegal murder as of yet.
Sure, that seems about right and the link is interesting.
I was just saying it's not a common excuse for cops in the UK (right now).
It's so broad, they can accuse anyone of it, and that's the point. Both parties have long supported these over broad laws too, because they are not on our side, they want the ability to bring the power of the state on the heads of any groups that might not be breaking the law in a way any reasonable person would condemn but still scare those aritstocrats.
It means "me no like."
It never had meaning. To instill deep fear. Doing violent acts with the purpose of achieving a political end.
It's always been super broad and just waiting for a domestic party to adopt the tactics of Israel's occupied territories here in the US, that's where this was always heading.
Flock is a terrorist organization.
Flock is a state sponsored terrorist organization.
"Everything I don't like is terrorism."
What is this, 2001 again?
Did it ever stop?
It's accelerated: In 2001, technology companies were forced to collect user data and realized it could be a goldmine. Today, technology companies are being forced to collect people's IDs... I'm sure this will end up just fine.
"Forced" -> paid.
Spoken like an antifa, uh, 3 star general. Get him boys! /s The future is a lot dumber than we might have thought.
Hey, man. I am four stars at least.
Feeling the need to state "they are closer to Antifa than anything else" about your opponents might be a good point to rethink your ethics...
So... Flock have literally described themselves as fascist...
Their self description fits their actions.
Their what?
Since Flock CEO wants to give this movement some press
Here's Benn Jordan, he's done a series of videos on the cameras, demonstrates their vulnerabilities, and talks about how Flock has been deploying secretly by co-opting local municipalities to subsidize their national rollout.
First video, the one seems to have started the major anti-Flock push: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
Follow-up showing how easy they are to hack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
More live demonstrated vulnerabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
Not as directly related, but he discusses a way to use generative AI models to create noise masks for your specific plate that will disrupt the OCR process that ALPRs use. (Key term: Adversarial Noise) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_F4rEaRduk
This guy is the coolest type of hacker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKr3Acrovio
This dude also has some solid videos on flock (and other things). Everyone should know that cities and towns are kicking flock out left and right. Use this momentum to organize against them in your town too!
Can someone explain how this makes any sense? They were ordered legally to deactivate and remove, unilaterally decide to put them back up and reactivate, the authorities (whomever those are) resort to covering them instead of removing and destroying them because "removing them is illegal"?
What the actual fuck is this?
My guess (emphasis "guess") is either some contractual bullshit or a result of state law superseding local law.
This is why when my city installed them (with a 3-2 vote from Council) they required them to all be installed in the Right-of-Way, which gives the city more authority to remove them if the contract is terminated (which it likely will be soon).
Fascism. The only thing that matters is power and deception.
I used deflock to look for cameras around me; I CANNOT leave my city limits by car without passing by a Flock camera.
My city is one of the few in my county that doesn't have a contract with flock, but the county was nice enough to put them up around town anyway.
Is there a resource to find out who has contracts with Flock?
I'd be interested to know, the reason I know my city doesn't have it is a bunch of residents pushed for it at multiple council meetings.
Same for me. In addition to deflock.me and haveibeenflocked.com, are there any community resource sites for finding others in the same city that would be willing to start pushing on the city to cancel their contract?
A question to nobody in particular: would it be possible to make license plate covers that are made out of the same material as those anti-facial recognition glasses?
It's not just license plate readers anymore. They have cameras that perform facial recognition and other identifying recognition.
Your car is in many ways uniquely identifiable by its markings and its model that vehicle with many pictures of it and that license plate are already in a database. If you have stickers, if you have big dents or additions and changes from the base model of your vehicle than you are quite identifiable within a particular geographical area depending on the urban density.
There’s YouTube video out there, the name escapes at the moment, where he figures out how to basically insert “noise” over his license plate that can lead to flock cameras not recognizing it. Fascinating stuff.
Two big issues IMO. 1) maybe it fools cameras now, but who knows if it continues to. 2) it’s illegal to cover your plate, probably doubly with the intent to obfuscate. My solution is bike rack. “Oops, didn’t meant to cover my plate” is good plausible deniability.
It’s Benn Jordan
Also, the way they catalogue info is not just license numbers, but any unique combinations of bike racks, bumper stickers or the like. So your bike rack would make you very trackable in a way, but at least your identity would be harder to pinpoint
And about the intentional obfuscation, all kinds of princess pavement trucks and entitled BMWs deliberately use smoked license plate covers, and nobody bats an eye. So if there’s a law against that, it either has no teeth or is not enforced
That guy is just the coolest person ever. Every time I hear his name its some new fucking based shit. His music as The Flashbulb is my favorite music of all time. He has unbelievable range and creativity as an artist and was one of the first people to fight against music labels going after torrenters/downloaders. He uploaded all his own torrents to a private tracker. Just an awesome fucking person who obviously just wants the best for everyone.
Ya, he mentioned the “identifiable” thing in the video. I’m not really how much truth is in that. Even if true, I feel better about being logged as “unidentifiable [color] [make] [model] with bike rack,” over [license plate number] which can be used to look up my name and address.
