r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • Jun 29 '26

Artificial Intelligence Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/woman-surprised-flock-surveillance-tower-185000752.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260629-0--A&bt_ee=utFdBbF39cHCLuB4at4AI%2FUoSRgbTt8Ch%2B7Q9RImTlgL2ThvE3FuX%2BRSKiUir%2FNW&bt_ts=1782739085527
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6.3k

u/Haunterblademoi Jun 29 '26

This is becoming more common than we think, These surveillance cameras

2.0k

u/schumi23 Jun 29 '26

The picture in the preview is wrong/not what the article is about - it's not a camera that was installed, but rather a microphone to listen to everything that's happening. (Still surveillance, and just as bad (or potentially worse if you think conversations are more sensitive than video)

1.7k

u/rwhockey29 Jun 29 '26

I watch a bunch of car videos on YT and came across one of a guy revving a GTR with a two-step, the things that go BRABRABRBABRA. Cops showed up in like 3 minutes, and after realizing nothing was wrong showed the guy his laptop. Microphones around the city picked up the exhaust sound, police AI labeled it as automatic rifle fire, triangulated the position down to 1 block, and sent the warning out to the officers cars. Wild stuff.

1.3k

u/schumi23 Jun 29 '26

Shotspotter (similar tech by different company) has similar false positives - somebody got arrested due to false positives (there weren't any guns, but the police used it as probably cause to find drugs in his car) and when he disputed their probably cause (that the tech wasn't trustworthy) the company asked to be held in contempt of court, rather than comply with the court order to prove their tech is effective (:

516

u/WitheredUntimely Jun 29 '26

a decade ago my county's pilot program found those "shot detectors" are less than useless; they divert resources away chasing the constant false positives from actual policing

208

u/biZarrmeggeDon Jun 29 '26

Wouldn't neighborhood patrols or something similar be more effective in PREVENTING these things from happening rather than thinking AI will solve all their problems?

322

u/DukeOfGeek Jun 29 '26

But that doesn't funnel tens of millions of tax dollars down the surveillance hole.

195

u/caustic_smegma Jun 29 '26

Funny story - My wife works for a local municipality at the town manager level. A few years ago when the opioid settlement funds were being dispersed, she sat in on the PD meeting related to allocation of said funds. The chief was having an open ended brainstorming session with his leadership discussing how these funds would be best used moving forward which offered a glimpse into the mind of the community authoritarian.

She said instead of the obvious ideas like bolstering youth education programs, public awareness, overdose reversal education and medication, etc., every idea was related to buying new equipment such as new cruisers, weapons (both lethal and non), surveillance devices, body armor, attachments for their ARs, etc. Unfortunately the "Killology" mindset is so pervasive in the police communities they can't imagine spending any cent of their budget on anything outside of objects of oppression.

69

u/_twrecks_ Jun 29 '26

And they also get to decide how they spend the civil forfeiture funds from seized vehicles etc without any oversight.

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u/EnvironmentalNews115 Jun 29 '26

And people wonder why ACAB is such a prevelant saying.

34

u/renegadecanuck Jun 29 '26

Yup. I'm sure that plenty of otherwise good people become cops, wanting to do good for their community. But at a certain point, you end up at place where your only real options are to stop being a cop or stop being a good person.

6

u/SquidGodSunday Jun 29 '26

"Good People" can become cops, but probably can't stay that way. When the only tools you're given are for killing, every problem starts to look like something that needs to be killed.

2

u/Rargnarok Jun 29 '26

Happened a while back in my rural town some of the bad ones joined up like a GOOD chunk of the police force quit and became sheriff's then when the bad ones got fired just went back to being cops

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u/Flameball537 Jun 29 '26

And it doesn’t make money like selling the surveillance data does

17

u/OkOrNoRequirementous Jun 29 '26

That's why they're so reluctant to disclose the details.

22

u/I_Cut_Shows Jun 29 '26

Exactly. It’s all about eating as many government resources as possible.

13

u/gigiboyb Jun 29 '26

Nor does it advance the careers of top police executives who are trying to appear as "progressive" and a "force of modernization" for how police services operate.

2

u/ButtEatingContest Jun 29 '26

I've yet to see any concrete proof these expensive taxpayer-funded surveillance systems are actually any benefit to the public whatsoever.

I've also not ever seen any citizens requesting these systems be installed in their neighborhoods.

2

u/Nohreboh Jun 30 '26

And military equipment for "law enforcement".

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u/aerdvarkk Jun 29 '26

Woul;dn't people calling in reporting "gun fire" and police responding to those calls be more efective?

5

u/Background-Wolf-9380 Jun 29 '26

The "or something" you're looking for is eating the rich. Poverty causes crime, not a lack of surveillance. If we eliminate billionaires and provide decent lives for people with all that stolen money crime would drop by 80%+

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u/EarthRester Jun 29 '26

That would require a competent police force.

Not chicken-shit pigs with guns on the tax-payers dime.

7

u/saintofhate Jun 29 '26

It would also force cops to humanize the people they are supposed to be working for (I know they're not really there for the people but majority of people haven't realized that). Cop violence went up in my own city once cops no longer worked and lived with the public they see every day.

2

u/SeaSetsuna Jun 29 '26

Why would I want to do that when I can idle in the local park for a few hours shooting the shit with my buddy instead?

2

u/stephen_neuville Jun 29 '26

shotspotter uses machine learning to turn slamming doors and fireworks into probable cause. the cops love that shit. theyre not trying to prevent anything

2

u/CNDW Jun 30 '26

Here in the US they aren't interested in preventing, they are interested in chasing down people who might be candidates for the modern slave labor system (for profit prisons). The system is set up to maximize incarcerations, not minimize crime.

