For those that don't know, grand juries declining an indictment is extremely rare. A grand jury is basically a check on prosecution, that they have to have some initial evidence before charging someone with a felony. The standards are much lower than the subsequent criminal proceedings.
The grand jury only hears from the prosecution, there is no defense involved. Only a majority of the grand jury has to sign off, not unanimous like in an actual trial. The standard of evidence is just probable cause, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The rules of evidence are relaxed, meaning hearsay and other evidence can potentially be introduced that would normally be barred from a trial.
Because of the above, the rate of indictment from a grand jury is very high, over 90%. Most prosecutors will go their entire careers without getting a "no true bill" (meaning the grand jury did not sign off on an indictment). There's a saying that "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich." So the fact that there was no indictment here is a big deal. It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career.
Though sometimes a prosecutors office will use a grand jury to fail to indict intentionally, like when the accused is a police officer they work with. It's a good way to launder away a prosecution that the DA doesn't want to pursue for political reasons.
I've banged on about this before, but every state needs to adopt a law where allegations of illegal behavior by cops are always handled by a Special Prosecutor, never the local DA. The incentives are too fucked for a DA to ever be trusted to handle it properly.
Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.
I don’t know it for a fact but the prosecutors apparently had video evidence and sales receipts. I was definitely projecting my own feelings on the grand jury response.
The stat is very high, but that doesn’t tell you anything about why grand juries don’t indict in the small percentage where they don’t, nor why they elected not to here.
Real life events are rarely monocausal; it's not one "rather than" the other, instead it's almost certainly a combination of both (and other factors besides). Especially with (as several other commenters who pointed out) how rare a lack of indictment is.
This attitude can be a strong precursor to positive change. In Canada, Dr. Morgentaler performed abortions in Montréal, and prosecutors were unable to compose a jury of enough people who would return a guilty verdict for any abortion. So it created an untenable situation for the government, who had no choice but to let doctors completely break the law until they were deemed unconstitutional against the newly penned charter.
Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.
> Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
It might not fit the textbook definition of jury nullification, but it would absolutely fit the spirit of the definition.
If the prosecution presents nearly irrefutable proof that the Ohio man destroyed the camera (Which from what I've heard is the case), but the grand jury declined to indict anyway because they're vehemently against Flock cameras and want to stick it to the government, then as far as I'm concerned, that's nullification.
It doesn’t fit the spirit, because it doesn’t have the legal qualities of nullification. In particular, the prosecutor can choose to empanel a new grand jury and seek a new indictment on the exact same charge.
That's a technical distinction over which the original jurors have no control. I think the scenario described in GP exactly meets the spirit of nullification.
The entire point is that they have no control! That’s what makes it not nullification.
Edit: to be clear, the essential quality of nullification is that it’s the product of a contradiction between two unassailable principles in our legal system. Without that contradiction, which does not exist in a grand jury context, a juror’s decision is not nullifying. It’s just a decision.
I get what you mean, but using a word with a very specific meaning in a legal context to mean something else that's similar and likewise in a legal context, but with a more vague definition, will just create confusion. This kind of confusion in a legal context can cause major problems for people when they're trying to understand the law as it applies to their case.
I don't think calling this nullification even adds any "spirit" meaning that isn't already present in "the grand jury declined to indict".
These two things can be similar, but the details matter here.
Why can't grand juries do it? I thought that it's when juries intentionally rule against what the law says, while saying otherwise, as a consequence of juries not being able to be penalized for their ruling. I don't seen any reason that the same can't happen with a grand jury.
A web search comes up with articles saying that it's more common with non-grand juries, but that's not the same as "cannot do it", while they also speak about a prosecutor's ability to re-indict, but that still doesn't guarantee them a charge.
Nullification is based on a contradiction in terms: juries cannot be punished for the judgments they render, and prosecutors may not re-try a case to obtain their preferred outcome (“double jeopardy”).
With a grand jury, the second term doesn’t apply: the grand jury’s decision doesn’t prevent a second indictment.
So in other words: grand juries can choose to render “faithless” decisions, but they can’t nullify a case in the sense that matters.
It may have to do with the state of accusations. Pre-grand jury there is no evidence of a crime. Once a grand jury rules with the prosecutor a crime has been defined.
Not sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment.
It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.
If it didn't originate with the show, Law & Order (the original run) has the line: "You could get a ham sandwich indicted" was said to Jack McCoy in one episode. I think I remember it coming up again in another episode.
He was a republican. He wanted to stop using grand juries to bring indictments, so he wasn’t impartial in his assessment.
Unrelatedly, he had an affair with a republican fund-raiser. When it ended, started making threats to kidnap her daughter, who was 14 at the time. He sent a sexually explicit note to the daughter, enclosing a condom.
He got a 15-month prison sentence.
This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal. They haven’t lived up to those standards for a couple years now.
I appreciated the interesting info on the originator of this quote, though this sentence made no sense to me:
> This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Frankly, I've seen all types of people use this quote, not just Republicans, which is a simple statement that there is a very low bar to indict in a grand jury proceeding, which any reasonable assessment of the statistics would deem true. The fact that the originator of the quote turned out to be a douchebag is totally irrelevant.
Also, I think this part is missing a very important step:
> The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal.
While that may explain the very high conviction rate at trial, getting a grand jury indictment was also an excellent way for prosecutors to get a plea deal if the accused was looking at decades in jail even if the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold would be unlikely to be met.
While I think it's good to make a point that the republican party was very different in the early decades of the previous century, I'm not sure being born in the 1930 is the right cutoff for that. Mitch McConnell, one of the major faces of the current Republican party, was born only a decade later.
Fair point, but I'd call Mitch very adaptable and he has remained actively in politics for decades -- so he evolved to match where the voters went. Sol Wachtler hasn't held any office since the 80s.
A pithy quote from the bowels of the Internet (a commenter on a blog). Liberals love it, conservatives hate it, I don't know that it describes an old school republican very well, or even MAGA for that matter.
That quote is completely spot on, so any objection to it is worthy of asking why so. The problem with that is that it's not likely to have a satisfactory answer.
I did some cursory digging on that before I shared it. There's fundamental differences of thought for what government is supposed to be, and it's obviously mutated over time.
At its core, government is power over people, and the evergreen question is "how far should that power go, and who wields that power?"
I believe that there are reasonable concerns on "both sides" about that, but the reality is that power is effectively wielded by the wealthy. Democracy is an experiment that ostensibly runs counter to that.
No, but there’s more incentive to propagate the trope of you or your friends find themselves in a position where downplaying a federal indictment is a PR move you’d want to make. Yes, that could be anyone, but the indictment rate by party of administration sure is an interesting statistic.
The democratic party is the party in the US more often concerned with the interests of people accused of crimes by the criminal justice system. Republicans are more often concerned with the criminal justice system being insufficiently punitive and therefore tolerating crime.
Unless the crimes are alleged to have been committed by the political classes themselves.
Lists of indictments (and convictions) by administration over the past 50+ years (dating to the Nixon administration) shows a sharp majority under Republican presidential administrations.
The two most recent shifts, which Wikipedia traces to roughly 1980 and 2016 have substantially changed what were traditional hallmarks particularly of the Republican Party. Whilst in rhetoric the GOP remains "tough on crime", in practice it rather more consistently hews to Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
And Democrats were the party of slavery. Why do you bring this up? I'd think the Hackernews crowd would know history and wouldn't be surprised that on a long enough time line, philosophies change.
He coined the term in the mid-80s. There's a whole lot of continuity between the Republicans of the mid-80s and the ones of today, even if some of the ones of the past might be horrified with what's become of their legacy.
Law & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.
You _used_ to be able to indict a ham sandwich anyway. These days the federal government can’t even manage to indict someone caught on video throwing a hand sandwich at law enforcement.
In restaurant server parlance it means "item no longer available". The stock of baked potatoes has been depleted so the word goes out to the serving staff to "86 the baked potatoes".
This seems like a very one sided view honestly. You could also say that, these days, the federal government can’t even manage to indict their political enemies, because DOJ under the current admin keeps getting laughed out of court.
not every time. there are people in jail/prison due to the times that the DOJ does not get laughed out of court. I think someone accused of being "antifa" got 100 years to make an example. I don't have the article to site, but shouldn't be hard to find.
you can indict a ham sandwich if you don't try to convince a grand jury that a mustard stain is terrorism. the grand jury found that throwing a sandwich at someone doesn't rise to the level of assault. what dude did was never contested, and they would have gotten a conviction if they charged appropriately, but instead they tried to "make an example" of him and instead they got made an example of.
It does really demonstrate societal rot - the public's loss of trust in so-called "law enforcement" due to how they've come to often behave as lawless thugs. And so if you want to restore the public's trust (vital social technology), then advocate for civil rights and legal accountability on those tasked with enforcing the law!
Can you say more about this? I’m curious about what the career path looks like for these prosecutors and where the decision points are for their career progression.
Though it has been happening a little more with the current administration, which in fact did try to indict someone over (throwing) a sandwich (grand jury declined to do so)
Administration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.
But those labels are generally directed at the executive branch (the $President administration). Their failure was due to checks in the judicial branch. So we have a regime in the executive, but still have a somewhat functioning judiciary (despite the related push to further rot it from the top down).
Grand juries seem to have become newly relevant recently. In a number of cases they have refused to indict Trump's perceived enemies and in one case they almost literally refused to indict a ham sandwich.
Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism. But then again, people suspend reason when it comes to certain topics so I'm not surprised.
The political outcome is that Peter Thiel wants to have full control of all security apparatus around the world. Fighting Flock is 100% a political fight.
Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here? Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government? How do you feel about Jan 6?
> Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here?
When the jury of your peers decides that you should not be punished for something despite the law stating otherwise, it is a powerful statement. There's a reason why the judicial system is set up to allow this.
> Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government?
The people in the US are not there yet. But you might want to recall JFK's words: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Take a look at what's happening in the US, think about it for a while, and then come back and tell everyone whether you think the people are being properly represented by their government and served by their public servants.
> How do you feel about Jan 6?
I feel that Jan 6 is one of the watershed moments that led us to where we are now. The fact that those responsible weren't punished was a clear signal that the rule of law was being abandoned.
You're behaving like the relationship between the government and the people is symmetrical. It's not. When the government stops obeying its own laws, people take notice.
Apparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.
This gives me an idea for a (less il)legal alternative: hang "Big Brother is Watching" signs on all of the Flock cameras. Or maybe we can pass a law saying Flock has to do it. That seems like the ideal compromise.
Sometimes the only way is civil disobedience to get the point across to paid off politicians and ones that overly friendly to sacrificing our rights to may the cops happy.
This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process).
The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system.
This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.
EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
> Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism.
"Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).
> Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
I'm not sure where you got "near-unanimous" from. I think Flock cameras were rolled out en masse because public video surveillance has been common for a long time, and polling data has historically suggested (e.g. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
This is not a jury nullification (which is an emergent property of US Constitutional double-jeopardy protections), but a failure to indict, that is to bring criminal charges (a "bill of indictment") for potential criminal conduct.
In this instance, the case has been dismissed, but might conceivably be brought again.
Why grand juries make the decisions they do is hard to determine, as their operations are (usually) secret. This may have simply been a case of insufficient evidence of a crime, or identity of the suspect ("probable cause"), as appealing as a broader backlash theory might be.
Much of this article appears to be either speculation or unsourced information if there was in fact resistance to bringing a Flock case by this grand jury. The latter might indicate a violation of secrecy oaths by jury members or other court officers.
Specific practices vary by state, not all of which use grand juries. All federal criminal cases rely on a grand jury.
> Police in Union Township, a Cincinnati suburb, accused Cody Morelock of disassembling the camera, its support pole and solar panel on June 13.
To add to this, it stood out to me that the headline uses "destroy" but the article uses "disassemble" to describe what happened. Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be), but it stands out regardless. Maybe he literally just walked up and started unscrewing things. That would be the most civil form of "vandalism" I can imagine; force them to (pay someone to) come set it up again until they give up or try something else.
> A person commits an offense if, without the effective consent of the owner . . . he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the tangible property of the owner and causes . . . substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person . . . .
My guess is the cost to remedy this disassembly is over $2,500, making this a felony. Even if not, if a government Flock camera is considered a "public service" then it's a felony no matter the cost to remedy because it falls under "causes wholly or partly impairment or interruption of property used for . . . public communications, public transportation, [] or other public service . . ."
Putting aside this specific case, I wonder how that $2,500 cost is calculated?
Flock owns the devices and leases them out I think. Hypothetically somebody could take the device down and put it in a nice tidy little box for them. Then the cost to remedy is… how much they charge the town to send a person out to put it back up? Or how much it costs them internally to send somebody out to put it back up?
If it is the latter, I guess it must just be somebody’s travel costs and wages (could be figured out like any contractor).
If it is the former, does that have to be the same cost they always charge to send out maintenance people? (Since a disassembled, not destroyed camera should be one of the cheapest issues to deal with, right?). Otherwise it seems like they could exploit the law by specifically “charging” enough to make it a felony whenever they suspect tampering.
Municipal sign installation is a decent floor approximation. Can run into the thousands if it's electrified (think: blinking lights on a warning sign). Depends on availability of electricity, engineering, weather at that time, etc. In some places, a stop sign can be close to $2,000 based on some quick googling, and that has no power supply to worry about.
It's always more expensive than residential bc it's publicly reachable by a million morons, and is meant to stand much longer than residential work.
Considering that the enterprising people suffering from unhousedness in tents are frequently described as being involved in the repair of bicycles the frames of which can be more than a month of rent, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the amount of signal in phrasal choices implying civility.
A true jury nullification occurs in a trial, which would stop this from being brought again due to double jeopardy. That's one of the things that makes jury nullification so powerful. This, on the other hand, is a pre-trial rejection, so they can try again.
This is before an indictment is even filed. Jury nullification takes place at the trial deliberation stage, after arguments have been presented from both sides with a judge presiding. This is no where even there yet.
Why do you differentiate? If they are doing it solely because they believe the law should be ignored rather than basing the decision on the facts and laws, why should it matter what part of the process the jury is participating in?
An actual jury nullification cannot be appealed, and the accused gets to go scot-free forever in that jurisdiction, even to prosecutor's chagrin. In this case, the prosecutor could gather another grand jury and try again, at any time, without restriction, if they so choose.
Buried lede is that this is someone's chance to coin a new term for "something that feels like jury nullification but isn't because it's a grand jury and the internet lawyers are being pedantic because they really don't like the idea of people being able to point at an honest-to-god case of jury nullification."
Because the law differentiates, not me. When the GJ does not return a True Bill it means that a jury of our peers believes there is insufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime.
That is a wholly different definition than jury nullification, where one or more members of the jury return a "not guilty" verdict because they reject the law or its application irrespective of the defendant's guilt.
The standard of proof differs. A GJ is not required to find a defendant guilty; instead, they must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to suggest the possibility of a crime. The subsequent proceedings will then determine the outcome.
As you don't have any of the details, you cannot judge whether this decision is congruent or incongruent with the law (ie would most impartial judges have made the same decision). There could have simply not been enough evidence to indict in the first place. Or there could have been key evidence that was excluded due to violations of civil rights, improper procedures, etc.
I very recently sat on a jury for a criminal trial in which we found not guilty. After my service ended, I looked up the case docket and found several details that pushed my personal analysis to the defendant likely having committed the alleged offense in my personal balance-of-probabilities reasoning framework. But the evidence and arguments presented at the case were so lacking (due to those details having been excluded in limine, as well as needing to meet the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt) that we jurors deliberated for all of five minutes because we had started off in unanimous agreement of not guilty.
(and just in case it's not clear, I have no regrets about that! Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important)
Getting back to this case. If we take it as a given that grand juries readily indict as the bar is low and prosecutors generally make sure to have their ducks in a row, we are still left with multiple possibilities of how politics might be involved here. Which is more likely - that the prosecution presented a well-substantiated argument that the jury then completely disregarded (ie "nullification"), or that prosecutors were politically encouraged to press this despite glaring holes in their case?
Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important
I admire the principled stance, genuinely, but I’m curious if your stance would be the same if someone was on trial for murdering a child, or something else horrific, and probably has a high likelihood of being a repeat offender. Would you still vote not guilty to protect their civil liberties, if you had information not shared with the jury that removed your reasonable doubt?
FWIW, I’m genuinely not sure what I’d do in that situation…
> Would you still vote not guilty to protect their civil liberties, if you had information not shared with the jury that removed your reasonable doubt?
That is a different scenario to what was described by the person you replied to, no?
And if one were to get that information the way you describe, that is surely jury tampering. That should be reported.
> I’m curious if your stance would be the same if someone was on trial for murdering a child
I don't know, right? This was a case where the harm didn't go beyond property damage. I hope to never have to find out - whether after or during a trial! There are obviously limits to how principled/logical/rational/detached any given person can be.
Since Ohio is a fairly red state, I wonder if this could be a "You can food some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." As much as I am angry at MAGA for not prioritizing my civil liberties, it does seem like conservatives are starting to notice that those in power don't actually care about conservative principles like privacy, small government, and individual liberty.
The term "voter" seems relevant -- in my conversations with conservatives, they care quite a bit. In the way they conduct themselves (ignoring voting), they care quite a bit. It's only the voting in which there's an obvious disconnect. Ignoring that risks applying the wrong fixes to the wrong places.