Even if his license plate trick worked under his conditions, there’s no way of knowing if it’s tricking Flock cameras or if it is, if it confines to do so with updates. And you never know if it fails, you’ll continue to think it’s working while it’s not.
Neither way is perfect, so perhaps the better solution it to assume your vehicle is always tracked and to take alternate forms of transportation when engaging in something you don’t want logged.
He points out in one of his videos how many Flock systems are not fully secure. You can access these systems and check to see if your vehicle was logged.
Flock cameras need to be banned, and the ones that are left should absolutely be destroyed. There is no excuse for having these things in communities.
I believe the collection of the information is inevitable. What I would push for instead of driving them to make the cameras and databases more clandestine than they already are is for the information that they collect to be made openly available to all.
As things are, it's a very asymmetrical power tool for the advantage of the (government) operators.
When ALL the information is available to everyone, we can talk about where the cameras do and do not need to be. And any unapproved cameras can be suppressed as evidence against private individuals.
That's like saying that it's inevitable that murder and rape will happen.
Just because someone is going to do it eventually doesn't mean that you shouldn't have the death penalty for doing it.
No, that's like saying that it's inevitable that indoor plumbing and air conditioning will continue to spread and be adopted by everyone who can afford them. Or that the police will use national computer databases to track criminals, and helicopters for urban surveillance and pursuit. Or that the military is going to use more drones in the future.
Even before everyone carried GPS trackers in their pockets and digital cameras became dirt cheap, you were being tracked and analyzed by your credit card: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
So we've moved on from Woke finally and just calling everything terrorist now? At least I won't have to ask everyone saying "everything is so woke now" to define woke and watch them sputter.
That will just be replaced with asking them to define terrorism and watching them sputter.
Does he care to explain why they leave town when cities or states simply tell them that all the data they collect becomes public domain?
Oh, so they aren't providing a public service, the only thing they care about is selling my data and keeping it secret.
Notice how a lot of these subservience CEO often come across as quite skittish and oddly concerned about what other are doing while obfuscating their own actions, kind of reminds me of a someone I used to know with diagnosed paranoia...
Just sayin...
Funny because I consider Flock a terrorist organization
He can go fuck himself.
This guy couldn't sound more fascist if he broke into German 1930s marching songs. This video should be used in education.
Flock is a terrorist organization.
good, terrifying CEOs is the right thing to do.
Terrorist calls man stopping their terror a terrorist.
flock feeding the videos to palintir calling people a terrorist orgniazation
It's always projection with them isn't it?
Yes. Always.
Why is he dressed like the joker?
... but the Joker if he sold fake life insurance in nursing homes.
Why do they always have such punchable faces?
his face appears to be asymmetrical.
"Anything/anyone that cuts into my profits are terrorists."
I think FLOCK is a terrorist organizaion
I thought their CEO was a 15 year old boy.
Wonder if their CEO finally stopped responding to hacker news threads or if he's still in there getting dunked on.
Yeah anything or anyone that starves the greed disease is a terrorist. Shame that greed is only terminal for the victims of it and not the carriers
It's a wonder people haven't started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that's not a trend?
I think a drone with a remotely-actuated spray can of black paint would be more fun. Come down from above so nothing is caught by the camera. Control it by a fiber link so that there's no signal to identify the drone.
Funny you should ask, yeah, I was discussing this the other day with some fellow techies down the pub.
I would've guessed that wireless would be the way to go since a fiber cable is quite literally a physical trace to your position. Are drones that easily identified by their wireless signal?
setting up 2 recievers to calculate the signal source position is significantly easier than tracing a cable as thick as spider's web
So don't do it from your house, go to a remote, unrelated location. By the time they get the video, analyze it, track back the signal, the camera is painted, and you're long gone.
Of course there may be cameras near that remote, unrelated location, so be careful of anything identifying, like a vehicle or your face.
Have you seen those 50W burning lazers? I wonder if one of those could fry sensors.
Add HIM to The List.
I don't know why I thought of this, but they make telescoping poles for wasp spray. I wonder if any other type of aerosol can would fit in them, or why you would even want to do that?
Paintball guns are very effective in (temporarily) blinding these cams and you can keep your distance.
Also harsh cleaning chemicals like Windex with Ammonia will degrade the IR/anti-glare coatings horribly and will lead to unusable shots within a season or two.
Funny, I've been calling Flock the same thing.
Fuck these bootlickers
DeFlock is just a front end for OSM, does that make OSM a "terrorist organization" too?
I would like to kindly invite this person to lodge their head in a deeply recessed part of their own anatomy.
This guy is LITERALLY AL QUEDA ISIS and THE DEVIL.
Boost this signal! Actual Satan!!
We can all just say crazy shit. Fucking asshole. Choke.
Deflock kind of implied by existing in the first place that they thought Flock was a terrorist organization
https://deflock.org/
So, to compare logic, people selling chocolate bars and cigarettes are calling the health industry terrorists. Profit should always come first. /s
I want to flip the cameras the bird when I'm driving by but when I see them they are on my side of the road and pointing the wrong way...