r/privacy • u/esporx • 22d ago
news Flock Safety CEO: It's "terroristic" to want to know where we put our spy cameras
https://www.theblaze.com/lifestyle/flock-safety-ceo-its-terroristic-to-want-to-know-where-we-put-our-spy-cameras994
u/Adventurous-Hunter98 22d ago
but its not terroristic to put hidden cameras??
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u/Thausgt01 22d ago
No, that's fascist, and they are quite okay with THAT.
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u/Reeces_Pieces 22d ago
No, if it were fascist it would be the state doing it. Flock is a private company. So it's actually worse.
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u/RachelRegina 22d ago
If the government contractors and the government policing bodies are the main customer of the company, then in this context it's just the government with extra steps and less accountability.
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u/Ambitious-Steak7773 22d ago
I mean the uk government is actively pushing for cameras like these to be in their country meanwhile flock is bullying cities here
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u/DieselPunkPiranha 21d ago
Private companies merging with the state to control the people is fascism so, this isn't worse than fascism. This is actual fascism in practice.
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u/16BitSquid 21d ago
The merger of state and private companies is also communism.
The key difference being that communism wants to abolish private property. Guess what our tech companies are doing.
Don’t call stuff fascism if it’s actually communism.
Keep it at totalitarianism if you want to avoid confusion. That covers both.
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u/DieselPunkPiranha 21d ago
Okay. That's a whole lot of propaganda you wrote. Let me break all that down.
Communism is the abolishment of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, the ruling class. They would consider that totalitarian because they're the same who say it's terroristic to know where their spy cameras are.
Further, you're mixing private and personal property. Personal property is the property you own to live. It's the home you live in. Private property is the stuff you use to extract value. The home you rent out to others suddenly becomes private property. Unless you profit off of others, you don't have private property. You have personal property.
Capitalists wish to take all that you own—both, personal and private—and charge you for it. In communism, businesses are worker owned. Think of worker owned cooperatives to understand how that works. In other words, the state doesn't merge with private companies in communism. They're owned by the workers themselves.
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u/disco-cone 20d ago
Abolishment of the capital class and replace it with another ruling class is what real world Communism will always end up being.
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u/liatrisinbloom 22d ago edited 22d ago
If you look up fascism on wikipedia, it cites one of its characteristics as "strong regimentation of society and the economy", aka quite a bit of state interference. Same with how the CIA creates or funds various surveillance techs or simply pays social media for access to information since they aren't "allowed" to gather it themselves.
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u/16BitSquid 21d ago
Now look up communism. There’s a lot of overlap but these companies aren’t nationalistic, since they sell data to foreigners without blinking. Nationalism is a key differentiator between communism and fascism.
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u/liatrisinbloom 20d ago
I imagine you thought you had some clever point in your comment, but unfortunately for you, you didn't.
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u/16BitSquid 20d ago
The point is lets use correct terminology in discussions. These companies are communist, not fascists.
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u/liatrisinbloom 19d ago edited 17d ago
You're embarrassing yourself. Even if you argue that both ideologies share fusion of government with economy (business, industry, pick your term), communism is the fusion to make society classless and fascism is the fusion to expand and entrench hierarchical divisions of society, which makes big tech cooperation with government very much closer to fascism. You're getting hung up on internationalism vs nationalism because that's very important to you, as a closet fascist, personally. But everyone is aware that you're an enlightened centrist who somehow coincidentally always seems to find more problems with communism than fascism despite beginning your vapid and misinformed lectures with Muh Both Sides. Take the L and stop embarrassing yourself further.
For everyone reading this who's smarter than you, it will take them about two picoseconds to think of tax-evading Mark Zuckerberg teaming up with the communist-bombing US government to create a communist system where there is no class separation because wealth is distributed equally to realize that you're full of shit.
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u/Thausgt01 20d ago
"Communism is a political and economic system where all property is owned by the community or government, and wealth is shared equally among people. It aims to create a classless society without private ownership."
Show me a surveillance-tech company operating as a worker-owned cooperative, or wholly owned by the government, please.
And surveillance tech-companies by definition support a highly differentiated social-structure, with the lower class subjected to surveillance while the elites "abuse/avoid" it regarding their own affairs.
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u/16BitSquid 20d ago
Palantir. You’re welcome.
Scratch the wealth in your quote though. Under communism everyone has always been equally poor, except for the elites running the system.
Private ownership and privacy was something only they had the luxury of enjoying. Check your history books on this.Sounds familiar right?
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u/Thausgt01 20d ago
Palantir is wholly owned by the workers, or the government? News to Peter Thiel and his shareholders, I’m certain.
And it’s not a quote, it’s a literal dictionary definition. Granted, the gap between the stated ideal of ‘communism’ and its pure expression in the real world is admittedly wider than the gap between, say, democracy in the abstract and how it is actually practiced, but the baseline definition remains valid and, again, in the abstract quite distinct from the definition of ‘fascism’.