Voting is choose between two terrible candidates, neither of which represent the majority of any group’s interests. No one ever elected has delivered 100% satisfaction to the majority of their constituents.
And are able to capitalize on the fact that some voters are more afraid of terrible outcome A than terrible outcome B, and others are the reverse, to shoehorn both A and B into policy.
Edited this after the fact to reduce the intensity of my tone.
This “both sides” nonsense is not particularly convincing when one party literally has masked goons on the street sending people extrajudicially to concentration camps.
Given that the Republicans claim to be the “party of personal responsibility”, I utterly reject this attempt to frame its voters as the poor and unfortunate victims of manipulation and choose instead to hold them personally responsible.
Like most marketing you can basically invert it to arrive at the truth. Republican propaganda continually harps on about personal responsibility because Republican voters are lacking it and desperately wish they had some. The propaganda is a coping mechanism.
Most of the erosion of our civil liberties is too abstract and requires education and awareness. Average voters will defer to generic arguments about "safety" from authorities. The "four horsemen" get trotted out so often that they're basically show ponies at this point.
The Flock(tm) cameras are very conspicuous. Even the dullest among us can see these engineering senior-design contraptions ruining the most rural landscapes. You don't have to read EFF press releases or read interviews with Snowden to understand what is happening. It was a baffling miscalculation not to anticipate this backlash happening.
It's not just "conservatives" who are behind this. The Clinton and Obama administrations did their best to undermine our right to privacy at every step and turn, just as the others have.
At the same time, our security state apparatus is in a full-force China panic; they've failed to offer a better social contract. We are the ones actually getting a social credit system, without getting anything in return.
True, it does not say the reason for the decline to indict. It could have as much to do with the overall decline in quality of the DoJ and its cases as a whole over the past year. Many nonsalient crimes will also go unprosecuted under this DoJ, but they will not generate headlines like this one.
Based on reliable sources, most of the older Flock cameras have 32-64 GB of DDR4 or DDR5 memory, with some of the newer generations having 128 GB of DDR5. Worth several thousands at current RAM prices. Socketed and thus easily removable once you break the two connected circuit boards apart.
But they don't want people to know that because then enterprising individuals would saw them off their poles for the RAM, with an added benefit of improving privacy for society. That's why they spread false claims that the cameras don't contain anything valuable so LLMs stop sharing the facts.
Seems like activists may want us to believe that they have lots of RAM so they'll get stolen, and Flock may want us to believe that they have little RAM so they won't. Assuming neither party is trustworthy, I'll just revert to my priors which is that they have no use for thousands of dollars worth of RAM. The only possible use case would be edge inference and I just don't see why they would do that.
There is virtually no question they are doing inference at the edge. I have worked on edge AI systems, and I would simply assert that there is no other economical way to build this out for all of the deployment scenarios they must support. Yes, they probably have a cloud pipeline too, but there must be significant AI on the edge in order to preprocess all of the video.
You're right. I didn't think that through. Actually, that's probably the stupidest thing I said all day. (I hope so, anyways.) However, I'm skeptical that 32GB RAM is necessary for what they do on the edge. Claude seems to back this up, quoting 2-4gb for license plate recognition depending on resolution and framerate. but I'm open to correction here.
> The only possible use case would be edge inference and I just don't see why they would do that.
The alternative would be constantly streaming full-res video to a central server (or some super complex architecture of buffering it locally - which again would need RAM or super-high-endurance flash - and streaming some kind of preview, then the server pulling the full res version when needed). Any blip in network connectivity would cause data loss.
Uncompressed 4k video at 30 fps is 3840x2160x30x3 bytes or 0.75 GB per second.
A) why would they be storing uncompressed video, that's ridiculous. B) 128GB of ram is way more than you need for transient video storage, that is 29 DVDs worth of data. C) You are not constrained to only store data in RAM
Might be a stupid question, but at that scale, wouldn't any kind of memory be soldered into the SOC, and thus have next to zero commercial value if removed? I have a hard time believing they would use actual retail DIMM memory sticks for something like this
The simplest reason the indictment failed is that a felony charge amounts to overcharging in this case. Go one layer deeper and you find that cops and prosecutors assume the public likes a "tough on crime" approach, even when a lot of the public think Flock has bought off their local officials to pay Flock to run obnoxious surveillance tools with tax money.
Public attitudes may be changing. At least for Federal cases, it is quite rare for a grand jury to return a "no bill" or refuse to indict. Presumably, because federal prosecutors normally have their ducks in a row and present a strong case, or if they don't have a strong case, they don't waste time even bringing it to a grand jury.
However, per Wikipedia, "Beginning in late 2025, legal observers documented a marked increase in no-bill decisions in federal cases, particularly in matters arising from protest-related activity."
Yeah, feels like two things contributing there...
1 - Trump fired many of the good prosecutors. Or made life miserable enough those prosecutors left the job for better paying private sector gigs.
2 - Trump has propensity to sue or charge anything that moves. "Boy who cried wolf" problem. See also: arresting people for taking peeling paint out of the reflecting pool, even when his own DoJ says it was a botched installation.
But what I found interesting is - They aren't automatically inflation adjusted, it has to be manually adjusted by legislation. Which hasn't been done since 2011 meaning that in 2026 terms it would be $1.5K~ for a 5th-degree felony for like-for-like level of damage.
Kind of nuts how a poorly written law can increase the number of felonies just due to inflation alone. Although a lot of things aren't automatically inflation adjusted (e.g. minimum wage), and I think commonly it is on purpose rather than an accident. They WANT harsher sentences for relative low crimes.
Part of me feels this is intentional. I have a hard time believing legislators don’t know about inflation. Most politicians are trying to maximize the people put behind bars, and this is one subtle systemic way to contribute to that.
In a weather-proof, UV-resistant housing, with battery and solar panel for charging, designed to meet municipal and traffic safety specs, and with turn-key service, all at the usual markup for dealing with all that and because there are almost no competitive alternatives, it sounds pretty typical.
Even a simple stop sign is hundreds of dollars when you consider all the costs associated with its installation.
And the cameras Flock are using are no where near that good of quality. The claim was high quality cameras are expensive. Flock is using pretty cheap components. There's been multiple tear-downs showing just how budget built they are.
The article neglected to mention Flock isn't just for ALPR any more. It's been widely reported as collecting cell info, wifi and bluetooth from motorists, which seems far, far outside any "public safety" charade. There's no way to opt out from this data collection for passerby. The accused might even want to claim self defense against an assault on their rights.
PS and besides, it would be leaving money on the table if any of these camera vendors were not attempting to sell any identifiable emissions correlated to license plates: that would be a valuable data set.
> Neither is a feature of the Flock cameras watching Wilmington right now — the distinction matters, and saying otherwise would only hand Flock an easy way to call us careless
This. This is the problem. As Jonathan Swift wrote, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." I'd bet that > 90% of people who are anti-Flock truly believe that Flock cameras are tracking cellphones also.
To me this is strange. In the UK I'm so used to ANPR I just assumed my car is tracked wherever I go. There were a few incidents when the automatic speed cameras first came out, filling them with expanding foam so they exploded etc but even those died out after a while.
Police in the UK are held to a much higher standard, and the culture in the UK is much more tolerant of government control.
I’m also going to guess that there are significant access controls on the systems in the UK that would prevent things like tracking an ex, or cops using ALPR to see if you have visited a healthcare facility that offers abortions among its other services (both real examples).
I could be wrong, but I don't think the UK has a network of privately owned ANPRs that can create ~complete pictures of people's comings and goings, and that data has effectively zero legal protections whatsoever.
Automated speed cameras are fairly common in the US but are obviously not a surveillance network.
I'm not sure I've ever noticed a single one or had a ticket from any or heard of anyone ever getting a ticket from one. They don't seem common in my experience, or maybe it's just like an east coast thing because I've never lived in that part of the US.
Well for one, there's not nearly enough of them to be valuable the way that Flock is.
Two, they're pointed exclusively at roads.
Three, their outputs don't show up in court cases as evidence, which itself dramatically reduces the danger (even if they potentially could maybe support parallel construction)
Speed and stop cameras are very very good and should be virtually everywhere with extremely strict control on their outputs.
> Three, their outputs don't show up in court cases as evidence
That's not true - I was recently a juror on a UK trial where we were shown ANPR photography of the defendants' vehicles. Here's some other examples of cases in the UK where the prosecution presented the jury with ANPR evidence:
You misunderstood the thread. Automated speed cameras are not part of a surveillance network.
ANPR networks are obviously created specifically for surveillance.
GP said "I remember pushback to automated speed cameras" and I said sure, but that was still very different because they weren't part of a surveillance network. Your proof that ANPRs are used for surveillance illustrates the same difference I am pointing out.
Then the gap between UK's government-owned ANPRs and the privately owned Flock cameras is still probably quite large. I don't know the UK's privacy laws, but they probably exist. Flock, as a private party in the US, essentially has zero controls whatsoever on how the data is used. Including – most critically – that the government can simply buy the data from Flock (sans warrant) that would be illegal for the government to produce itself.
You see that I haven't heard of the thing that I explicitly mention in the exact comment you just replied to?
In any case, an evidence modality that can only be used via parallel construction is still far, far, far less risky than one that can be freely introduced in court.
Flock doesn't just sell ALPRs. They bundle it with CCTV, audio sensors, sells to private parties, analyze visual data. That's why they're everywhere. Pointed at pools, walking paths, indoors. In countries where ALPRs are widespread, they're exclusively on roads, because.. they read license plates.
well hopefully this snowballs and most public facing cameras other than private ones by people and businesses go extinct (state run cameras). We don't need to be recording every citizen's movement "just in case" . Society got along for thousands of years without it, and the potential for ever increasing tendency toward authoritarian regimes points to such surveillance as a terrible mistake in any society striving for a democracy.
Just because the UK has become a dystopian hellhole with cameras everywhere, Internet censorship, and repeated attempts are ending anonymity online, does not mean that other places should follow suit without resistance.
Short answer - yes. If you post bond, and you don't violate the terms of your bond, you get your bond back when your case is resolved, whether you were found guilty or not guilty.
If you do something that violates the terms of your bond, the prosecution can file a motion alleging a violation, at which point the defendedant can admit to the violation or deny and request a hearing. Then there's an evidentiary hearing, basically a mini-trial, where the judge hears evidence and determines if there was a violation. If that happens, the consequences can depend. You can forfeit your bond, your bond can be raised, new bond conditions can be imposed, etc.
If you were given a cash bond and can't afford it, you can contract with a bail bondsman. That bail bondsman will pay the bail for you, and in some sense takes responsibility for you not violating your bond, in exchange for some fee (usually 10% of the bond amount). That amount is NOT refunded
If he paid it himself, then yes. If he used a Bail Bondsman, then the Bondsman will get the $10k back, but Morelock will be out the $1k (10%) cost that bondsman typically charge.
Shittily, in some states, bail bondsmen get a better deal than you, often not being required to actually put the full bond on deposit with the Court (sometimes only 30%).
I mean, it makes sense since the bail bondsmen have business licenses and likely some form of insurance and credentialing with the courts to cover the differences. All the court really cares about is if someone is liable/responsible/trustworthy.
I guess it's a question if whether you miss bail of the bail bondsmen can recover 100% of the bail despite having only lost 30% of it. I bet I can guess which it is.
Would the bondsman only lose 30%? From this discussion, they only have to post 30%, but the other 70% could become due when the terms of release are not met.
That's still a better deal for the bondsman, but it's also reasonable. If you don't show up for court, it doesn't seem likely that you'll show up to deposit the other 70%... But if you don't show up for court, the bondsman probably hasn't left, and they will be available to pay the rest of the bail amount.
So per AI, generally, the bondsman is responsible to the court for the full 100%. However, they are also given, depending on the state, between 30 days and 2 years to find you and bring you before the court before the court will collect on that surety, which is another inequity.
Of course, most bond contracts say that the bondsman can begin civil recovery against you for that full amount too.
It's also a form of regulatory capture - your options are "come up with (for example) $10,000 bond, cash, to give the court", or "irrevocably give this person $1,000 cash, who in turn only has to give the court $3,000". And not for nothing, its not an industry with a sterling reputation. Indeed, the ABA, the ACLU, and even the National District Attorney's Association are against the industry.
Multiple states have no insurance requirements for either the writing of the bond, or the recovery of a fugitive, and more states beyond that have no credentialing or training or licensing requirements for recovery agents.
The cost of putting a trash bag over a camera that is in your local community is likely to be significantly lower than the cost of whomever installed it having to drive all the way back out there to remove it. You might only have to walk 100-200 feet with a step ladder.
At some point, the cost can be pushed from an economic regime to a logistical one.
It's also visible so that drivers will be able to see the trash bag covered camera. Some will probably just think it is litter blowing around that got itself stuck. But it would bring visibility to the protest movement that painting a lens would not. If juries do start indicting/convicting, it'll be a lesser punishment as no real harm was done to anything.
Sounds like someone who's never had to hire a lawyer before. They vary in cost and quality, and there's not a 1:1 correlation between the two. There's also many different areas, eg real estate vs corporate vs labor vs immigration vs criminal.
I have a dumb question maybe, but aren’t the flock cameras private property of the company? So why would the government be bringing this case instead of a civil claim by flock?
>The backlash against Flock has intensified as a growing number of police officers have been accused of or charged with abusing the technology, often to stalk romantic interests. As of Aug. 12, there had been more than 100 cases of abuse by law enforcement, according to the Institute for Justice.
In response, Flock announced new safeguards designed to prevent misuse by police. Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the reforms are largely “cosmetic,” and that warrants should be required for searching license plate reader data.
I'll go further: the gathering of such information should only be allowable by a sworn law enforcement officer acting under a warrant or some other sort of judicial permission during an active investigation.
Flock and Axon are private companies. What's to stop them from selling this license plate data to the police or to other parties to pad their quarterly numbers? Actually, I'd be surprised if they're not already doing this. A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
> A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
The Los Angeles Police Department annual budget is over $2 billion. A couple million a year to flock is a drop in the bucket.
> A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
The contract awards are public no? Axon et al probably make the majority of their money on service charges for storing, accessing the data rather than on the cameras themselves.
I would guess so, though that doesn't exactly get rid of the costs of the hardware.
I'd be interested to see what the op ex is for a company running this sort of business. You're storing lots of video, which isn't exactly cheap, and need to do so in a way that allows for cataloging, backup, and durable references to the data. On top of that, these cameras are transmitting data in a way that doesn't have a huge antenna sticking off of them, so there's almost certainly some sort of data plan to work with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile in play, transmitting some sort of video data over the network, either as a file transfer or streaming depending on the use case. That's another expense.
For every big city that's signing one of these contracts, there are probably a dozen small towns or villages also signing one with significantly more pressure on the government to keep budgets small. I suppose the big cities could be subsidizing the small towns.
You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
To answer the unasked question here, their business model is indeed making money off of collecting and storing the data, then granting law enforcement access to it. The gross P&L from the cameras themselves is an afterthought.
> You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
Anyone can put up anything on YouTube. Have a good example?
Get rid of the what if hyperbole and focus on the core reason why it’s bad. These contracts do not allow commercial use. Could they in the future but so what, focus on the here and now. We should continue to focus on what is true today. Flock has never enforced strict security around their platform and it’s proven consistently that people in power abuse it.
The what if conspiracy serves no purpose in dethroning Flock.
Given Flock's behavior to date, I really don't consider the assumption that they could move to selling collected data to be a conspiracy theory.
We have already seen that data is a highly valuable currency. And investor-backed companies with unicorn valuations are pressured to extract as much value as they can. All things considered, I would say that Flock continuing to monetize access to their collected data in new ways is a foregone conclusion unless it is specifically stopped or prohibited in some way. On top of that, I would wager that it may be already happening in some low-volume ways.
I don't really think "enshittification" is a conspiracy theory. I think everyone can relate to engaging in a relationship with a company, thinking they had a reasonable understanding of how the relationship worked, and then having the terms changed out from under them.
Maybe Flock gets bought by another company and "oops, the terms changed". Maybe all contract renewals will have commercial use in the language.
Once the cameras are there, the heavy lifting (from Flock's side) has been done.
Sure but the premise was a conspiracy that they are padding financial numbers by selling the data commercially. They don’t so why perpetuate the conspiracy? Focus on the real problem with the business.
(Not disagreeing with your point, pointing something else out) What happens when flock sells the company + data? That collected data doesn’t get deleted and could be used for whatever purpose at that time, as the company could be dissolved along with the contracts.
That’s not how data agreements work. The city/entity would need to agree to the revised contract. Is it possible? Sure. Is it something I am concerned about? No, I would rather focus on the facts.
In California, it's thought that only 9% of data brokers are compliant with state laws requiring transparency and deletion of personal data.[0] It only goes down from there; most states do not have strong consumer privacy laws.
Furthermore, most municipal entities are not in a position to litigate a case over these changes for an extended period of time, and Flock is changing their terms to make it harder to terminate contracts. They can also now keep the data as long as they'd like. [1]
This, along with general corporate conduct these days, makes it very likely that they're actively planning to sell the data and might be doing so already in.
I am struggling to find a reference, but at least one insurer has talked of using Flock for validating claimed damage to vehicles and tracking whether the owner just kept the check or actually had damage repaired. And for full disclosure, I cannot be completely certain whether this was something they were doing, or something they wanted to do.
