The police say that over the weekend, officers found the poles the cameras were mounted on had been cut down and the cameras were gone. Flock cameras are stirring controversy across the country as they compile license plate and other vehicle details in a national database.
    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      69·
      9 天前

      I mean it’s the cameras’ job to keep track of criminals, right? So it’s not my job anymore to give a shit about where they went or what they looked like, surely.

      • EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world
        28·
        9 天前

        Growing up watching Batman and Spiderman be told to leave it to the professionals, I think it might be my job to not interfere by knowing anything.

        My memory has been shot for ten years anyways.

        • fartographer@lemmy.world
          5·
          8 天前

          I mean, who am I gonna trust? Some person on the Internet saying that I didn’t see anything, or my lying eyes?

    • chocrates@piefed.worldEnglish
      6·
      8 天前

      It’s never our job to assist the police. If they talk to you the only response is “am I being detained”

  • CubitOom@infosec.pubEnglish
    110·
    9 天前

    I think flock is stealing their own cameras so they can reset them and charge to replace them. There is a clear incentive.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 天前

      If you don’t have a cellphone but ya got a sheisty…

      There’s not really anyway to ID the person in the video.

      • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.mlEnglish
        61·
        9 天前

        They’d recognize my LIMP. I have a (documented) broken bone in my foot.

        (For a short time I can limp on the wrong foot so THEY have PROOF that it wasn’t me)

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          8 天前

          Gait recognition is not as good as they say it is…

          They use it to say two videos are of the same person, but if you think “expert testimony” gives actual opinions and not just what will get lawyers to pay them again…

          Then you don’t understand how any of this works.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      6·
      7 天前

      I know it’s a joke, but I’m hijacking youry comment because it’s a great example sentence on why you should never, ever talk to the police outside of an active emergency when you need their help.

      You didn’t do anything, but your words self-incriminated you as someone who took part in the destruction of the cameras.

      • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        7·
        7 天前

        Hmm, never thought of it that way. Yes, if someone were incredibly stupid or malicious, that would certainly come off that way. So I can see why a cop might see it like that.

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
          7·
          7 天前

          Exactly. And when they testify at trial that you admitted to being with the offender at the time of the crime, it’s not just the cop’s opinion you have to worry anout. Your defense of “I was lying to get the real culprit off the hook” also wouldn’t help you much at that point. Best case you’re looking at an obstruction conviction.

          Even more interestingly - this scenario doesn’t require the officer to be corrupt.

          Never talk to cops.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
    18·
    8 天前

    Quick question, how are these flock cameras generally connected to the Web?

    Is it via Wi-Fi, perhaps 4g radio?

    What frequencies would one need to jam (completely theoretically) to know that the camera wasn’t able to send back video of a person cutting it down.

      • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
        9·
        8 天前

        That would get expensive. Get a roll of heavy duty foil and a roll of metal tape (the kind for duct work). Wrap them in a bag made of doubled up heavy duty foil.

          • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
            4·
            8 天前

            It generally does. But even if some signal escapes (like if you had to hurry and do this so it wasn’t perfectly sealed), it wouldn’t be that great a signal so communication would definitely be compromised.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      7 天前

      Mobile broadband. I promise you, if you go around jamming cell towers, you’re going to get the feds on your ass real quick.

      • Promethiel@lemmy.world
        4·
        7 天前

        @Cocodapuf@lemmy.world Listen to the above comment!

        This is not amateur hour. Radio waves are not analogous to just DDOS’ing over the Internet. The consequences and effects play out in the physical world.

        You cannot scream into the void without the source being heard.

        Say, I’m writing a story. A work of fiction. Sci-fi, really. Here’s a hypothetical sort of idea that I’m work shopping currently and might as well share:

        Edit:

        The protagonist needs to deal with some surveillance appliances, that use cellular network to communicate, and needs to jam them.

        He goes around, and buys many small solar panels. He wires them to radios that work with Lora/Reticulum/And the Internet. He places them around the local town parks and such, near the surveillance appliances, months before he needs to disrupt them, slowly, unseen.

        Still working on the climax, when he triggers them remotely and they do some cool stuff tho.

        • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          7 天前

          Your character would get caught. Mainly because electronics boards are absolutely covered in parts made from all over the world. Each one of those parts is batch numbered, if not labeled with a serial number. If your main character wasn’t caught from being the only person with a purchase history that matches the equipment used, they would certainly be caught using forensic analysis of the identifying marks on the devices.

          Your character’s best bet is to realize that the point of sabotage is not to destroy a resource, (complete destruction is a bonus), but to make the opponent either realize that they would need to commit more effort to protect that resource than it is worth, or get your opponent to commit that effort, wasting their time and resources.

          Real life example : Ukraine blew up part of a useful bridge in Crimea with a truck bomb. The bridge has been restored to working order, but now Russia has to check every single truck that goes over the bridge very thoroughly. They’ve limited the maximum size of the trucks as well. The total flow of material over that bridge had been choked, and Russia is doing all the work to choke out their own asset, and they will need to continue to do this for the rest of the conflict, or the bridge will get blown up again.

          So, back to your fictional character… He doesn’t need to devise a sophisticated attack to destroy all the cameras, he just needs to be part of an ongoing uncoordinated campaign of random attacks. Either the camera owners step up hardening their devices, which increases the cost and decreases the number they can deploy, and their usefulness, or, the government entities that use the cameras will need to deploy more police presence to protect the cameras, invalidating the benefit of having the cameras anyway.

          • Promethiel@lemmy.world
            1·
            7 天前

            You are absolutely correct in all you said! And you also made several assumptions about the character actions; some considered already and some most illuminating! Thank you for improving my fiction!

            Though the goal of the character isn’t at all the destruction of a resource. It is the simple and timely denial of access of the story’s antagonist to their tooling, at a time when they expected it to be working. Like during a bean counting competition at the country fair!