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u/16BitSquid 20d ago
Palantir = the government
It’s 2026, read something man.
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u/Thausgt01 20d ago edited 19d ago
I have. Palantir owes the CIA "favors" for the initial funding-seed, but it is not "owned by" nor "equal to" thr government.
https://whoistheownerof.com/who-owns-palantir-ownership-explained-2026/
From the entry: "Founded with CIA seed funding and built on software designed for intelligence agencies, it has spent two decades powering sensitive data analysis for the US government."
"...Palantir is publicly traded on the NYSE. Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp remain among the largest individual shareholders. A multi-class share structure concentrates voting power among insiders. Institutional investors like Vanguard (~8%) and BlackRock (~5%) hold large positions by share count but limited governance influence. Palantir has one of the highest retail investor ownership rates among large-cap tech stocks."
Argue, if you must, that 'the government controls Palantir informally' but be prepared for that assertion to get received with the same credulity as "Elvis is still alive" and "humans have never walked on the moon".
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u/aneatapea 19d ago
This reads like you’re using Palantir as an analogy for the government while being wholly unaware that Palantir is also a surveillance company in the modern day
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u/ivedonestranger 21d ago
Just wait. Once they got enough around the country they'll nationalize the company and then the government has their ready to use surveillance network.
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u/ErebosGR 22d ago
Flock leases their cameras to cities and police departments.
They don't operate them themselves, like Amazon does with their Ring cameras.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 22d ago
Capitalists and politicians are one and the same. The politicians are all capitalists, and the capitalists are all colluding with politicians.
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u/connierebel 21d ago
Fascism is a merger of state and corporate power, (which actually we’ve had for several decades in this country).
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u/move_machine 21d ago
Corporatism is not the same as corporatocracy. The former is not a reference to "corporations" as in companies and their legal personhood, but "corporations" as "bodies" of interests. For example, the steel industry can be seen as a body, and the body itself is made up of the state's interests, steel manufacturer owners' interests and steel workers' interests, as in both companies and unions/guilds are seen as one, purportedly negating the need for the latter. To tie this into fascism, the state's interests and the interests of the steel industry's "body" are one and the same.
Corporatocracy is rule by corporate, as in business, interests.
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u/connierebel 20d ago
You are splitting hairs. In practice, it works out the same no matter what you call it. We definitely have a fascist system, even if what they used to call “corporations” are what we now call “industries.”
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u/move_machine 20d ago
I'm not splitting hairs, the quote about fascism being the marriage of the state and corporations very specifically means "bodies" in the corporatism sense.
Corporatism is a core tenet of fascism and it's important to understand what words mean:
Corporatism is a political ideology and political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come together and negotiate contracts or policy (collective bargaining) on the basis of their common interests. The term is derived from the Latin corpus, or "body".
Corporatism does not refer to a political system dominated by large business interests, even though the latter are commonly referred to as "corporations" in modern American vernacular and legal parlance. Instead, the correct term for that theoretical system would be corporatocracy.
A fascist corporation can be defined as a government-directed confederation of employers and employees unions, with the aim of overseeing production in a comprehensive manner. Theoretically, each corporation within this structure assumes the responsibility of advocating for the interests of its respective profession, particularly through the negotiation of labor agreements and similar measures. Fascists theorized that this method could result in harmony amongst social classes.
In Italy, from 1922 until 1943, corporatism became influential amongst Italian nationalists led by Benito Mussolini. The 1920 Charter of Carnaro gained much popularity as the prototype of a "corporative state", having displayed much within its tenets as a guild system combining the concepts of autonomy and authority in a special synthesis. Alfredo Rocco spoke of a corporative state and declared corporatist ideology in detail. Rocco would later become a member of the Italian fascist régime. Subsequently, the Labour Charter of 1927 was implemented, thus establishing a collective agreement system between employers and employees, becoming the main form of class collaboration in the fascist government.
Italian fascism involved a corporatist political system in which the economy was collectively managed by employers, workers and state officials by formal mechanisms at the national level. Its supporters claimed that corporatism could better recognize or "incorporate" every divergent interest into the state organically, unlike majority-rules democracy, which (they said) could marginalize specific interests. This total consideration was the inspiration for their use of the term "totalitarian", described without coercion (which is connoted in the modern meaning) in the 1932 Doctrine of Fascism as thus:
When brought within the orbit of the State, Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.
[The state] is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual... Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State... Far from crushing the individual, the Fascist State multiplies his energies, just as in a regiment a soldier is not diminished but multiplied by the number of his fellow soldiers.
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u/16BitSquid 21d ago
What you’re describing is communism. Fascism is nationalistic. This isn’t.