It seems they can't do so without possible consequence in California, at least. It'd be interesting to know about other jurisdictions, and whether or not ALPR data is used as a possible lever to offer municipalities a "discount" by these companies' sales teams in jurisdictions where such things are allowed.
How do we know they're abiding by those agreements?
So far as I can tell from my little corner of Healthcare IT, Big Tech primarily has people doing two things:
1) creating ways to get people to generate data
2) people sitting around consulting with experts - including lawyers - about how to monetize that data.
Just a week or two ago, a jury found Meta liable for breaking New Mexico state consumer protection laws related to, among other things, child safety. They were ordered to pay $375 million over it. They'll appeal, of course [0] but this points to at least one part of the industry blatantly disregarding laws around their products in order to pursue more profits.
You can bet there's at least one person at Flock and Axon thinking of ways to further monetize their data. They might be willing to accept the cost of a fine or civil action as a part of doing business unless it wipes out all profit gained from the violation.
Given that this is a mass surveillance tool, I'd say its on them to prove they're complying with society's expectations, not for society to just accept "we're in compliance with the law".
Anyone accessing data from this system should have an active case they are assigned to, anything else should be subject to disciplinary action just as with HIPAA. It should have tamper evident audit trails. It should not be on a whim. If emergency access is needed they have to retroactively get reviewed and approved and if it was not in line with any active investigation or assist in an active investigation again it should come under serious scrutiny with actionable consequences.
Regulation of private companies and enforcement of same aren't really the way things work in America. And even the most highly regulated companies struggle with reality practicalities of tamper evident audit trails, for example designating a subset of systems in-scope of SOX or PCI controls where such trails are required.
You could require third party audits on an annual basis and discrepancies and violations addressed and or investigated. Failures need consequences like increased insurance rates, dismissals, etc. if it continues then the Feds get to take over the department/precinct, whatever.
Flock sucks but I think these kind of conspiracies hurt the argument. You can go look at a number of these contracts since they are part of your local city/municipality.
A typical flock agreement is pretty firm that the data is the customers. Some of it might be used for training. There is opt-in to share with other law enforcement but I have not yet seen anything around commercial use.
I don’t think much padding is necessary. It’s a metal pole with a cheap camera and SIM card. They charge $3-5k a year per camera. The only upfront cost is a local contractor to install the camera, they typically have one that covers a very large region. Huge margins with that alone.
This issue is a lot more nuanced than Flock's standard contract with municipalities.
You're right that Flock explicitly -- and repeatedly -- states that agencies "own" the data. They make those statements not just in their contract but also in their marketing materials, in interviews with city councilors, and to the press.
But that could also be seen as a fig leaf for their actual control over the data, and as a disclaimer of liability. They've wanted to have it both ways: they get to own every endpoint that the data flows through, and at no time does the supposed customer have real control over the collected data, and yet they aren't responsible for the content or consequences of collecting, transporting, and storing that data.
Customers do not even control whether the devices are powered on or off. Two cities here had to ask Flock to disable the devices while the cities reconsidered their contract, and in both cases some devices got reactivated without the cities' permission. We aren't the only ones.
Flock has also been incredibly dishonest about their object detection. They repeatedly made statements that it was "just the rear corner of vehicles" or "just a license plate", but when we (legally) acquired some of their devices for analysis, we found hardcoded tags for multiple other objects, including people and bicycles. Flock's "FreeForm" product marketing further supports that they are collecting images of people, and internal training materials from our local police department also supports the belief that Flock is uploading far more than just images of vehicles and license plates.
So, my question would be: if you don't control the devices, and you don't own the network, and you don't know what's in the data, then... do you actually own that data? In what substantive way is this situation different from DRM-encumbered media with a revocable license? I mean, sure, you paid for that game or that movie, but if someone else can decide at any time to change your access to it, do you own it?
You also made a few other comments rebutting arguments about commercial use of the data. Again, you're technically correct: to date, there are no known cases of Flock directly selling access to ALPR data to a third party in direct exchange for money. But, Flock is a subscription service and cities don't own any of the hardware or the software involved. Flock is directly collecting ALPR data in each city and then selling it back to the city.
Even setting that aside, their valuation in 2025 strongly suggested a connection between the data they were collecting and the amount of capital investors were willing to provide. $7.5 billion valuation against $300 million ARR, combined with ALPRs mostly cobbled together from open source or off-the-shelf software and cheap hardware and installed by a nationwide fleet of contractors: it's really hard to look at all the numbers and not conclude that the most valuable asset Flock had was the data they were collecting. If Flock did get $275 million of additional funding largely on the value of the data they had access to, is that really substantially different from commercial sale of the data?
> A typical flock agreement is pretty firm that the data is the customers. Some of it might be used for training. There is opt-in to share with other law enforcement but I have not yet seen anything around commercial use.
And yet even when opting out, and/or specifically disallowed by the contract, Flock will happily share with other agencies, particularly Federal. It has happened multiple times in my state alone (Washington): https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wav...
Agree and that is a massive fact issue that we should be focusing on. I think folks are conflating me wanting to focus on the facts as that should be the evidence we use and not what if scenarios.
It's too late for that. This would have maybe worked 30 years ago, but since the Patriot Act and FISA we have literal secret courts approving >99% of the government's requests for surveillance. The existence of the data is now enough to guarantee its misuse.
He is a hero. Everyone should eliminate Flock spy cameras and similar cameras. They systematically undermine several amendments. All of this government overreach is based on the assumption that people driving cars gave up certain rights automatically, which is simply illogical when no crime has been committed.
They'll hit him with a civil infraction, deny his appeals via whatever kangaroo administrative process the department they did it under (probably not the police, too much restrictive case law) uses and when that's unpayably large they'll lien his house and all that jazz and he'll have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to sue them to get them to f-off.
And all of the useful idiots who say useful idiots things like "we can't just let them get away with it" when the same civil law procedures and precedents are use to violate the 7th and 8th amendment rights of people they don't like will be deafeningly silent.
This isn't jury nullification which occurs during a criminal trial, and for which US Constitutional double-jeopardy protections mean that no further trial for the same offence may be brought.
This is a grand jury, which has refused to bring an indictment. There is no double-jeopardy protection here. The prosecutor has several options:
- Bring the case directly to a judge.
- File charges with a new grand jury. (Grand juries typically sit for a period of time.)
In this case, however, charges have been dismissed. There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.
What is notable here is that grand juries almost always vote to indict. This isn't a verdict of "guilty", but rather, a finding of sufficient cause to bring trial. As the saying goes, "a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich",[1] that is, overwhelmingly (apparently 95%+ of the time) a prosecutor easily convinces a grand jury to file charges.
Given that grand jury proceedings are usually secret (there are exceptions), and we have no further insight as to what the basis of this decision was, there's not much inference which can be made, though I'd lean more strongly to weak evidence than any specific anti-Flock backlash, much as I'd prefer to believe the latter.[3][4]
The common refrain is "you can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich". The standards required to indict are quite low. The fact that they failed to get an indictment here must mean they had ~nothing.
Would this still be jury nullification in a social/political sense? That is to say: since it's well known that getting a indictment is very easy, this seems that, like jury nullification, this represents society effectively saying that they don't recognize the validity of a law.
Of course like we said, we can't know for sure. Maybe the prosecutor messed up jury selection or failed to present compelling evidence.
If what the rest of the thread is saying is true (failed indictments being rare and harmful for the career of the prosecutor), the possibility of bringing the case up again seems relatively unlikely, making this de facto jury nullification.
> There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.
Grand juries can't dismiss with prejudice, FWIW. That's a role for judges, but a judge wouldn't have seen the case at this stage to issue such a dismissal. "Charges were dismissed" in the article is likely reference to the actions of the grand jury. It's possibly an inartful way of saying "the charges were dropped by the prosecution."
That's the part of my comment I was least comfortable with, particularly with regards to local / state jurisdictions. A judge, if involved, might request such a dismissal based on the Grand Jury's decision. Or perhaps not.
My point was to clarify (I hoped) the distinction between double jeopardy and jury nullification with Grand Jury dismissal, which ... seems to be a frequently-iterated confusion in comments.
What this isn't is jury nullification, whatever other win it represents for the anti-Flock crowd.
You ever hear of the scottsboro boys? Emmett Till's murderers were also acquitted via jury nullification, it was common for lynchings in the jim crow era. It's a tool.
I love sharing this here. If you want to have some privacy and protection, don't own a car. 3rd party car titling and registration services have existed for this purpose for decades, and once a property owned by that entity/LLC is used by you, you get privacy benefits and are on the hook for use tax and that LLC might have to register the car locally.
I haven't seen evidence that flock and associated entities pierce the corporate veil or obtain your local address information from insurance records.
Obviously pursue at your own risk and with professional consultation. I know someone who does this though and they're happy for the privacy comfort they get.
In addition to making it abundantly clear that we will not stand for a techno-Stasi, we need to remember to vote out the buffoons responsible for this too.
For one: calling in false police reports on people who video recorded the Flock subsidiary buildings by claiming they are on their property and saying "We don't know if they're armed." in an attempt to get them killed by police. Flock corporation's shells corps really don't like being recorded from public spaces adjacent to them and respond with attempts to incite violence against those that legally and peacefully record them. Which would be hilariously hypocritical if it weren't so dangerous. ref: https://youtu.be/S3MQLlMbS-Y?t=1894 (sorry this is a youtube video, recording of the false and inciting police report)
And then there are the cities that Flock is forcing to keep cameras physical up and which have to resort to putting bags over them like in Dayton, Ohio.
Many of the features flock provides or basically mimics in functionality have been declared illegal in the supreme Court (multiple cases). But of course since Flock is a NEW tech that's a UNIQUE combination of things, their lawyers can argue there is no EXPLICIT law in books for what Flock is, so they basically do whatever they want until the law catches up. By the time they happens it won't matter. Tale as old as time.
It seems that both your article and OP's are clearly stating that the suspect was not indicted, and that the charges were correspondingly dropped, and are entirely consistent with each other.
Can you point out where you are seeing a contradiction, or any indication of either article being "fake news"?
However the agent here with the power is the state and local and federal government. They're just going to do drones next if they can't do sensor masts.
Everyone who authorized this funding needs to be voted out. If we really care the signal is to take away the power of people who decided to use this.
> Everyone who authorized this funding needs to be voted out. If we really care the signal is to take away the power of people who decided to use this.
Yes, and we should continue to nullify convictions for activists fighting this technology on the streets. If they use drones lets shoot them down and nullify those charges too. The court is the final stand and juries are where we the citizens have actual power.
Can you be more specific? Are you claiming that the winner is not actually whoever gets the most votes (e.g. voter fraud, corrupt vote counting), or that someone who would not authorize something like this would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot? Those are the only two scenarios I can think of that would result in the conclusion you're stating.
As far as I can tell, people who claim the former are almost overwhelming the ones voting for the people who are worst about stuff like this. I've honestly never seen anyone claim the latter though, so if that's what you believe, elaborating more would be helpful.
> or that someone who would not authorize something like this would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot?
I'm surprised that you've never encountered this persepective before, it seems a very common one to me.
The first thing I think about is the South Park episode in which the elementary school had to vote for a school mascot and they were given the choice of either "a giant douche" or "a turd sandwich".
The second thing is another South Park episode (circa 2009), for which they actually produced two episodes (and aired one) for the Presidential election between McCain and Obama. Regardless of who would win, the plot was the same: the winner colludes with the loser in a National Treasure-style heist, with the election just being part of the setup.
In the latter example, the message seems to be that it doesn't matter who wins because the same outcomes occur. The former example probably doesn't need explaining.
Anyway, yeah, it would be nice to choose something better than a turd sandwich but when the other option is a giant douche, what is there to do? The way I see it, you either vote for someone who you know stands no chance (Jill Stein, btw), don't vote at all, or vote for the turd sandwich (or the giant douche, if that's your persuasion).
I guess I wasn't clear: I'm aware there are people who think that the choice doesn't really matter. That's very different than people literally being blocked from appearing on the ballots at all (which some people in sibling comments have cited some references to I'll need to look into more), and even that's different from them refusing to count votes and declare a winner if they did actually receive the most votes but don't fit the status quo.
As far as the one real-world example you gave goes, I'm not convinced that someone who feels the need to avoid making definitive statements about whether vaccines cause autism is a great example of someone who wants to effect meaningful change rather than play the politics game, but that's mostly an orthogonal point.
The last person to stand for president who managed to get political momentum and wanted real change in the system was Eugene Debs, and they arrested him.
Am I missing something here? Perot was on the ballot in 1992, and he won a bunch of votes. IIRC he was the most successful independent candidate in modern times, by vote count.
Sanders ran an insurgent campaign while denigrating the party, and didn't win more votes. I seriously don't understand the argument that the person with fewer votes should win the nomination, although I am receptive to hearing a coherent articulation thereof. (Superdelegates did not enter the picture until tens of millions of votes were cast, with Sanders trailing by millions of votes.)
Perot dropped out, then reentered the race at the last minute. This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable. He had many more votes before withdrawing.
Sanders was on track to win in 2015 but the media counted all superdelegates for Clinton throughout the campaign, costing him votes in later states where voters didn’t show up, assuming he lost. I guess this isn’t entirely the party’s fault and they did reform the system somewhat afterwards.
> This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable
This was...an eminently reasonable response to Perot's own actions?
> Sanders was on track to win in 2015
Yes, like Clinton was "on track" to win in 2007. "On track to win" is necessarily filtered through a set of lenses that don't mean anything compared to actual votes. He didn't earn the votes, so he lost. There's nothing unfair about that.
We also can't definitively state that the reason we "went off track" and lost was the superdelegate counting. It's certainly a plausible factor, but there are so many factors that go into trying to predict how situations like this will end up playing out that I think it makes sense to start with the baseline assumption that there isn't one direct obvious cause and then try to disprove that if you suspect it's wrong.
Perot’s actions were atypical for him, and should be viewed in light of both his statements about personal threats, which he viewed as credible, AND George H. W. Bush’s deep intelligence connections (including his role as DCI and his connection to illegal and brutal Latin American operations). You also have to remember that Perot was siphoning more votes from Bush than from Clinton. Dirty tricks and general ratfuckery were extremely common in this era.
I think the sibling comment addresses Sanders very well.
Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying that Perot thought there was a credible threat that a sitting vice president was planning to have him assassinated?
He apparently said there was a plot to release compromising (altered) photos of his daughter, just before her wedding, which is very specific. Small potatoes for Bush, who oversaw projects that created death squads.
there was a ton of ratfuckery. clinton's team got debate questions ahead of time from a friendly moderator. debbie wasserman schultz resigned as dnc chair because it was shown that the dnc tried to undermine the sanders campaign in favor of clinton. the clinton campaign was given operational and fiancial control of the dnc prior to the end of the primaries.
My recollection of the DNC linkage was that the Clinton campaign agreed to help the DNC in a set of ways (likely raising money for the DNC and helping Democratic candidates) in exchange for some affordances and Sanders refused to do likewise (which, to his credit is on brand). Is that not accurate? I admit it's been 10 years and there have been a lot of claims made as to why Sanders should have been given the nomination in spite of not winning more votes.
Brazile gives strong evidence here that the process was rigged against Sanders, inside the DNC. No, votes themselves there not altered, but when the arbiter of the process itself is not neutral, that is completely damning, and honestly, i think that behavior has just continued to this day such that we are seeing fed up Dems on the left revolting against the legacy party, causng it to look like it is about to fracture, and become the mirror image of MAGA.
The candidate would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot, and it happens regularly. For an example, look what happened to Butch Ware in the California election recently.
I think memes and political bubbles are making it very hard for people to reason through the actual principles and mechanisms of democratic governance. The reason the system keeps trying to make you vote for people like "Cop Kamala" is that most Americans like the police (https://news.gallup.com/poll/690959/racial-divide-policing-n...); there's no secret set of popular anti-police candidates who some shadowy "they" aren't allowing you to vote for.
Apple is rumored to be integrating cameras into AirPods[0] that are cloud connected for "AI." They supposedly won't be able to take "pictures" and "video" but will transmit essentially the same information for AI/Siri.
Between the reaction to Flock and also the Meta Glasses; I'm legitimately surprised that companies aren't reading the Tea leaves here. But, no, I guess everything needs a camera and a cloud feed of that camera's vision now.
PS - And before you say "that is just a rumor" the video file was extracted from Apple's macOS 26.7 RC that showcases how it may work.
> Look how the populist right has failed its primaries so hard.
From my bubble (we’re all in bubbles), it seems that the populist right are in bed with the technocrat authoritarians, e.g. the Vance-Thiel connection. Losses in primaries would indicate to me that the technocrat authoritarians are not succeeding in purchasing politicians.
Massie is kinda interesting. Because he’s a sort of libertarian who ran as a republican when the right was a bit more united
But it was a strange election. The “establishment” candidate was a no name who refused to do any debates. Rarely ever seem to say much, and when he did, it was mostly just empty parroting of Trumps agenda. Maybe that’s truly what that district wanted.
What was interesting was how Massie seemed slated to win until the very end. Suddenly at the last minute, all sorts of smear ads and all kinds of (honestly very mild) accusations of personal impropriety were being slung left and right and days before the election, polls swap showing Gallrein in the lead, a complete reversal from the months before. A man I’ve never heard speak anything that wasn’t just party lines or something about being a SEAL.
Now I understand that polling isn’t always accurate. But I’ve seen the same exact thing play out nearly the same way in other recent primaries. Feels fishy.
I don't think it's just recent primaries. Our electoral system is heavily influence by the highest bidder and has been this way for a long time. There are always exceptions, like Massie, but the overall trend is that the majority of candidates who are elected at the federal and state level support and are supported by a few big monied interests. This includes the big healthcare industries, the war machine, the pro Israel lobby, etc. It's why we do things like the war in Iran that are vastly unpopular with the general public. And don't do things that are popular like single payer healthcare.
I read it as technocrats Vance-Thiel successfully bought populist MAGA politicians. Those then failed in primaries, because electorate including portion of maga base rejects them. The "buying politicians" step was successful.
Now they need to buy new politicians and will definitely try.
> From my bubble (we’re all in bubbles), it seems that the populist right are in bed with the technocrat authoritarians, e.g. the Vance-Thiel connection.
Interesting, in my bubble “populist” right refers more younger more paleo conservative types who feel betrayed by MAGA. Many of these people hate Thiel and Technocrats as much as my Marxist friends.
I’m gonna guess (and tell me if I’m wrong) the disconnect is that you may be referring to the Trump admin itself which is indeed in bed with Thiel types. Personally I don’t really bother considering them populist anymore. They seem to mostly be interested in enriching their little circle.
Interesting. MAGA no longer being populist feels like a bit of a bleeding edge take. I don’t disagree necessarily, but I’m not going to put any eggs in that basket until there’s a massive swing at the voting booth both this November and in 2028.
Tea Party gave the blueprint for 21st century populist rightwing politics, eschewing much of the baggage of Bush neoconservativism. Then Trump turned the volume up to 12. I’d be surprised to see more novel populist rightwing political dynamics as it feels like the movement is running out of gas after a 16 year run (since 2010 primaries). The disillusionment is at a peak.
Hence, the destruction, the calls for more destruction, and the lack of indictment. Seems like the people feel left, unjustifiably, out of the loop on this one.
Axon makes drones and tasers and all sorts of other stuff too. Body cameras that are not publicly available at the time of recording are useless theater.
The body cameras that seem to make a difference are the ones we all carry in our pockets/purses. Axon cameras are nothing special, and the company is not neutral.
That's a very good point. Redactions and denial of public records requests make the Axon cameras mostly useless for bringing police misconduct to light. They might help once a case has become notorious. But they rarely start the process of accountability.
I'm more pro surveillance and think a lot of people missbehaving in public need it nowadays. But even I think this Flock Quasistasi mass sutveillance stuff is going way to far. It's hard to say I love security but also privacy and the abuse potential or risks are huge as well. I'm torn.
Are there actually more people misbehaving in public? Outside of the covid blip, crime has generally been on a downward trend for decades. Perception certainly is that crime is out of control, but I am not sure it is true.
Yep. And crime has been on a downward trend, even despite the fact that income inequality has been rising. Crime is usually driven by a lack of opportunity; if we ever actually helped out the poor then crime would likely go down even faster.
Is this sarcasm? Hopefully so but if not I assure you Flock is not worried about those bad seeds. They want a panopticon that can help the feds with parallel construction.
There's already broad support for universal healthcare, cannabis legalization, longer maternity leave, and probably many other progressive policies like enhanced privacy rights.
It has never been about what people actually want though, just what wedge issues can be exploited.
Well, this is a rare case where a grand juries declining an indictment. They usually churn out indictments like a conveyor belt but here they refused. I wonder why?
It's obviously a balance. But if you're asking if say 1,000 lost lives per year is worth it to save the privacy of 350 million people, I would say yes.
Just look at the 10's of thousands of people who die every year so that we have the convenience of driving cars. Not to mention the millions whose health are affected by the air pollution.
That’s even assuming flock saves lives, which it doesn’t. Really the question should be, is giving up privacy worth it if it helps law enforcement solve a crime faster? Still don’t think so.
Your phrasing is weird. In this case, the two are not in conflict but rather symbiotic - this grand jury chose to preserve the life of the person who was being accused of protecting our privacy. There is also a good chance that privacy (evidentiary rules) helped preserve this person's life.
But also you're going to have to elaborate what you mean by life being considered the highest value. Have you seen how we treat one another? We're always looking for rationales as to why someone else's life should be considered unimportant.
I don't object to Flock cameras or any other public cameras. But if I did, I would write to my congress person rather than commit a crime and destroy someone's property.
There is a juggernaut of surveillance consuming everything in its path, where laws are skirted to install surveillance instruments and due process might as well not exist. And you're talking about "protecting property" and pulling out your little pen and paper to tell your congressperson "i'd like you to try this instead, please"
I'm sorry, no. You don't necessarily have to be the one taking action in the streets, by all means write your letter, but please don't criticize others and pretend that your approach will get you any further than other peoples approach
It was like this in the face of some of the BLM protests. A notable group of people were saying:
> It's terrible that an innocent black man died. But this property destruction has to stop!
when, in reality, the perspective should be much more:
"It's terrible that there is this property destruction. But these innocent deaths have to stop!"
Hyperbole, some may some reading this, "We're talking about license plate readers[1], not people being shot or killed", but let's be real, there's very much a non-zero risk of that happening as a result of Flock-spawned encounters (and to be even more real, the culture from the top, as espoused very directly by its CEO is that false positives are a better outcome, and should be how the system works, rather than a false negative, because, ugh, "false negatives don't advance our mission to a world without crime, thanks to Flock").
[1] And they do far more than recognize license plates.
This is a justification for any kind of vigilanteism. Is this also what you will tell armed righties who decide to round up illegal immigrants and shuttle them across the border to Mexico because the government is ignoring their concerns or is breaking the law because the government ignores you only reserved for your pet causes?
That is not inconsistent with a belief that violence against a person is worse than violence against property. It is odd to compare kidnapping a person with destroying their home security cameras.
Democracy operates at multiple levels. You’ll notice that armed right wingers kidnapping people suspected of being undocumented is a problem confined to the government itself. There’s a reason for that. No-one really cares about immigrants, outside of performative politics, enough to take that personal risk. If they did, we’d find out what society’s reaction is. People are unlikely to look on that as favorably as they do on petty vandalism against an undemocratic rollout of a surveillance network.
> On Jan. 20, just three days after Cade’s aid camp visit near Sasabe, another group assembled on a ridge overlooking the Rio Grande in Texas and stood over five seated migrants. Some of those standing were armed with long guns or pistols and one wore tactical gear; they questioned the migrants, all young men or boys, while filming them.
But structurally, doing vigilante immigration enforcement is more difficult than doing vigilante destruction of property. Destroying a security camera takes one person doing one action one time; physically restraining a human being who doesn't want to be restrained and physically transporting them to the US border is a complex logistical operation that you really need the resources of a state-run bureaucracy in order to do. A vigilante group can't replicate it, unless it's so large and well-organized itself that it's a de-facto rival state to the legitimate US government, and this simply doesn't exist in the United States at this time.
> I would write to my congress person rather than commit a crime and destroy someone's property.
Your congressman is having a nice steak dinner with representatives of the company while some poor staffer pastes the generic response in the letter sent back to you.
For those that don't know, grand juries declining an indictment is extremely rare. A grand jury is basically a check on prosecution, that they have to have some initial evidence before charging someone with a felony. The standards are much lower than the subsequent criminal proceedings.
The grand jury only hears from the prosecution, there is no defense involved. Only a majority of the grand jury has to sign off, not unanimous like in an actual trial. The standard of evidence is just probable cause, not beyond a reasonable doubt. The rules of evidence are relaxed, meaning hearsay and other evidence can potentially be introduced that would normally be barred from a trial.
Because of the above, the rate of indictment from a grand jury is very high, over 90%. Most prosecutors will go their entire careers without getting a "no true bill" (meaning the grand jury did not sign off on an indictment). There's a saying that "a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich." So the fact that there was no indictment here is a big deal. It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career.
Though sometimes a prosecutors office will use a grand jury to fail to indict intentionally, like when the accused is a police officer they work with. It's a good way to launder away a prosecution that the DA doesn't want to pursue for political reasons.
The state could contract a criminal defense lawyer to prosecute, they probably already have antagonistic relationship with police.
This is how it should be done. But police departments strongly resist even administrative discipline by independent bodies.
Why would the state do that unless forced?
Because it doesn't benefit the state to hav corrupt cops?
This is too black and white of a take.
The state can benefit when it has particular kinds of corruption, but not all kinds of corruption.
But it can help many of the individuals that are running or working for the state.
That's either a very shallow or deep question. :)
I've banged on about this before, but every state needs to adopt a law where allegations of illegal behavior by cops are always handled by a Special Prosecutor, never the local DA. The incentives are too fucked for a DA to ever be trusted to handle it properly.
This recent phenomenon is interesting to me because a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach.
Do we know that to be the case? This could just as likely be an incompetent prosecutor showing up with inadequate or invalidated evidence and the jury throwing the case out on grounds of procedural incompetence rather than sympathy.
I don’t know it for a fact but the prosecutors apparently had video evidence and sales receipts. I was definitely projecting my own feelings on the grand jury response.
> just as likely
If you look at the success rate of prosecutors getting grand juries to indict, it's certainly not "just as likely".
The stat is very high, but that doesn’t tell you anything about why grand juries don’t indict in the small percentage where they don’t, nor why they elected not to here.
that sounds exactly like "a jury of peers is standing up for individuals against corporate/government overreach"
Real life events are rarely monocausal; it's not one "rather than" the other, instead it's almost certainly a combination of both (and other factors besides). Especially with (as several other commenters who pointed out) how rare a lack of indictment is.
This attitude can be a strong precursor to positive change. In Canada, Dr. Morgentaler performed abortions in Montréal, and prosecutors were unable to compose a jury of enough people who would return a guilty verdict for any abortion. So it created an untenable situation for the government, who had no choice but to let doctors completely break the law until they were deemed unconstitutional against the newly penned charter.
This is why it's important for us to show up and do jury duty even if it's not sexy. You can make a difference.
Not real recent. Nullification like this goes far back. It just requires a certain level of bias across the jury pool. After which, some people or companies will be unable to be protected by criminal law.
As others in this thread point out, this is not nullification. Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
> Nullification is a different thing and grand juries cannot do it.
It might not fit the textbook definition of jury nullification, but it would absolutely fit the spirit of the definition.
If the prosecution presents nearly irrefutable proof that the Ohio man destroyed the camera (Which from what I've heard is the case), but the grand jury declined to indict anyway because they're vehemently against Flock cameras and want to stick it to the government, then as far as I'm concerned, that's nullification.
It doesn’t fit the spirit, because it doesn’t have the legal qualities of nullification. In particular, the prosecutor can choose to empanel a new grand jury and seek a new indictment on the exact same charge.
That's a technical distinction over which the original jurors have no control. I think the scenario described in GP exactly meets the spirit of nullification.
The entire point is that they have no control! That’s what makes it not nullification.
Edit: to be clear, the essential quality of nullification is that it’s the product of a contradiction between two unassailable principles in our legal system. Without that contradiction, which does not exist in a grand jury context, a juror’s decision is not nullifying. It’s just a decision.
I get what you mean, but using a word with a very specific meaning in a legal context to mean something else that's similar and likewise in a legal context, but with a more vague definition, will just create confusion. This kind of confusion in a legal context can cause major problems for people when they're trying to understand the law as it applies to their case.
I don't think calling this nullification even adds any "spirit" meaning that isn't already present in "the grand jury declined to indict".
These two things can be similar, but the details matter here.
Why can't grand juries do it? I thought that it's when juries intentionally rule against what the law says, while saying otherwise, as a consequence of juries not being able to be penalized for their ruling. I don't seen any reason that the same can't happen with a grand jury.
A web search comes up with articles saying that it's more common with non-grand juries, but that's not the same as "cannot do it", while they also speak about a prosecutor's ability to re-indict, but that still doesn't guarantee them a charge.
Nullification is based on a contradiction in terms: juries cannot be punished for the judgments they render, and prosecutors may not re-try a case to obtain their preferred outcome (“double jeopardy”).
With a grand jury, the second term doesn’t apply: the grand jury’s decision doesn’t prevent a second indictment.
So in other words: grand juries can choose to render “faithless” decisions, but they can’t nullify a case in the sense that matters.
It may have to do with the state of accusations. Pre-grand jury there is no evidence of a crime. Once a grand jury rules with the prosecutor a crime has been defined.
Not sure why your comment is being downvote. That is in fact the best explanation for what is going on here, and the outcome has little to do with the competence of the prosecutor, as is perhaps alluded to by the original comment.
It's good to see individuals on a jury acting according to rational self-interest.
If it didn't originate with the show, Law & Order (the original run) has the line: "You could get a ham sandwich indicted" was said to Jack McCoy in one episode. I think I remember it coming up again in another episode.
Solomon "Sol" Wachtler appears to have coined the phrase.
He is a retired New York judge, ultimately chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals.
And still living at 96.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler>
More color to this tidbit:
He was a republican. He wanted to stop using grand juries to bring indictments, so he wasn’t impartial in his assessment.
Unrelatedly, he had an affair with a republican fund-raiser. When it ended, started making threats to kidnap her daughter, who was 14 at the time. He sent a sexually explicit note to the daughter, enclosing a condom.
He got a 15-month prison sentence.
This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal. They haven’t lived up to those standards for a couple years now.
I appreciated the interesting info on the originator of this quote, though this sentence made no sense to me:
> This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Frankly, I've seen all types of people use this quote, not just Republicans, which is a simple statement that there is a very low bar to indict in a grand jury proceeding, which any reasonable assessment of the statistics would deem true. The fact that the originator of the quote turned out to be a douchebag is totally irrelevant.
Also, I think this part is missing a very important step:
> The real force behind the low no-true-bill rate for federal grand juries is that the DoJ had extraordinarily high standards for themselves before they even approached a GJ. They had to believe they could convict and sustain on appeal.
While that may explain the very high conviction rate at trial, getting a grand jury indictment was also an excellent way for prosecutors to get a plea deal if the accused was looking at decades in jail even if the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold would be unlikely to be met.
> He was a republican.
He was born in 1930, though, so it's hard to say that he shares much in common with the ideology we call republican today.
While I think it's good to make a point that the republican party was very different in the early decades of the previous century, I'm not sure being born in the 1930 is the right cutoff for that. Mitch McConnell, one of the major faces of the current Republican party, was born only a decade later.
Fair point, but I'd call Mitch very adaptable and he has remained actively in politics for decades -- so he evolved to match where the voters went. Sol Wachtler hasn't held any office since the 80s.
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
A pithy quote from the bowels of the Internet (a commenter on a blog). Liberals love it, conservatives hate it, I don't know that it describes an old school republican very well, or even MAGA for that matter.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FrankWilhoit>
Cool that he's here. Thanks!
That quote is completely spot on, so any objection to it is worthy of asking why so. The problem with that is that it's not likely to have a satisfactory answer.
I did some cursory digging on that before I shared it. There's fundamental differences of thought for what government is supposed to be, and it's obviously mutated over time.
At its core, government is power over people, and the evergreen question is "how far should that power go, and who wields that power?"
I believe that there are reasonable concerns on "both sides" about that, but the reality is that power is effectively wielded by the wealthy. Democracy is an experiment that ostensibly runs counter to that.
Thanks!
I saw mention of the peccadillo, but wasn't aware of the full back-story.
>This is who republicans are quoting whenever they repeat the phrase that “you can indict a ham sandwich”.
Do you think that only Republicans say this or something?
No, but there’s more incentive to propagate the trope of you or your friends find themselves in a position where downplaying a federal indictment is a PR move you’d want to make. Yes, that could be anyone, but the indictment rate by party of administration sure is an interesting statistic.
The democratic party is the party in the US more often concerned with the interests of people accused of crimes by the criminal justice system. Republicans are more often concerned with the criminal justice system being insufficiently punitive and therefore tolerating crime.
Unless the crimes are alleged to have been committed by the political classes themselves.
Lists of indictments (and convictions) by administration over the past 50+ years (dating to the Nixon administration) shows a sharp majority under Republican presidential administrations.
<https://gigafact.org/fact-briefs/have-there-been-significant...>
For a longer history: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scan...>
Note that the US has had (by general consensus) six or seven party systems, with significant re-alignments occurring at several points.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_eras_of_the_United_S...>
The two most recent shifts, which Wikipedia traces to roughly 1980 and 2016 have substantially changed what were traditional hallmarks particularly of the Republican Party. Whilst in rhetoric the GOP remains "tough on crime", in practice it rather more consistently hews to Wilhoit's Law: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
<https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...>.
> He was a republican.
And Democrats were the party of slavery. Why do you bring this up? I'd think the Hackernews crowd would know history and wouldn't be surprised that on a long enough time line, philosophies change.
He coined the term in the mid-80s. There's a whole lot of continuity between the Republicans of the mid-80s and the ones of today, even if some of the ones of the past might be horrified with what's become of their legacy.
Irrelevant and not my point at all.
The point was that OP was making a rage-bait statement. HN is supposed to be better than that.
Ah, so it was topical!