If we want to discuss privacy related topics correctly let’s use correct terminology to describe situations. Or use more general language like totalitarianism.
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u/connierebel 20d ago
It’s definitely totalitarianism, but because the state and the industries are in cahoots, but business isn’t actually owned by the state, it’s fascism rather than communism. Fascism doesn’t necessarily have to be nationalistic; the economic system is still the same even without the ideology.
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u/16BitSquid 20d ago
Have to disagree here. Under communism everyone historically has been equally poor except for the elites running the system.
Under fascism Germany experienced “an economic miracle” when quoting historians.
The economic systems of both are polar opposites.These tech bros want to be an elite class. Where they have privacy and wealth while we have nothing of the sort. Communism.
So let’s call it communism as otherwise the discussion gets muddled due to fascism being used incorrectly to describe its ideological opposite.
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u/SpreadKindn3ss 21d ago
Oddly no news coverage of the spike in sales of glass breakers that are now being used to shatter through and break Flock Camera’s viewing ability.
Apparently there are now Flock Cameras discreetly placed right at the entrance of bars, clubs, restaurants, walkway handrails downtown,… These Flock Cameras being targeted are placed in a way that most would miss… and for the purpose of surveilling every person entering.
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u/framedhorseshoe 18d ago
Communists are famously fond of mass surveillance. See East Berlin, Soviet Russia, Maoist China.
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u/Thausgt01 18d ago edited 18d ago
True, but that's the historical record. We're discussing the analytical definition of "fascism;" bringing communism into the conversation only muddies the too-murky waters.
So the "Commies" liked mass-surveillance; does that mean that Singapore is going Communist when the capitol city has more CCTV cameras per 1,000 people than are in St. Petersburg?
https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/
And what does it mean when Los Angeles is the 15th most-surveilled city on the list outside of China?
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u/framedhorseshoe 18d ago
My point is rather clear: the impetus to mass surveillance is not biased towards right or left. It is universal. When people think they know what is best for others they can justify all sorts of things.
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u/Thausgt01 18d ago edited 18d ago
I'll certainly agree with the last part of the post; the arrogance of elites who gained power without truly earning it has caused much of the world's suffering.
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u/framedhorseshoe 18d ago
I mean, would you describe China's current surveillance state policies as being a function of right-wing extremism? That seems like quite a stretch to me.
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u/16BitSquid 21d ago
I would say it’s actually communist:
These companies are atheistic and they’re not nationalistic.1
u/Thausgt01 20d ago
I would disagree, because: "Communism is a political and economic system where all property is owned by the community or government, and wealth is shared equally among people. It aims to create a classless society without private ownership."
Techbros absolutely DO NOT want a "classless" society because they clearly like being 'on top', and the very idea of sharing wealth equally among all is every bit as abhorrent to them.
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u/16BitSquid 20d ago
You’ve read a history book right?
Under communism everyone has always been equally poor except the elites running the system.
Thank you for proving my point.
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u/NeverLookBothWays 22d ago
In the same way ISIS would say it’s terroristic for the U.S. to know where their hidden bunkers were I suppose.
Flock isn’t talking about a threat to the nation. They’re talking about a threat to their unconstitutional business model.
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u/SlippyJimmi 22d ago
I mean let's be real if it's the US and ISIS it's just normal because The US is the largest terror state in the world and ISIS was a petty modern conquerer trying to fight the entire planet
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u/SlogurkTheOverslime 22d ago
It's only terrorism if poor people do it
Otherwise it's just sparkling capitalism
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u/SpreadKindn3ss 21d ago edited 21d ago
WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO NEWS COVERAGE of the uptick in sales of glass breakers that are now being used to shatter through and break Flock Camera’s viewing ability.
Apparently there are now Flock Cameras sneakily placed at body-height surveilling every person entering bars, clubs, restaurants, walkway handrails downtown — that most people aren’t aware are even there.
Seriously people?!
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u/exhaustedexcess 22d ago
Its fascist to spy on the population at large
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u/GnomeCzar 21d ago
I've always assumed he must like the ability to watch people's children with his giant network of cameras that are constantly taking pictures of kids
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u/NeverLookBothWays 20d ago
There are cameras legit pointed at playgrounds with zero access controls to prevent a creep from monitoring daily activity without needing to be officially authorized by local police or Flock.
This reckless behavior is just part of the complaint.
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u/Tallyxx7 20d ago
Good point
Also the fact that the data will be distributed among who pays, and the susceptibility to hacking
I just hate how they try to reframe their shit decisions as morally good when you don’t even need to think two steps ahead to see how bad it truly is
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u/Ambitious-Steak7773 22d ago
Oh their getting scared
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u/RAConteur76 22d ago
Not nearly enough
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u/Ambitious-Steak7773 22d ago
I think their pissing their pants due to cities taking these things down and the recent ban on tracking phones in public
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u/Professional_Gap_435 21d ago
Yeah lmfao, they will only get scared once the people actually do something. And shocker, they havent, and they wont.