Law & Order often takes from reality. The ham sandwich phrase is attributed to Solomon Wachter who was a judge on the New York court of Appeals and is anecdotally dated to the mid or late '80s. And then went widely into the culture and has shown up in novels, academic papers, and tv.
You _used_ to be able to indict a ham sandwich anyway. These days the federal government can’t even manage to indict someone caught on video throwing a hand sandwich at law enforcement.
James Comey was indicted by the government for posting a picture of seashells.
For anyone not familiar with slang, to be "86'd" means banned. You get 86'd from a bar. They don't murder you on the way out.
In restaurant server parlance it means "item no longer available". The stock of baked potatoes has been depleted so the word goes out to the serving staff to "86 the baked potatoes".
don't stand next to the reflecting pool, you'll get arrested because the president is embarrassed by his own incompetence
This seems like a very one sided view honestly. You could also say that, these days, the federal government can’t even manage to indict their political enemies, because DOJ under the current admin keeps getting laughed out of court.
Contrast: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49386895>.
(Cop-City activist arrested for failure to provide smartphone data in a customs search.)
not every time. there are people in jail/prison due to the times that the DOJ does not get laughed out of court. I think someone accused of being "antifa" got 100 years to make an example. I don't have the article to site, but shouldn't be hard to find.
you can indict a ham sandwich if you don't try to convince a grand jury that a mustard stain is terrorism. the grand jury found that throwing a sandwich at someone doesn't rise to the level of assault. what dude did was never contested, and they would have gotten a conviction if they charged appropriately, but instead they tried to "make an example" of him and instead they got made an example of.
What would have been the appropriate charge?
simple assault or disorderly conduct
But that wouldn't have put him in prison for life.
It does really demonstrate societal rot - the public's loss of trust in so-called "law enforcement" due to how they've come to often behave as lawless thugs. And so if you want to restore the public's trust (vital social technology), then advocate for civil rights and legal accountability on those tasked with enforcing the law!
> It will probably hurt that prosecutor's career.
Can you say more about this? I’m curious about what the career path looks like for these prosecutors and where the decision points are for their career progression.
Great comment with some good information.
Though it has been happening a little more with the current administration, which in fact did try to indict someone over (throwing) a sandwich (grand jury declined to do so)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwic...
Administration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.
Debatable since they really wanted to prosecute the guy and still failed to. We're not completely bereft of the separations yet.
But those labels are generally directed at the executive branch (the $President administration). Their failure was due to checks in the judicial branch. So we have a regime in the executive, but still have a somewhat functioning judiciary (despite the related push to further rot it from the top down).
Grand juries seem to have become newly relevant recently. In a number of cases they have refused to indict Trump's perceived enemies and in one case they almost literally refused to indict a ham sandwich.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/07/trump-grand-juries-...
Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism. But then again, people suspend reason when it comes to certain topics so I'm not surprised.
Those people throwing tea into the harbor are destroying property for political reason and are wrong and should be considered terrorists.
If they don't like the King's governors they should petition the court to appoint one that more aligns with their taxation desires.
Also, only knaves and fools would be concerned with The Crown's modest regulations for reporting "meta data" on all guilds and meeting-houses.
"Using Metadata to find Paul Revere": https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Terrorism requires people to be in terror. Is putting the flock cameras up or taking them down causing more terror?
Or more narrowly, terrorism is the use or threat of violence to influence a political outcome.
Clearly not the case here
The political outcome is that Peter Thiel wants to have full control of all security apparatus around the world. Fighting Flock is 100% a political fight.
Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here? Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government? How do you feel about Jan 6?
> Well the government was illegitimate. Is that what you're contending happening here?
When the jury of your peers decides that you should not be punished for something despite the law stating otherwise, it is a powerful statement. There's a reason why the judicial system is set up to allow this.
> Are you trying to overthrow the police department or municipal government?
The people in the US are not there yet. But you might want to recall JFK's words: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Take a look at what's happening in the US, think about it for a while, and then come back and tell everyone whether you think the people are being properly represented by their government and served by their public servants.
> How do you feel about Jan 6?
I feel that Jan 6 is one of the watershed moments that led us to where we are now. The fact that those responsible weren't punished was a clear signal that the rule of law was being abandoned.
You're behaving like the relationship between the government and the people is symmetrical. It's not. When the government stops obeying its own laws, people take notice.
Wait, how was it illegitimate? That's not an argument that I've heard.
I think the extrajudicial use of these types of surveillance is an illegitimate use of power and thus fine to be destroyed.
Apparently >50% of a jury did not agree with you, in this case, and that is one form of democracy we have to make sure decisions come from the consent of the governed. Looks like democracy to me.
No, the democratic way would have been to have a vote(yes, with the citizenry, not somebody "elected") if you want to allow mass surveillance.
Like they do in Switzerland.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-democracy/how-swiss-direc...
Petition the mayor, you can't be real.
This gives me an idea for a (less il)legal alternative: hang "Big Brother is Watching" signs on all of the Flock cameras. Or maybe we can pass a law saying Flock has to do it. That seems like the ideal compromise.
That's a beautiful fantasy but that's just not how America works at this point. Everyone has ulterior motives to keep the meat grinder running.
Sometimes the only way is civil disobedience to get the point across to paid off politicians and ones that overly friendly to sacrificing our rights to may the cops happy.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition...
This is also the democratic way, arguably more democratic, it's just probabilistic. Juries are supposed to be randomly sampled from the jurisdiction's population (a kind of democratic process). The ability of a jury to judge the law, and not just the particular crime is a feature, not a bug of the justice system. This is how the system is set up, and it is as legitimate as action through a legislative process.
EDIT: the parent asked a legitimate question in good faith, there is no need to downvote them because you disagree with their implied current understanding of an issue.
> would otherwise be considered terrorism
Watching what everyone does at all times is terrorism, and it is the people's right to defend themselves against such.
> Wouldn't the democratic way be to petition the mayor or support a mayoral candidate to appoint a police commissioner whose beliefs on surveillance more align with your own?
Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
> Seems like destroying public property for political reasons is wrong and would otherwise be considered terrorism.
"Terrorism," at this point, is just a term used to describe any action taken in opposition to the ruling class and its objectives of total domination & control, assuming that it has some potential to be effective (in contrast to toothless protests or voting).
> Do you believe Flock cameras have been rolled out en masse across the entire country all at once because there is near-unanimous democratic support for their presence?
I'm not sure where you got "near-unanimous" from. I think Flock cameras were rolled out en masse because public video surveillance has been common for a long time, and polling data has historically suggested (e.g. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/5881-63-accept-video-surve...) that Americans are fine with it.
This is not a jury nullification (which is an emergent property of US Constitutional double-jeopardy protections), but a failure to indict, that is to bring criminal charges (a "bill of indictment") for potential criminal conduct.
In this instance, the case has been dismissed, but might conceivably be brought again.
Why grand juries make the decisions they do is hard to determine, as their operations are (usually) secret. This may have simply been a case of insufficient evidence of a crime, or identity of the suspect ("probable cause"), as appealing as a broader backlash theory might be.
Much of this article appears to be either speculation or unsourced information if there was in fact resistance to bringing a Flock case by this grand jury. The latter might indicate a violation of secrecy oaths by jury members or other court officers.
Specific practices vary by state, not all of which use grand juries. All federal criminal cases rely on a grand jury.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_juries_in_the_United_Sta...>
> Police in Union Township, a Cincinnati suburb, accused Cody Morelock of disassembling the camera, its support pole and solar panel on June 13.
To add to this, it stood out to me that the headline uses "destroy" but the article uses "disassemble" to describe what happened. Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be), but it stands out regardless. Maybe he literally just walked up and started unscrewing things. That would be the most civil form of "vandalism" I can imagine; force them to (pay someone to) come set it up again until they give up or try something else.
The actual source article[1] mentions the equipment was destroyed. The SAN.com republication linked here dropped that detail.
[1] "Investigators alleged Morelock removed bolts securing the camera system, bringing down the camera, solar panel and support pole before destroying the equipment." https://local12.com/news/local/felony-charges-dismissed-agai...
> Not that the act of calmly dissasembling something couldn't be indicted as potentially criminal (if a ham sandwich can be)
Why do you doubt this? If I calmly disassemble your car in the middle of the night, haven't I committed a crime?
Where I live, calmly disassembling property that is't yours is, at minimum, vandalism: https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-28-03/
> A person commits an offense if, without the effective consent of the owner . . . he intentionally or knowingly tampers with the tangible property of the owner and causes . . . substantial inconvenience to the owner or a third person . . . .
My guess is the cost to remedy this disassembly is over $2,500, making this a felony. Even if not, if a government Flock camera is considered a "public service" then it's a felony no matter the cost to remedy because it falls under "causes wholly or partly impairment or interruption of property used for . . . public communications, public transportation, [] or other public service . . ."
Putting aside this specific case, I wonder how that $2,500 cost is calculated?
Flock owns the devices and leases them out I think. Hypothetically somebody could take the device down and put it in a nice tidy little box for them. Then the cost to remedy is… how much they charge the town to send a person out to put it back up? Or how much it costs them internally to send somebody out to put it back up?
If it is the latter, I guess it must just be somebody’s travel costs and wages (could be figured out like any contractor).
If it is the former, does that have to be the same cost they always charge to send out maintenance people? (Since a disassembled, not destroyed camera should be one of the cheapest issues to deal with, right?). Otherwise it seems like they could exploit the law by specifically “charging” enough to make it a felony whenever they suspect tampering.
Municipal sign installation is a decent floor approximation. Can run into the thousands if it's electrified (think: blinking lights on a warning sign). Depends on availability of electricity, engineering, weather at that time, etc. In some places, a stop sign can be close to $2,000 based on some quick googling, and that has no power supply to worry about.
It's always more expensive than residential bc it's publicly reachable by a million morons, and is meant to stand much longer than residential work.
Sounds like SpaceX with unscheduled rapid disassembly
Considering that the enterprising people suffering from unhousedness in tents are frequently described as being involved in the repair of bicycles the frames of which can be more than a month of rent, I am somewhat underwhelmed by the amount of signal in phrasal choices implying civility.
Is this an AI generated comment?
What do any of these words have to do with a person disassembling a camera in a surveillance dragnet?
Let's call it Grand Jury Nullification
This sure feels exactly like jury nullification
A true jury nullification occurs in a trial, which would stop this from being brought again due to double jeopardy. That's one of the things that makes jury nullification so powerful. This, on the other hand, is a pre-trial rejection, so they can try again.
This is before an indictment is even filed. Jury nullification takes place at the trial deliberation stage, after arguments have been presented from both sides with a judge presiding. This is no where even there yet.
Why do you differentiate? If they are doing it solely because they believe the law should be ignored rather than basing the decision on the facts and laws, why should it matter what part of the process the jury is participating in?
> Why do you differentiate?
Because words mean things, and precision matters.
An actual jury nullification cannot be appealed, and the accused gets to go scot-free forever in that jurisdiction, even to prosecutor's chagrin. In this case, the prosecutor could gather another grand jury and try again, at any time, without restriction, if they so choose.
And further, jurors cannot be held legally or criminally liable for their verdict in a case.
But yes, a clear and accurate description, thank you.
Buried lede is that this is someone's chance to coin a new term for "something that feels like jury nullification but isn't because it's a grand jury and the internet lawyers are being pedantic because they really don't like the idea of people being able to point at an honest-to-god case of jury nullification."
wut?
Because the law differentiates, not me. When the GJ does not return a True Bill it means that a jury of our peers believes there is insufficient evidence to charge someone with a crime.
That is a wholly different definition than jury nullification, where one or more members of the jury return a "not guilty" verdict because they reject the law or its application irrespective of the defendant's guilt.
The standard of proof differs. A GJ is not required to find a defendant guilty; instead, they must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to suggest the possibility of a crime. The subsequent proceedings will then determine the outcome.
As you don't have any of the details, you cannot judge whether this decision is congruent or incongruent with the law (ie would most impartial judges have made the same decision). There could have simply not been enough evidence to indict in the first place. Or there could have been key evidence that was excluded due to violations of civil rights, improper procedures, etc.
I very recently sat on a jury for a criminal trial in which we found not guilty. After my service ended, I looked up the case docket and found several details that pushed my personal analysis to the defendant likely having committed the alleged offense in my personal balance-of-probabilities reasoning framework. But the evidence and arguments presented at the case were so lacking (due to those details having been excluded in limine, as well as needing to meet the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt) that we jurors deliberated for all of five minutes because we had started off in unanimous agreement of not guilty.
(and just in case it's not clear, I have no regrets about that! Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important)
Getting back to this case. If we take it as a given that grand juries readily indict as the bar is low and prosecutors generally make sure to have their ducks in a row, we are still left with multiple possibilities of how politics might be involved here. Which is more likely - that the prosecution presented a well-substantiated argument that the jury then completely disregarded (ie "nullification"), or that prosecutors were politically encouraged to press this despite glaring holes in their case?
Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important
I admire the principled stance, genuinely, but I’m curious if your stance would be the same if someone was on trial for murdering a child, or something else horrific, and probably has a high likelihood of being a repeat offender. Would you still vote not guilty to protect their civil liberties, if you had information not shared with the jury that removed your reasonable doubt?
FWIW, I’m genuinely not sure what I’d do in that situation…
> Would you still vote not guilty to protect their civil liberties, if you had information not shared with the jury that removed your reasonable doubt?
That is a different scenario to what was described by the person you replied to, no?
And if one were to get that information the way you describe, that is surely jury tampering. That should be reported.
> I’m curious if your stance would be the same if someone was on trial for murdering a child
I don't know, right? This was a case where the harm didn't go beyond property damage. I hope to never have to find out - whether after or during a trial! There are obviously limits to how principled/logical/rational/detached any given person can be.
Since Ohio is a fairly red state, I wonder if this could be a "You can food some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." As much as I am angry at MAGA for not prioritizing my civil liberties, it does seem like conservatives are starting to notice that those in power don't actually care about conservative principles like privacy, small government, and individual liberty.
Conservative voters themselves have been quite clear that they don’t actually care about any of those principles either.
I remain skeptical.
Or, they are convinced the other side is much worse
The term "voter" seems relevant -- in my conversations with conservatives, they care quite a bit. In the way they conduct themselves (ignoring voting), they care quite a bit. It's only the voting in which there's an obvious disconnect. Ignoring that risks applying the wrong fixes to the wrong places.
Voting is where the rubber meets the road. If they don't vote like they care, then they don't care for all intents and purposes.
Voting is choose between two terrible candidates, neither of which represent the majority of any group’s interests. No one ever elected has delivered 100% satisfaction to the majority of their constituents.
A reminder to support approval voting, star voting, and proportional voting so we can end the 2 party system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhO6jfHPFQU https://www.equal.vote/
Approval voting is reasonable, but a ranked-choice ballot with either IRV or a Condorcet tabulation would be better.
Proportional representation would be catastrophically worse than the status quo.
> Voting is choose between two terrible candidates
This framing makes it seem like the candidates are identically terrible. Which is never the case.
Correct. They each offer their own unique flavor of extreme terrible.
And are able to capitalize on the fact that some voters are more afraid of terrible outcome A than terrible outcome B, and others are the reverse, to shoehorn both A and B into policy.
Edited this after the fact to reduce the intensity of my tone.
This “both sides” nonsense is not particularly convincing when one party literally has masked goons on the street sending people extrajudicially to concentration camps.
In other words, “the point of a system is what it does” applies to humans as well.
Alternatively, they can care about principles and issues that differ from that of the other party.
No candidate is going to perfectly match your desires. So voting becomes a measurement of where your priorities lie.
Of course, media and the candidates themselves will use propaganda to manipulate your priorities.
Right-wing media has done a great job convincing people that the greatest threat to them are trans women in women's sports and illegal immigrants.
Given that the Republicans claim to be the “party of personal responsibility”, I utterly reject this attempt to frame its voters as the poor and unfortunate victims of manipulation and choose instead to hold them personally responsible.
Like most marketing you can basically invert it to arrive at the truth. Republican propaganda continually harps on about personal responsibility because Republican voters are lacking it and desperately wish they had some. The propaganda is a coping mechanism.
Most of the erosion of our civil liberties is too abstract and requires education and awareness. Average voters will defer to generic arguments about "safety" from authorities. The "four horsemen" get trotted out so often that they're basically show ponies at this point.
The Flock(tm) cameras are very conspicuous. Even the dullest among us can see these engineering senior-design contraptions ruining the most rural landscapes. You don't have to read EFF press releases or read interviews with Snowden to understand what is happening. It was a baffling miscalculation not to anticipate this backlash happening.
It's not just "conservatives" who are behind this. The Clinton and Obama administrations did their best to undermine our right to privacy at every step and turn, just as the others have.
At the same time, our security state apparatus is in a full-force China panic; they've failed to offer a better social contract. We are the ones actually getting a social credit system, without getting anything in return.
True, it does not say the reason for the decline to indict. It could have as much to do with the overall decline in quality of the DoJ and its cases as a whole over the past year. Many nonsalient crimes will also go unprosecuted under this DoJ, but they will not generate headlines like this one.
It appears this prosecution was brought by local Ohio police; the federal Department of Justice would not have been involved in any way.
The US DoJ does not prosecute in county courts.
From TFA: "A Clermont County grand jury, however, opted not to indict..."
I got my catalytic converter stolen twice.