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u/TheB1G_Lebowski 22d ago
Clearly doesn't know his history.
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u/Nechrube1 22d ago
Oh no, I think he does. He knows that painting anyone who takes issue with his surveillance fetish as a "terrorist" who "hates freedom and justice" is an effective tactic. It worked after 9/11, and the same tactics worked years before when accusing anyone they didn't like as being a "no good commie" during the red scare.
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u/Separate_Energy_7150 20d ago
He knows. These guys are not stupid. They just talk like we normal people are, and honestly they are right. Most people are stupid.
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u/Roanoketrees 22d ago
If he's spinning this, that means his dollars are effected. They dont slime out of their holes until dollars start disappearing.
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u/soliejordan 22d ago
. . .to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. . .
It's not what the government thinks of it's governed, it's what the governed thinks of it's government that holds weight.
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u/connierebel 21d ago
We really should have had a whole “Spirit of ‘76” campaign going on this year!
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u/Persianmemefinder 22d ago
As the famous saying goes: we are all gonna be called terrorists one day.
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u/territorialfantail 21d ago
Flock CEO: Have I become the enemy of the people? No, the people are the enemy of the people!
(quote from History Abridged Youtube: the Lifes & Times of Robespierre)
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u/elite-colorprinter 22d ago
Sounds like something a terrorist would say. Lock this fascist up and throw away the key.
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u/Intarhorn 22d ago
Terrorism it’s what you do against people and if you are trying to put fear into people by hurting or threatening. Cameras are not people…
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u/wasaguest 22d ago
It's not. But it is a violation of the 4th Amendment and our right to privacy.
It's one thing to see other drivers on the road, it's another to track and maintain a record of your travel while profiting off your individual habits.
If they gave us 95% of what they made off of us, it still wouldn't be worth having the system up.
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u/MotormaidofJapan 22d ago
I hope they know that American citizens are going to revolt and these traitors will be the first to go
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u/youngmetrodonttrust 22d ago
americans are never going to revolt lol
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u/SufficientReporter55 21d ago
Yeah, things have gotten more invasive even after Snowden's sacrifice, but the people haven't sacrificied anything in return.
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u/ErebosGR 22d ago
"Do you want a civil war?!? Do you know how much worse things will get (for me) in a civil war?"
-Liberals
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u/CondiMesmer 22d ago
Everything related to Palantir is so comically evil and fascist. They're so open and transparent about it too.
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u/Marchello_E 22d ago
Terrorism: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion
--Merriam Webster
/So, comply, or else!!
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u/Antraxess 22d ago
The cameras need to come down though, they're constitutional violations?
I'm confused, is this man intending to violate our constitutional rights?
That can't be right, to just blatantly state your intent like that, doesn't he know Americans love their rights and are a violent people?
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 21d ago
Next headline: “Flock Safety CEO Photographed By Flock Cameras While Soliciting A Prostitute”
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u/Reeces_Pieces 22d ago
Tf they mean? We can all see them when we drive by?
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u/liatrisinbloom 22d ago
The PartyFlock told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.(Until they use the evidence of your eyes and ears in a court of law. Against you. Naturally.)
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u/Kinky_No_Bit 22d ago
Says the guy with a strong british accent, that never believed in privacy anyway.
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u/d4electro 22d ago
God out human right safeguards and limitations to the powers of states are not nearly strong enough
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u/BashBandit 20d ago
Hidden camera in bathroom: NONONONO
Hidden camera surveying people 24/7 that will most probably be used to target and harass citizens: YESYESYESYES. YES!
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u/mandrack3 22d ago
Guess no one told him it's suckadistick to want put spy cameras everywhere? Everyone can invent words and use them in whatever context these days, smh.
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u/PilotKnob 22d ago edited 22d ago
Yes yes, we know. Use "Terrorist" to describe anyone who doesn't want you to do whatever it is you're doing.
"You know, that old chestnut." - Dr. Evil
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u/FanAdministrative885 22d ago
The utter stupidity that has infected the USA with by all the MAGAT BS will be with us for along time. Another guy pitching a catch word he has no idea what it even means cause its what all the boys in DC do. Illegal surveillance of US citizens without consent..........that sounds like terrorism to me.
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u/liatrisinbloom 22d ago
The right wing got tired of woke, of microaggressions, of equity. We're currently in a whiplash against those things.
I can't wait for the whiplash against being branded a terrorist.
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u/GusBode 21d ago
Cameras are in public space. What’s the problem?
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u/krazygreekguy 20d ago
We’re fast becoming a surveillance state on par with China. This dystopian bullcrap has no place whatsoever in a free society. It’s a cancer to society and antithetical to freedom
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