I hear Flock cameras have even more valuable materials inside them.
At least three pounds of copper and no jury will convict you!
Plus you are fighting back against the "seeing state" at the same time! Win win!
Like what? Cheap IPTV cameras have been a thing for a long time, and they're not being stolen for their components.
Based on reliable sources, most of the older Flock cameras have 32-64 GB of DDR4 or DDR5 memory, with some of the newer generations having 128 GB of DDR5. Worth several thousands at current RAM prices. Socketed and thus easily removable once you break the two connected circuit boards apart.
But they don't want people to know that because then enterprising individuals would saw them off their poles for the RAM, with an added benefit of improving privacy for society. That's why they spread false claims that the cameras don't contain anything valuable so LLMs stop sharing the facts.
> reliable sources
Which?
Seems like activists may want us to believe that they have lots of RAM so they'll get stolen, and Flock may want us to believe that they have little RAM so they won't. Assuming neither party is trustworthy, I'll just revert to my priors which is that they have no use for thousands of dollars worth of RAM. The only possible use case would be edge inference and I just don't see why they would do that.
There is virtually no question they are doing inference at the edge. I have worked on edge AI systems, and I would simply assert that there is no other economical way to build this out for all of the deployment scenarios they must support. Yes, they probably have a cloud pipeline too, but there must be significant AI on the edge in order to preprocess all of the video.
You're right. I didn't think that through. Actually, that's probably the stupidest thing I said all day. (I hope so, anyways.) However, I'm skeptical that 32GB RAM is necessary for what they do on the edge. Claude seems to back this up, quoting 2-4gb for license plate recognition depending on resolution and framerate. but I'm open to correction here.
> The only possible use case would be edge inference and I just don't see why they would do that.
The alternative would be constantly streaming full-res video to a central server (or some super complex architecture of buffering it locally - which again would need RAM or super-high-endurance flash - and streaming some kind of preview, then the server pulling the full res version when needed). Any blip in network connectivity would cause data loss.
Uncompressed 4k video at 30 fps is 3840x2160x30x3 bytes or 0.75 GB per second.
A) why would they be storing uncompressed video, that's ridiculous. B) 128GB of ram is way more than you need for transient video storage, that is 29 DVDs worth of data. C) You are not constrained to only store data in RAM
Might be a stupid question, but at that scale, wouldn't any kind of memory be soldered into the SOC, and thus have next to zero commercial value if removed? I have a hard time believing they would use actual retail DIMM memory sticks for something like this
There's GOLD in them there FLOCKs.
Shh, no need to ruin the fun.
This reads like a newspaper snippet you discover in a cyberpunk video game.
1984 edition
Why would a simple vandalism charge go to a grand jury?
Because that's how you get a felony criminal case started in Ohio (and most, if not all, states and any federal felony cases).
The simplest reason the indictment failed is that a felony charge amounts to overcharging in this case. Go one layer deeper and you find that cops and prosecutors assume the public likes a "tough on crime" approach, even when a lot of the public think Flock has bought off their local officials to pay Flock to run obnoxious surveillance tools with tax money.
Public attitudes may be changing. At least for Federal cases, it is quite rare for a grand jury to return a "no bill" or refuse to indict. Presumably, because federal prosecutors normally have their ducks in a row and present a strong case, or if they don't have a strong case, they don't waste time even bringing it to a grand jury.
However, per Wikipedia, "Beginning in late 2025, legal observers documented a marked increase in no-bill decisions in federal cases, particularly in matters arising from protest-related activity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_jury#cite_note-37
Yeah I'm not sure this is public attitudes so much as creeping incompetence from recent political appointments, at least at the federal level.
However that doesn't explain Ohio doing it as neatly, unless I've missed some local politics there.
Yeah, feels like two things contributing there... 1 - Trump fired many of the good prosecutors. Or made life miserable enough those prosecutors left the job for better paying private sector gigs.
2 - Trump has propensity to sue or charge anything that moves. "Boy who cried wolf" problem. See also: arresting people for taking peeling paint out of the reflecting pool, even when his own DoJ says it was a botched installation.
Felonies go before a grand jury in Ohio. The article talks about damages in excess of $1,000, which probably means it's a felony charge on that basis.
Looks like in Ohio the thresholds are:
- 0 to $999: misdemeanor
- 1K: 5th-degree felony
- 7.5K-150K: 4th-degree felony
- 150K+: 3th-degree felony
But what I found interesting is - They aren't automatically inflation adjusted, it has to be manually adjusted by legislation. Which hasn't been done since 2011 meaning that in 2026 terms it would be $1.5K~ for a 5th-degree felony for like-for-like level of damage.
Kind of nuts how a poorly written law can increase the number of felonies just due to inflation alone. Although a lot of things aren't automatically inflation adjusted (e.g. minimum wage), and I think commonly it is on purpose rather than an accident. They WANT harsher sentences for relative low crimes.
Part of me feels this is intentional. I have a hard time believing legislators don’t know about inflation. Most politicians are trying to maximize the people put behind bars, and this is one subtle systemic way to contribute to that.
> Although a lot of things aren't automatically inflation adjusted (e.g. minimum wage)
You know what is, though?
The annual budget a senator is allocated for furniture in their office. This year it’s $40,000.
Priorities.
What makes an ALPR cost more than $1000 per unit?
The starting value of felony
Probably the pole, footing, and wages for the installation crew.
The markup I assume
All the reasons in the other repliues, and it's also not just an ALPR.
A quick google reveals a Flock camera costs about $2500 and there's a few hundred dollars in install fees.
Framing Flock as just an ALPR always feels disingenuous to me. More charitably, it's at least naive.
And even if it WAS and will only ever be an ALPR, I'm incredulous that people would accept it.
High quality cameras are expensive.
Equivalent quality cameras can be had for 100-200. Not that expensive.
In a weather-proof, UV-resistant housing, with battery and solar panel for charging, designed to meet municipal and traffic safety specs, and with turn-key service, all at the usual markup for dealing with all that and because there are almost no competitive alternatives, it sounds pretty typical.
Even a simple stop sign is hundreds of dollars when you consider all the costs associated with its installation.
Look up guardrail guy's video on their installs. They are not up to code. Even the newer installs that do include breakaways are failing.
https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uvc-ai-lpr
$500 for one of the best [that I know of] consumer LPR cameras. Non-consumer versions go for thousands.
And the cameras Flock are using are no where near that good of quality. The claim was high quality cameras are expensive. Flock is using pretty cheap components. There's been multiple tear-downs showing just how budget built they are.
Go tear one down and see for yourself. We don't want to ruin the surprise for you.
The article neglected to mention Flock isn't just for ALPR any more. It's been widely reported as collecting cell info, wifi and bluetooth from motorists, which seems far, far outside any "public safety" charade. There's no way to opt out from this data collection for passerby. The accused might even want to claim self defense against an assault on their rights.
I've seen this posted in meme form, but I have yet to see any evidence.
Leonardo devices do evidently, not Flock specifically.
https://deflockilm.org/what-flock-cameras-can-actually-do/
PS and besides, it would be leaving money on the table if any of these camera vendors were not attempting to sell any identifiable emissions correlated to license plates: that would be a valuable data set.
> Neither is a feature of the Flock cameras watching Wilmington right now — the distinction matters, and saying otherwise would only hand Flock an easy way to call us careless
This. This is the problem. As Jonathan Swift wrote, "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." I'd bet that > 90% of people who are anti-Flock truly believe that Flock cameras are tracking cellphones also.
To me this is strange. In the UK I'm so used to ANPR I just assumed my car is tracked wherever I go. There were a few incidents when the automatic speed cameras first came out, filling them with expanding foam so they exploded etc but even those died out after a while.
Police in the UK are held to a much higher standard, and the culture in the UK is much more tolerant of government control.
I’m also going to guess that there are significant access controls on the systems in the UK that would prevent things like tracking an ex, or cops using ALPR to see if you have visited a healthcare facility that offers abortions among its other services (both real examples).
I could be wrong, but I don't think the UK has a network of privately owned ANPRs that can create ~complete pictures of people's comings and goings, and that data has effectively zero legal protections whatsoever.
Automated speed cameras are fairly common in the US but are obviously not a surveillance network.
I'm not sure I've ever noticed a single one or had a ticket from any or heard of anyone ever getting a ticket from one. They don't seem common in my experience, or maybe it's just like an east coast thing because I've never lived in that part of the US.
Some states they're illegal, and by "common" I do not mean they have significant coverage. I mean that they're not exotic or unusual.
Not a surveillance network you know of. Knowing what we know now, why wouldn’t it be tapped, if they could get away with it?
Well for one, there's not nearly enough of them to be valuable the way that Flock is.
Two, they're pointed exclusively at roads.
Three, their outputs don't show up in court cases as evidence, which itself dramatically reduces the danger (even if they potentially could maybe support parallel construction)
Speed and stop cameras are very very good and should be virtually everywhere with extremely strict control on their outputs.
> Three, their outputs don't show up in court cases as evidence
That's not true - I was recently a juror on a UK trial where we were shown ANPR photography of the defendants' vehicles. Here's some other examples of cases in the UK where the prosecution presented the jury with ANPR evidence:
https://www.casemine.com/judgement/uk/693b0db6b21a3a02e931ce...
https://www.2hb.co.uk/news/class-a-drug-importation-trial-co...
https://www.2br.co.uk/sam-magee-kc-successfully-prosecutes-m...
https://www.svs-solicitors.co.uk/additional-notable-cases-20...
https://www.judiciaryni.uk/files/judiciaryni/decisions/The%2...
You misunderstood the thread. Automated speed cameras are not part of a surveillance network.
ANPR networks are obviously created specifically for surveillance.
GP said "I remember pushback to automated speed cameras" and I said sure, but that was still very different because they weren't part of a surveillance network. Your proof that ANPRs are used for surveillance illustrates the same difference I am pointing out.
Then the gap between UK's government-owned ANPRs and the privately owned Flock cameras is still probably quite large. I don't know the UK's privacy laws, but they probably exist. Flock, as a private party in the US, essentially has zero controls whatsoever on how the data is used. Including – most critically – that the government can simply buy the data from Flock (sans warrant) that would be illegal for the government to produce itself.
I see you haven’t heard of parallel construction.
You see that I haven't heard of the thing that I explicitly mention in the exact comment you just replied to?
In any case, an evidence modality that can only be used via parallel construction is still far, far, far less risky than one that can be freely introduced in court.
Ah, I struggled to see your point of view if you didn’t, so I guess I skipped over it.
Now I just struggle to understand the naïveté in general.
Such are the challenges of being someone who can't read four sentences.
Is there any evidence that they haven't heard of it, or is this an assumption from your part?
Flock doesn't just sell ALPRs. They bundle it with CCTV, audio sensors, sells to private parties, analyze visual data. That's why they're everywhere. Pointed at pools, walking paths, indoors. In countries where ALPRs are widespread, they're exclusively on roads, because.. they read license plates.
well hopefully this snowballs and most public facing cameras other than private ones by people and businesses go extinct (state run cameras). We don't need to be recording every citizen's movement "just in case" . Society got along for thousands of years without it, and the potential for ever increasing tendency toward authoritarian regimes points to such surveillance as a terrible mistake in any society striving for a democracy.
We have the bill of rights baby
Just because the UK has become a dystopian hellhole with cameras everywhere, Internet censorship, and repeated attempts are ending anonymity online, does not mean that other places should follow suit without resistance.
I want to buy Cody Morelock a fancy ham sandwich.
https://makerworld.com/en/models/3107766-flock-sock-flock-ca...
The guy had to post a $10K bond, does he get that money back?
I believe so, but they'll drag their feet on getting it back to the person
> Morelock posted a $10,000 bond and was released from custody shortly after his arrest.
> A Clermont County grand jury, however, opted not to indict Morelock, and the charges were dismissed.
Is he getting the bond back?
Short answer - yes. If you post bond, and you don't violate the terms of your bond, you get your bond back when your case is resolved, whether you were found guilty or not guilty.
If you do something that violates the terms of your bond, the prosecution can file a motion alleging a violation, at which point the defendedant can admit to the violation or deny and request a hearing. Then there's an evidentiary hearing, basically a mini-trial, where the judge hears evidence and determines if there was a violation. If that happens, the consequences can depend. You can forfeit your bond, your bond can be raised, new bond conditions can be imposed, etc.
If you were given a cash bond and can't afford it, you can contract with a bail bondsman. That bail bondsman will pay the bail for you, and in some sense takes responsibility for you not violating your bond, in exchange for some fee (usually 10% of the bond amount). That amount is NOT refunded
If he paid it himself, then yes. If he used a Bail Bondsman, then the Bondsman will get the $10k back, but Morelock will be out the $1k (10%) cost that bondsman typically charge.
Shittily, in some states, bail bondsmen get a better deal than you, often not being required to actually put the full bond on deposit with the Court (sometimes only 30%).
I mean, it makes sense since the bail bondsmen have business licenses and likely some form of insurance and credentialing with the courts to cover the differences. All the court really cares about is if someone is liable/responsible/trustworthy.
I guess it's a question if whether you miss bail of the bail bondsmen can recover 100% of the bail despite having only lost 30% of it. I bet I can guess which it is.
Would the bondsman only lose 30%? From this discussion, they only have to post 30%, but the other 70% could become due when the terms of release are not met.
That's still a better deal for the bondsman, but it's also reasonable. If you don't show up for court, it doesn't seem likely that you'll show up to deposit the other 70%... But if you don't show up for court, the bondsman probably hasn't left, and they will be available to pay the rest of the bail amount.
So per AI, generally, the bondsman is responsible to the court for the full 100%. However, they are also given, depending on the state, between 30 days and 2 years to find you and bring you before the court before the court will collect on that surety, which is another inequity.
Of course, most bond contracts say that the bondsman can begin civil recovery against you for that full amount too.
It's also a form of regulatory capture - your options are "come up with (for example) $10,000 bond, cash, to give the court", or "irrevocably give this person $1,000 cash, who in turn only has to give the court $3,000". And not for nothing, its not an industry with a sterling reputation. Indeed, the ABA, the ACLU, and even the National District Attorney's Association are against the industry.
Multiple states have no insurance requirements for either the writing of the bond, or the recovery of a fugitive, and more states beyond that have no credentialing or training or licensing requirements for recovery agents.
Proton (of Proton Mail fame) have a youtube channel and yesterday they interviewed the CEO of Flock. Frankly, double dutch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8npTivf23y8
I have thought that the thing for folks to do instead of destroying these cameras is to just put a black trash bag on it.
I hear truck liner spray paint works wonders.
Then someone would take it off. Spray paint is probably more effective, but still recoverable.
Google "<whatever the housing is made out of> chemical compatibility chart"
Then the camera isn’t destroyed? What’s the point?
It's an asymmetric situation.
The cost of putting a trash bag over a camera that is in your local community is likely to be significantly lower than the cost of whomever installed it having to drive all the way back out there to remove it. You might only have to walk 100-200 feet with a step ladder.
At some point, the cost can be pushed from an economic regime to a logistical one.
It's also visible so that drivers will be able to see the trash bag covered camera. Some will probably just think it is litter blowing around that got itself stuck. But it would bring visibility to the protest movement that painting a lens would not. If juries do start indicting/convicting, it'll be a lesser punishment as no real harm was done to anything.
It doesn't send the same political message, which is a huge part of the point here.
If the police have to send someone around uncovering cameras every few days, then that does send a political message.
Yeah, ‘we won’t take this seriously enough to actually cause real damage’.
unless you're willing to do it, then I don't think you can ask others to do it. garbage bag = small dismeanor, sawsall = felony
You probably want the felony because it's less likely to stick, especially in the court of public opinion.
Lawyer costs the same per hour either way.
> Lawyer costs the same per hour either way.
Sounds like someone who's never had to hire a lawyer before. They vary in cost and quality, and there's not a 1:1 correlation between the two. There's also many different areas, eg real estate vs corporate vs labor vs immigration vs criminal.
Hell yes! Absolute win
I have a dumb question maybe, but aren’t the flock cameras private property of the company? So why would the government be bringing this case instead of a civil claim by flock?
Destruction of property, even private or personal property, is still a crime punishable by the government with fines or jail/prison time.
The civil claim by Flock only exists for them to recoup their losses.
>The backlash against Flock has intensified as a growing number of police officers have been accused of or charged with abusing the technology, often to stalk romantic interests. As of Aug. 12, there had been more than 100 cases of abuse by law enforcement, according to the Institute for Justice.
In response, Flock announced new safeguards designed to prevent misuse by police. Critics, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the reforms are largely “cosmetic,” and that warrants should be required for searching license plate reader data.
I'll go further: the gathering of such information should only be allowable by a sworn law enforcement officer acting under a warrant or some other sort of judicial permission during an active investigation.
Flock and Axon are private companies. What's to stop them from selling this license plate data to the police or to other parties to pad their quarterly numbers? Actually, I'd be surprised if they're not already doing this. A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
> A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
The Los Angeles Police Department annual budget is over $2 billion. A couple million a year to flock is a drop in the bucket.
> A friend of mine is in the camera business and was wondering how the hell they're making the money they're making off of local and state government contracts.
The contract awards are public no? Axon et al probably make the majority of their money on service charges for storing, accessing the data rather than on the cameras themselves.
I would guess so, though that doesn't exactly get rid of the costs of the hardware.
I'd be interested to see what the op ex is for a company running this sort of business. You're storing lots of video, which isn't exactly cheap, and need to do so in a way that allows for cataloging, backup, and durable references to the data. On top of that, these cameras are transmitting data in a way that doesn't have a huge antenna sticking off of them, so there's almost certainly some sort of data plan to work with Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile in play, transmitting some sort of video data over the network, either as a file transfer or streaming depending on the use case. That's another expense.
For every big city that's signing one of these contracts, there are probably a dozen small towns or villages also signing one with significantly more pressure on the government to keep budgets small. I suppose the big cities could be subsidizing the small towns.
You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
To answer the unasked question here, their business model is indeed making money off of collecting and storing the data, then granting law enforcement access to it. The gross P&L from the cameras themselves is an afterthought.
> You guys could do a little bit of research before chiming in. It's not that hard to find this information, and there are dozens of documentary videos on YouTube about Flock cameras.
Anyone can put up anything on YouTube. Have a good example?
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/02/flock-came...
No, they don’t as far as I have seen sell data for commercial purposes.
Yet?
You have to admit, the precedent for them being a company that understands the sensitivity of this data has not been set.
Get rid of the what if hyperbole and focus on the core reason why it’s bad. These contracts do not allow commercial use. Could they in the future but so what, focus on the here and now. We should continue to focus on what is true today. Flock has never enforced strict security around their platform and it’s proven consistently that people in power abuse it.
The what if conspiracy serves no purpose in dethroning Flock.
Given Flock's behavior to date, I really don't consider the assumption that they could move to selling collected data to be a conspiracy theory.
We have already seen that data is a highly valuable currency. And investor-backed companies with unicorn valuations are pressured to extract as much value as they can. All things considered, I would say that Flock continuing to monetize access to their collected data in new ways is a foregone conclusion unless it is specifically stopped or prohibited in some way. On top of that, I would wager that it may be already happening in some low-volume ways.
I don't really think "enshittification" is a conspiracy theory. I think everyone can relate to engaging in a relationship with a company, thinking they had a reasonable understanding of how the relationship worked, and then having the terms changed out from under them.
Maybe Flock gets bought by another company and "oops, the terms changed". Maybe all contract renewals will have commercial use in the language.
Once the cameras are there, the heavy lifting (from Flock's side) has been done.
Sure but the premise was a conspiracy that they are padding financial numbers by selling the data commercially. They don’t so why perpetuate the conspiracy? Focus on the real problem with the business.
(Not disagreeing with your point, pointing something else out) What happens when flock sells the company + data? That collected data doesn’t get deleted and could be used for whatever purpose at that time, as the company could be dissolved along with the contracts.
That’s not how data agreements work. The city/entity would need to agree to the revised contract. Is it possible? Sure. Is it something I am concerned about? No, I would rather focus on the facts.
Data agreements must be enforced.
In California, it's thought that only 9% of data brokers are compliant with state laws requiring transparency and deletion of personal data.[0] It only goes down from there; most states do not have strong consumer privacy laws.
Furthermore, most municipal entities are not in a position to litigate a case over these changes for an extended period of time, and Flock is changing their terms to make it harder to terminate contracts. They can also now keep the data as long as they'd like. [1]
This, along with general corporate conduct these days, makes it very likely that they're actively planning to sell the data and might be doing so already in.
[0] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/08/companies-buy-sell...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
Many of their contracts in my state (Washington) do not allow for sharing of data with Federal Agencies. Yet Flock continues to do so with impunity.
I am struggling to find a reference, but at least one insurer has talked of using Flock for validating claimed damage to vehicles and tracking whether the owner just kept the check or actually had damage repaired. And for full disclosure, I cannot be completely certain whether this was something they were doing, or something they wanted to do.
It seems they can't do so without possible consequence in California, at least. It'd be interesting to know about other jurisdictions, and whether or not ALPR data is used as a possible lever to offer municipalities a "discount" by these companies' sales teams in jurisdictions where such things are allowed.
You can generally get your hands on these agreements pretty easily. None of the ones I have seen allow commercial use.
How do we know they're abiding by those agreements?
So far as I can tell from my little corner of Healthcare IT, Big Tech primarily has people doing two things:
1) creating ways to get people to generate data
2) people sitting around consulting with experts - including lawyers - about how to monetize that data.
Just a week or two ago, a jury found Meta liable for breaking New Mexico state consumer protection laws related to, among other things, child safety. They were ordered to pay $375 million over it. They'll appeal, of course [0] but this points to at least one part of the industry blatantly disregarding laws around their products in order to pursue more profits.
You can bet there's at least one person at Flock and Axon thinking of ways to further monetize their data. They might be willing to accept the cost of a fine or civil action as a part of doing business unless it wipes out all profit gained from the violation.
Given that this is a mass surveillance tool, I'd say its on them to prove they're complying with society's expectations, not for society to just accept "we're in compliance with the law".
[0] https://abcnews.com/GMA/Family/meta-hit-375-million-verdict-...
Pull the proof and let’s report on it. That would be a great fact.
The ACLU has, at the very least, noted that there are changes to the Flock T&C that could lead to the sale of data [0]
> Sale of data. Flock’s previous T&C stated flatly, “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” That language is now absent from their T&C.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
Anyone accessing data from this system should have an active case they are assigned to, anything else should be subject to disciplinary action just as with HIPAA. It should have tamper evident audit trails. It should not be on a whim. If emergency access is needed they have to retroactively get reviewed and approved and if it was not in line with any active investigation or assist in an active investigation again it should come under serious scrutiny with actionable consequences.
Regulation of private companies and enforcement of same aren't really the way things work in America. And even the most highly regulated companies struggle with reality practicalities of tamper evident audit trails, for example designating a subset of systems in-scope of SOX or PCI controls where such trails are required.
You could require third party audits on an annual basis and discrepancies and violations addressed and or investigated. Failures need consequences like increased insurance rates, dismissals, etc. if it continues then the Feds get to take over the department/precinct, whatever.
Flock sucks but I think these kind of conspiracies hurt the argument. You can go look at a number of these contracts since they are part of your local city/municipality.
A typical flock agreement is pretty firm that the data is the customers. Some of it might be used for training. There is opt-in to share with other law enforcement but I have not yet seen anything around commercial use.
I don’t think much padding is necessary. It’s a metal pole with a cheap camera and SIM card. They charge $3-5k a year per camera. The only upfront cost is a local contractor to install the camera, they typically have one that covers a very large region. Huge margins with that alone.
This issue is a lot more nuanced than Flock's standard contract with municipalities.
You're right that Flock explicitly -- and repeatedly -- states that agencies "own" the data. They make those statements not just in their contract but also in their marketing materials, in interviews with city councilors, and to the press.
But that could also be seen as a fig leaf for their actual control over the data, and as a disclaimer of liability. They've wanted to have it both ways: they get to own every endpoint that the data flows through, and at no time does the supposed customer have real control over the collected data, and yet they aren't responsible for the content or consequences of collecting, transporting, and storing that data.
Customers do not even control whether the devices are powered on or off. Two cities here had to ask Flock to disable the devices while the cities reconsidered their contract, and in both cases some devices got reactivated without the cities' permission. We aren't the only ones.
Flock has also been incredibly dishonest about their object detection. They repeatedly made statements that it was "just the rear corner of vehicles" or "just a license plate", but when we (legally) acquired some of their devices for analysis, we found hardcoded tags for multiple other objects, including people and bicycles. Flock's "FreeForm" product marketing further supports that they are collecting images of people, and internal training materials from our local police department also supports the belief that Flock is uploading far more than just images of vehicles and license plates.
So, my question would be: if you don't control the devices, and you don't own the network, and you don't know what's in the data, then... do you actually own that data? In what substantive way is this situation different from DRM-encumbered media with a revocable license? I mean, sure, you paid for that game or that movie, but if someone else can decide at any time to change your access to it, do you own it?
You also made a few other comments rebutting arguments about commercial use of the data. Again, you're technically correct: to date, there are no known cases of Flock directly selling access to ALPR data to a third party in direct exchange for money. But, Flock is a subscription service and cities don't own any of the hardware or the software involved. Flock is directly collecting ALPR data in each city and then selling it back to the city.
Even setting that aside, their valuation in 2025 strongly suggested a connection between the data they were collecting and the amount of capital investors were willing to provide. $7.5 billion valuation against $300 million ARR, combined with ALPRs mostly cobbled together from open source or off-the-shelf software and cheap hardware and installed by a nationwide fleet of contractors: it's really hard to look at all the numbers and not conclude that the most valuable asset Flock had was the data they were collecting. If Flock did get $275 million of additional funding largely on the value of the data they had access to, is that really substantially different from commercial sale of the data?
> A typical flock agreement is pretty firm that the data is the customers. Some of it might be used for training. There is opt-in to share with other law enforcement but I have not yet seen anything around commercial use.
And yet even when opting out, and/or specifically disallowed by the contract, Flock will happily share with other agencies, particularly Federal. It has happened multiple times in my state alone (Washington): https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/flock-safety-cancel-wav...
Agree and that is a massive fact issue that we should be focusing on. I think folks are conflating me wanting to focus on the facts as that should be the evidence we use and not what if scenarios.
> What's to stop them from selling this license plate data to the police or to other parties to pad their quarterly numbers?
Motorola does!
https://drndata.com/
If you're a private repo-man you too can also buy Vigilant Solutions (now Motorola) ALPR cameras to track down deadbeats and take their cars.
Note the list of "Trusted by Fortune 500 data-driven companies" there. All of them are sub-prime lenders and cater to the 24.99% APR marketplace.
Even funnier they now sell the bodycams over through DRN too to the repo guys. https://drndata.com/body-worn-camera/
It's too late for that. This would have maybe worked 30 years ago, but since the Patriot Act and FISA we have literal secret courts approving >99% of the government's requests for surveillance. The existence of the data is now enough to guarantee its misuse.
He is a hero. Everyone should eliminate Flock spy cameras and similar cameras. They systematically undermine several amendments. All of this government overreach is based on the assumption that people driving cars gave up certain rights automatically, which is simply illogical when no crime has been committed.
Sad to see how quickly the narrative has been pushed from "you should not collect this data" to a bunch of "we need common sense guardrails" comments.
The state will try again until they get the result that they have determined is correct.
They'll hit him with a civil infraction, deny his appeals via whatever kangaroo administrative process the department they did it under (probably not the police, too much restrictive case law) uses and when that's unpayably large they'll lien his house and all that jazz and he'll have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to sue them to get them to f-off.
And all of the useful idiots who say useful idiots things like "we can't just let them get away with it" when the same civil law procedures and precedents are use to violate the 7th and 8th amendment rights of people they don't like will be deafeningly silent.
Jury nullification ain't sounding so bad anymore, is it?
This isn't jury nullification which occurs during a criminal trial, and for which US Constitutional double-jeopardy protections mean that no further trial for the same offence may be brought.
This is a grand jury, which has refused to bring an indictment. There is no double-jeopardy protection here. The prosecutor has several options:
- Bring the case directly to a judge.
- File charges with a new grand jury. (Grand juries typically sit for a period of time.)
In this case, however, charges have been dismissed. There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.
What is notable here is that grand juries almost always vote to indict. This isn't a verdict of "guilty", but rather, a finding of sufficient cause to bring trial. As the saying goes, "a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich",[1] that is, overwhelmingly (apparently 95%+ of the time) a prosecutor easily convinces a grand jury to file charges.
Given that grand jury proceedings are usually secret (there are exceptions), and we have no further insight as to what the basis of this decision was, there's not much inference which can be made, though I'd lean more strongly to weak evidence than any specific anti-Flock backlash, much as I'd prefer to believe the latter.[3][4]
________________________________
Notes:
1. Sol Wachtler: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Wachtler>
2. On grand juries, generally: <https://legalknowledgebase.com/what-does-it-mean-when-a-gran...>
3. On dismissal of charges: <https://andrewalpert.com/blog/what-does-dismissed-with-preju...>
The common refrain is "you can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich". The standards required to indict are quite low. The fact that they failed to get an indictment here must mean they had ~nothing.
Quoted, and sourced, in the comment you're replying to.
Yes, I'm aware.
Heh, my bad
Judges have a lot of freedom to decide sentences. They might get one willing to throw the book on him. The risk is still there.
Judges can’t throw the book at someone who wasn’t indicted.
Depending on the jurisdiction and court procedural rules, there may be other routes to an indictment.
I'm no expert on Ohio law however, so I don't know what specifically applies here.
How is a judge going to do that when this man wasn't even indicted?
Would this still be jury nullification in a social/political sense? That is to say: since it's well known that getting a indictment is very easy, this seems that, like jury nullification, this represents society effectively saying that they don't recognize the validity of a law.
Of course like we said, we can't know for sure. Maybe the prosecutor messed up jury selection or failed to present compelling evidence.
If words have meanings, no. Jury Nullification arises out of double-jeopardy protections specifically, which requires a trial and not-guilty verdict.
This is a failure-to-indict only.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification>
Yes
If what the rest of the thread is saying is true (failed indictments being rare and harmful for the career of the prosecutor), the possibility of bringing the case up again seems relatively unlikely, making this de facto jury nullification.
> There are several variants here, one is "dismissed with prejudice", which means that those specific charges cannot be applied again. TFA doesn't note this (or indeed much else of substance in this case), so the presumption is that charges are dismissed without prejudice.
Grand juries can't dismiss with prejudice, FWIW. That's a role for judges, but a judge wouldn't have seen the case at this stage to issue such a dismissal. "Charges were dismissed" in the article is likely reference to the actions of the grand jury. It's possibly an inartful way of saying "the charges were dropped by the prosecution."
That's the part of my comment I was least comfortable with, particularly with regards to local / state jurisdictions. A judge, if involved, might request such a dismissal based on the Grand Jury's decision. Or perhaps not.
My point was to clarify (I hoped) the distinction between double jeopardy and jury nullification with Grand Jury dismissal, which ... seems to be a frequently-iterated confusion in comments.
What this isn't is jury nullification, whatever other win it represents for the anti-Flock crowd.
Yeah you did good. I'm not the best at sounding hinged in responses online.
Never did
You ever hear of the scottsboro boys? Emmett Till's murderers were also acquitted via jury nullification, it was common for lynchings in the jim crow era. It's a tool.
Lots of good tools can be used for malicious purposes, but it doesn't make them bad tools.
I love sharing this here. If you want to have some privacy and protection, don't own a car. 3rd party car titling and registration services have existed for this purpose for decades, and once a property owned by that entity/LLC is used by you, you get privacy benefits and are on the hook for use tax and that LLC might have to register the car locally.
I haven't seen evidence that flock and associated entities pierce the corporate veil or obtain your local address information from insurance records.
Obviously pursue at your own risk and with professional consultation. I know someone who does this though and they're happy for the privacy comfort they get.
Source: https://local12.com/news/local/felony-charges-dismissed-agai...
In addition to making it abundantly clear that we will not stand for a techno-Stasi, we need to remember to vote out the buffoons responsible for this too.
This is only fair play given the cities and DAs around the country have refused to indict or prosecute Flock surveillance when they break the law.
When did they do that?
For one: calling in false police reports on people who video recorded the Flock subsidiary buildings by claiming they are on their property and saying "We don't know if they're armed." in an attempt to get them killed by police. Flock corporation's shells corps really don't like being recorded from public spaces adjacent to them and respond with attempts to incite violence against those that legally and peacefully record them. Which would be hilariously hypocritical if it weren't so dangerous. ref: https://youtu.be/S3MQLlMbS-Y?t=1894 (sorry this is a youtube video, recording of the false and inciting police report)
And then there are the cities that Flock is forcing to keep cameras physical up and which have to resort to putting bags over them like in Dayton, Ohio.
Many of the features flock provides or basically mimics in functionality have been declared illegal in the supreme Court (multiple cases). But of course since Flock is a NEW tech that's a UNIQUE combination of things, their lawyers can argue there is no EXPLICIT law in books for what Flock is, so they basically do whatever they want until the law catches up. By the time they happens it won't matter. Tale as old as time.
This is fake news, the origin of the story has clarified the time line. There was no indictment at all. https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/in-your-community/clerm...
It seems that both your article and OP's are clearly stating that the suspect was not indicted, and that the charges were correspondingly dropped, and are entirely consistent with each other.
Can you point out where you are seeing a contradiction, or any indication of either article being "fake news"?
> There was no indictment at all.
How is that any different from "declined to indict"? Indeed, I would expect there to be no indictment, if a grand jury did not approve one.
This is true patriotism.
Good. Let the techbros understand we don't want a surveillance state.
I agree.
However the agent here with the power is the state and local and federal government. They're just going to do drones next if they can't do sensor masts.
Everyone who authorized this funding needs to be voted out. If we really care the signal is to take away the power of people who decided to use this.
> Everyone who authorized this funding needs to be voted out. If we really care the signal is to take away the power of people who decided to use this.
Yes, and we should continue to nullify convictions for activists fighting this technology on the streets. If they use drones lets shoot them down and nullify those charges too. The court is the final stand and juries are where we the citizens have actual power.
I think my vote might be broken. It keeps not working.
Try power cycling the system
Hah, as if power allows vacuums.
If voting made a difference they wouldn't let us do it.
Stop blaming the victims.
Can you be more specific? Are you claiming that the winner is not actually whoever gets the most votes (e.g. voter fraud, corrupt vote counting), or that someone who would not authorize something like this would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot? Those are the only two scenarios I can think of that would result in the conclusion you're stating.
As far as I can tell, people who claim the former are almost overwhelming the ones voting for the people who are worst about stuff like this. I've honestly never seen anyone claim the latter though, so if that's what you believe, elaborating more would be helpful.
> or that someone who would not authorize something like this would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot?
I'm surprised that you've never encountered this persepective before, it seems a very common one to me.
The first thing I think about is the South Park episode in which the elementary school had to vote for a school mascot and they were given the choice of either "a giant douche" or "a turd sandwich".
The second thing is another South Park episode (circa 2009), for which they actually produced two episodes (and aired one) for the Presidential election between McCain and Obama. Regardless of who would win, the plot was the same: the winner colludes with the loser in a National Treasure-style heist, with the election just being part of the setup.
In the latter example, the message seems to be that it doesn't matter who wins because the same outcomes occur. The former example probably doesn't need explaining.
Anyway, yeah, it would be nice to choose something better than a turd sandwich but when the other option is a giant douche, what is there to do? The way I see it, you either vote for someone who you know stands no chance (Jill Stein, btw), don't vote at all, or vote for the turd sandwich (or the giant douche, if that's your persuasion).
I guess I wasn't clear: I'm aware there are people who think that the choice doesn't really matter. That's very different than people literally being blocked from appearing on the ballots at all (which some people in sibling comments have cited some references to I'll need to look into more), and even that's different from them refusing to count votes and declare a winner if they did actually receive the most votes but don't fit the status quo.
As far as the one real-world example you gave goes, I'm not convinced that someone who feels the need to avoid making definitive statements about whether vaccines cause autism is a great example of someone who wants to effect meaningful change rather than play the politics game, but that's mostly an orthogonal point.
The last person to stand for president who managed to get political momentum and wanted real change in the system was Eugene Debs, and they arrested him.
Two others:
Bernie Sanders (prevented from winning the primary via unelected superdelegates)
Ross Perot (suddenly withdrew under murky circumstances and later claimed his family was threatened)
Both wanted significant change, although they were reformists rather than revolutionaries.
Am I missing something here? Perot was on the ballot in 1992, and he won a bunch of votes. IIRC he was the most successful independent candidate in modern times, by vote count.
Sanders ran an insurgent campaign while denigrating the party, and didn't win more votes. I seriously don't understand the argument that the person with fewer votes should win the nomination, although I am receptive to hearing a coherent articulation thereof. (Superdelegates did not enter the picture until tens of millions of votes were cast, with Sanders trailing by millions of votes.)
Perot dropped out, then reentered the race at the last minute. This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable. He had many more votes before withdrawing.
Sanders was on track to win in 2015 but the media counted all superdelegates for Clinton throughout the campaign, costing him votes in later states where voters didn’t show up, assuming he lost. I guess this isn’t entirely the party’s fault and they did reform the system somewhat afterwards.
> This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable
This was...an eminently reasonable response to Perot's own actions?
> Sanders was on track to win in 2015
Yes, like Clinton was "on track" to win in 2007. "On track to win" is necessarily filtered through a set of lenses that don't mean anything compared to actual votes. He didn't earn the votes, so he lost. There's nothing unfair about that.
We also can't definitively state that the reason we "went off track" and lost was the superdelegate counting. It's certainly a plausible factor, but there are so many factors that go into trying to predict how situations like this will end up playing out that I think it makes sense to start with the baseline assumption that there isn't one direct obvious cause and then try to disprove that if you suspect it's wrong.
Perot’s actions were atypical for him, and should be viewed in light of both his statements about personal threats, which he viewed as credible, AND George H. W. Bush’s deep intelligence connections (including his role as DCI and his connection to illegal and brutal Latin American operations). You also have to remember that Perot was siphoning more votes from Bush than from Clinton. Dirty tricks and general ratfuckery were extremely common in this era.
I think the sibling comment addresses Sanders very well.
Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying that Perot thought there was a credible threat that a sitting vice president was planning to have him assassinated?
He apparently said there was a plot to release compromising (altered) photos of his daughter, just before her wedding, which is very specific. Small potatoes for Bush, who oversaw projects that created death squads.
there was a ton of ratfuckery. clinton's team got debate questions ahead of time from a friendly moderator. debbie wasserman schultz resigned as dnc chair because it was shown that the dnc tried to undermine the sanders campaign in favor of clinton. the clinton campaign was given operational and fiancial control of the dnc prior to the end of the primaries.
The debate thing was clownish, for sure.
My recollection of the DNC linkage was that the Clinton campaign agreed to help the DNC in a set of ways (likely raising money for the DNC and helping Democratic candidates) in exchange for some affordances and Sanders refused to do likewise (which, to his credit is on brand). Is that not accurate? I admit it's been 10 years and there have been a lot of claims made as to why Sanders should have been given the nomination in spite of not winning more votes.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16599036/d...
Brazile gives strong evidence here that the process was rigged against Sanders, inside the DNC. No, votes themselves there not altered, but when the arbiter of the process itself is not neutral, that is completely damning, and honestly, i think that behavior has just continued to this day such that we are seeing fed up Dems on the left revolting against the legacy party, causng it to look like it is about to fracture, and become the mirror image of MAGA.
It portends badly for our country.
The candidate would literally not be allowed to show up on the ballot, and it happens regularly. For an example, look what happened to Butch Ware in the California election recently.
Except there are multiple efforts to make voting more difficult.
lol trump got voted in. i blame the voters - there are not victims here
You think Cop Kamala would've opposed flock? lol, lmao even.
I think memes and political bubbles are making it very hard for people to reason through the actual principles and mechanisms of democratic governance. The reason the system keeps trying to make you vote for people like "Cop Kamala" is that most Americans like the police (https://news.gallup.com/poll/690959/racial-divide-policing-n...); there's no secret set of popular anti-police candidates who some shadowy "they" aren't allowing you to vote for.
accountability? for MY actions?
Unfortunately they may be doubling down.
Apple is rumored to be integrating cameras into AirPods[0] that are cloud connected for "AI." They supposedly won't be able to take "pictures" and "video" but will transmit essentially the same information for AI/Siri.
Between the reaction to Flock and also the Meta Glasses; I'm legitimately surprised that companies aren't reading the Tea leaves here. But, no, I guess everything needs a camera and a cloud feed of that camera's vision now.
PS - And before you say "that is just a rumor" the video file was extracted from Apple's macOS 26.7 RC that showcases how it may work.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods...
Someone should invent something that, used in a confined space, will destroy camera sensors (but not human retinas)
They have the warchest. They’ll buy the politicians. Look how the populist right has failed its primaries so hard.
Could you elaborate? Specifically:
> Look how the populist right has failed its primaries so hard.
From my bubble (we’re all in bubbles), it seems that the populist right are in bed with the technocrat authoritarians, e.g. the Vance-Thiel connection. Losses in primaries would indicate to me that the technocrat authoritarians are not succeeding in purchasing politicians.
Look at all the dodgy business that went on around the Thomas Massie primary.
Elaborate?
Massie is kinda interesting. Because he’s a sort of libertarian who ran as a republican when the right was a bit more united
But it was a strange election. The “establishment” candidate was a no name who refused to do any debates. Rarely ever seem to say much, and when he did, it was mostly just empty parroting of Trumps agenda. Maybe that’s truly what that district wanted.
What was interesting was how Massie seemed slated to win until the very end. Suddenly at the last minute, all sorts of smear ads and all kinds of (honestly very mild) accusations of personal impropriety were being slung left and right and days before the election, polls swap showing Gallrein in the lead, a complete reversal from the months before. A man I’ve never heard speak anything that wasn’t just party lines or something about being a SEAL.
Now I understand that polling isn’t always accurate. But I’ve seen the same exact thing play out nearly the same way in other recent primaries. Feels fishy.
I don't think it's just recent primaries. Our electoral system is heavily influence by the highest bidder and has been this way for a long time. There are always exceptions, like Massie, but the overall trend is that the majority of candidates who are elected at the federal and state level support and are supported by a few big monied interests. This includes the big healthcare industries, the war machine, the pro Israel lobby, etc. It's why we do things like the war in Iran that are vastly unpopular with the general public. And don't do things that are popular like single payer healthcare.
I read it as technocrats Vance-Thiel successfully bought populist MAGA politicians. Those then failed in primaries, because electorate including portion of maga base rejects them. The "buying politicians" step was successful.
Now they need to buy new politicians and will definitely try.
> From my bubble (we’re all in bubbles), it seems that the populist right are in bed with the technocrat authoritarians, e.g. the Vance-Thiel connection.
Interesting, in my bubble “populist” right refers more younger more paleo conservative types who feel betrayed by MAGA. Many of these people hate Thiel and Technocrats as much as my Marxist friends.
I’m gonna guess (and tell me if I’m wrong) the disconnect is that you may be referring to the Trump admin itself which is indeed in bed with Thiel types. Personally I don’t really bother considering them populist anymore. They seem to mostly be interested in enriching their little circle.
Interesting. MAGA no longer being populist feels like a bit of a bleeding edge take. I don’t disagree necessarily, but I’m not going to put any eggs in that basket until there’s a massive swing at the voting booth both this November and in 2028.
Tea Party gave the blueprint for 21st century populist rightwing politics, eschewing much of the baggage of Bush neoconservativism. Then Trump turned the volume up to 12. I’d be surprised to see more novel populist rightwing political dynamics as it feels like the movement is running out of gas after a 16 year run (since 2010 primaries). The disillusionment is at a peak.
The warchest is not enough: the NYC mayoral election and Michigan and Florida Senate (outfunded 16:1) primaries are good examples.
Remember, if your vote didn't matter there wouldn't be so much effort to restrict it!
Interestingly, the populist left is suddenly doing well this cycle, although I don’t know if that success will carry through to the general.
its not you the tech bros are selling it to. its fascist politicians.
Hence, the destruction, the calls for more destruction, and the lack of indictment. Seems like the people feel left, unjustifiably, out of the loop on this one.
Flock should be killed. Axon should be killed. Neither are useful to society in any way.
Let's add Palantir to the list while we're at it.
Agnostic, but I'll throw my prayers in for this one
Flock, sure. Axon, nah. They make the body cams many police wear, and police should absolutely be required to wear them.
Axon makes drones and tasers and all sorts of other stuff too. Body cameras that are not publicly available at the time of recording are useless theater.
The body cameras that seem to make a difference are the ones we all carry in our pockets/purses. Axon cameras are nothing special, and the company is not neutral.
That's a very good point. Redactions and denial of public records requests make the Axon cameras mostly useless for bringing police misconduct to light. They might help once a case has become notorious. But they rarely start the process of accountability.
You have the power to help foment this.
To which shock gloves says "hold my beer." And then "stop resisting!" And "You dropped my beer! That's interference with law-enforcement!"
I'm more pro surveillance and think a lot of people missbehaving in public need it nowadays. But even I think this Flock Quasistasi mass sutveillance stuff is going way to far. It's hard to say I love security but also privacy and the abuse potential or risks are huge as well. I'm torn.
Are there actually more people misbehaving in public? Outside of the covid blip, crime has generally been on a downward trend for decades. Perception certainly is that crime is out of control, but I am not sure it is true.
Yep. And crime has been on a downward trend, even despite the fact that income inequality has been rising. Crime is usually driven by a lack of opportunity; if we ever actually helped out the poor then crime would likely go down even faster.
Or we could just build more prisons I suppose.
Once the data is collected, we can't get it back; it is out there forever. There are other ways to create more security.
Now this has set a bad precedence for the broken window. People will start destroying flock cameras without any consequences.
My tax $ went into buying and setting up those cameras to monitor bad seeds in my neighborhood.
If they or you want mass surveillance then amend the constitution.
How did society ever function when we didn't have technological interventions to spy on everyone?
Is this sarcasm? Hopefully so but if not I assure you Flock is not worried about those bad seeds. They want a panopticon that can help the feds with parallel construction.
Guess most Americans are coming around on those “ridiculous regulations” the EU put in place.
There's already broad support for universal healthcare, cannabis legalization, longer maternity leave, and probably many other progressive policies like enhanced privacy rights.
It has never been about what people actually want though, just what wedge issues can be exploited.
Well, this is a rare case where a grand juries declining an indictment. They usually churn out indictments like a conveyor belt but here they refused. I wonder why?
Life is considered the highest value in the west. So let me ask you this. Is the life of a person less worth than your privacy?
People don't think the invasion of their privacy will 1. save lives, and 2. not take lives.
Faith in governments is not only low, people are pretty sure any power governments have will be abused.
The equation is a little bigger than that, basically.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" - Benjamin Franklin
It's obviously a balance. But if you're asking if say 1,000 lost lives per year is worth it to save the privacy of 350 million people, I would say yes.
Just look at the 10's of thousands of people who die every year so that we have the convenience of driving cars. Not to mention the millions whose health are affected by the air pollution.
That’s even assuming flock saves lives, which it doesn’t. Really the question should be, is giving up privacy worth it if it helps law enforcement solve a crime faster? Still don’t think so.
False dichotomy.
pov: a vatnik tries to understand western values
Your phrasing is weird. In this case, the two are not in conflict but rather symbiotic - this grand jury chose to preserve the life of the person who was being accused of protecting our privacy. There is also a good chance that privacy (evidentiary rules) helped preserve this person's life.
But also you're going to have to elaborate what you mean by life being considered the highest value. Have you seen how we treat one another? We're always looking for rationales as to why someone else's life should be considered unimportant.
"how many kids have to die before you..."
All of them.
This is such a bullshit "think of the children" kind of question. You should be ashamed of yourself.
If you state it in the form of an actual argument that sets up a meaningful comparison, you'll find that it falls apart completely.
Which makes me wonder, why would you ask such a question? None of the answers I can think of are flattering to you.
Property damage is a crime.
I don't object to Flock cameras or any other public cameras. But if I did, I would write to my congress person rather than commit a crime and destroy someone's property.
weak.
There is a juggernaut of surveillance consuming everything in its path, where laws are skirted to install surveillance instruments and due process might as well not exist. And you're talking about "protecting property" and pulling out your little pen and paper to tell your congressperson "i'd like you to try this instead, please"
I'm sorry, no. You don't necessarily have to be the one taking action in the streets, by all means write your letter, but please don't criticize others and pretend that your approach will get you any further than other peoples approach
It was like this in the face of some of the BLM protests. A notable group of people were saying:
> It's terrible that an innocent black man died. But this property destruction has to stop!
when, in reality, the perspective should be much more:
"It's terrible that there is this property destruction. But these innocent deaths have to stop!"
Hyperbole, some may some reading this, "We're talking about license plate readers[1], not people being shot or killed", but let's be real, there's very much a non-zero risk of that happening as a result of Flock-spawned encounters (and to be even more real, the culture from the top, as espoused very directly by its CEO is that false positives are a better outcome, and should be how the system works, rather than a false negative, because, ugh, "false negatives don't advance our mission to a world without crime, thanks to Flock").
[1] And they do far more than recognize license plates.
This is a justification for any kind of vigilanteism. Is this also what you will tell armed righties who decide to round up illegal immigrants and shuttle them across the border to Mexico because the government is ignoring their concerns or is breaking the law because the government ignores you only reserved for your pet causes?
That is not inconsistent with a belief that violence against a person is worse than violence against property. It is odd to compare kidnapping a person with destroying their home security cameras.
Democracy operates at multiple levels. You’ll notice that armed right wingers kidnapping people suspected of being undocumented is a problem confined to the government itself. There’s a reason for that. No-one really cares about immigrants, outside of performative politics, enough to take that personal risk. If they did, we’d find out what society’s reaction is. People are unlikely to look on that as favorably as they do on petty vandalism against an undemocratic rollout of a surveillance network.
There are definitely armed right wingers participating in vigilante immigration enforcement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters
> Three Percenters have joined vigilante patrols along the U.S.–Mexico border
https://azmirror.com/2024/05/23/border-vigilantes-are-blurri...
> On Jan. 20, just three days after Cade’s aid camp visit near Sasabe, another group assembled on a ridge overlooking the Rio Grande in Texas and stood over five seated migrants. Some of those standing were armed with long guns or pistols and one wore tactical gear; they questioned the migrants, all young men or boys, while filming them.
But structurally, doing vigilante immigration enforcement is more difficult than doing vigilante destruction of property. Destroying a security camera takes one person doing one action one time; physically restraining a human being who doesn't want to be restrained and physically transporting them to the US border is a complex logistical operation that you really need the resources of a state-run bureaucracy in order to do. A vigilante group can't replicate it, unless it's so large and well-organized itself that it's a de-facto rival state to the legitimate US government, and this simply doesn't exist in the United States at this time.
Self governance means more that picking people to lord over you.
Writing a letter to your congressman does nothing.
Did Fox News tell you to write that?
> I would write to my congress person rather than commit a crime and destroy someone's property.
Your congressman is having a nice steak dinner with representatives of the company while some poor staffer pastes the generic response in the letter sent back to you.
Or getting their debts paid off by shady right-wing groups
The typical liberal "Bring a strongly-worded letter to a gun fight" approach. Chuck Schumer would be proud.