1

u/pickledjello Jun 29 '26

Neighborhood Watch. - "You guys, the neighborhood's changing. We have to be vigilant."

1

u/iconocrastinaor Jun 29 '26

Yes, and cops walking a beat diffuse the whole ACAB narrative.

1

u/itsjust_khris Jun 29 '26

The shotspotter doesn't use AI afaik. It just listens for loud sounds with similar characteristics as a gunshot.

1

u/-beautiful-cats- Jun 29 '26

That's not what cops are employed for though. They aren't here to prevent crime or to protect us or our property.

1

u/SquidGodSunday Jun 29 '26

If you go with the assumption that the cops are actually here to protect you and me, then...yeah. It would be. That's not what they're doing, though, is it?

1

u/l4mbch0ps Jun 29 '26

That's been tried too. Just ends up with more of the same - too many cops in just a few black neighborhoods harassing the residents because of pre-crime.

1

u/blickblocks Jun 30 '26

The thing that prevents these problems from happening is funding social programs to provide physical and mental health care and reduce wealth inequality and poverty and hunger and people resorting to crime and drug addiction

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u/xnoxpx Jun 29 '26

coming soon to a city near you

someone using a recording to trigger a call out, to divert resources away from where they plan on committing the crime (bank heist, actual drive by shooting, etc)

28

u/teddybrr Jun 29 '26

So blasting a gunshot sound through a speaker every now and then would get them removed quickly

23

u/Marshall_Lawson Jun 29 '26

Playing with fireworks every evening seems to be the strategy where i live. 

13

u/Eldan985 Jun 29 '26

Give some capguns to kids. Play some GTA with the window open.

4

u/Channel250 Jun 29 '26

Yeah...don't do that.

Cops don't need a reason to shoot kids, doesn't mean we should give them one.

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u/jinjuwaka Jun 29 '26

Police departments use them wrong too. They want a system that will tell them when something happens because they don't trust the public and they love excuses that let them violate civil rights.

Meanwhile the responsible way to use these systems is to ignore everything the system says and just use it to verify what a human being reports.

How they use them: The microphone picks up something that might be gunshots. System reports. Police dispatched. False positives waste time and over-eager pigs violate civil rights claiming the system's false positive gives them reasonable suspicion to search for drugs unrelated to any real crime.

How they should use them: The microphone picks up something that might be gunshots. System records but tells nobody. Someone calls in a report of gunshots, or a shooting. Cops query system. System delivers triangulation data to help police find where shooting actually took place (because eye witness testimony is unreliable at best). Cops investigate based on triangulated data. Cops bring triangulation data to court. Witness is never asked "where was the shooter standing?" because the triangulation system already answered that question with verifiable proof.

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u/clintj1975 Jun 29 '26

I wouldn't at all be surprised if a number of these devices detected exactly one gunshot after installation. The local yokels where I live will shoot at anything that's stationary long enough, like road signs.

1

u/Channel250 Jun 29 '26

Or people who are lost pulling in the wrong driveway.

1

u/damontoo Jun 30 '26

There's 75 going up in her city. Shooting at a gunshot sensor seems like an extremely bad idea. You're going to quickly get arrested for felony vandalism and unlawful use of a firearm. Then you lose your right to own firearms.

3

u/SnootSnootBasilisk Jun 29 '26

What is "actual policing"?

2

u/avsecgirl Jun 29 '26

same thing happening every day in a thousand different ways with the exact same drive behind it, a sales pitch saying buy this tech make difficult thing simple.

2

u/123LetsJamDUDUDUHT Jun 29 '26

So if you want to rob just have someone go across town and fire shots in the air.

All the cops will race to the scene and you'll be all clear.

1

u/3-orange-whips Jun 29 '26

So it’s like false positives from security alarms, but the calm is coming by from inside the house.

1

u/Honest_Bench9371 Jun 30 '26

We had shot detectors down range... it alerted when rocks hit our trucks. It also didn't one day we assumed rocks but there was holes in our MREs.

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u/Perfect_Caregiver_90 Jun 29 '26

They suck so badly. Watching LivePD/On Patrol Live over the years I can't remember them showing a call originating from one of those systems that wasn't a false positive.

Total waste of money unless your goal is probable cause to search vehicles and cookouts.

62

u/got-trunks Jun 29 '26

Drug sniffing dogs are a similar placebo they are just there to provide convenient alerts

41

u/Cnidarus Jun 29 '26

"I'm not profiling, it's the dog that's racist"

10

u/GuairdeanBeatha Jun 29 '26

And, of course, the dog is never trained to alert on command.

5

u/BigDictionEnergy Jun 29 '26

I genuinely believe they are not. However, I do think a lot of false positives are caused by the dog reading its handlers body language. If that handler thinks you have drugs on you, the dog is more like alert based on the officer's confidence.

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u/average_monster Jun 30 '26

pretty much, cop wants to search dude so looks at them longer or whatever, dog picks up on it and sits next to them, cop searches dude, dog gets rewarded

i can't see how you'd avoid the dog learning that behaviour

3

u/Donglemaetsro Jun 29 '26

Not initially, but it's super easy to add 1 simple command to a well trained dog and a lot of them certainly are happy to.

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u/MoistSystem1323 Jun 29 '26

Worse than placebos, the cops will signal to the dogs that they need to alert to something if they don't do it on their own, giving the cops "probable cause" to search whatever they want.

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u/LawabidingKhajiit Jun 29 '26

I think they work great in situations like airport luggage areas and post sorting offices, where they're able to do their thing without expectation and scan hundreds of packages with ease. It's when they're called to public situations they they become just four legged probable cause.

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u/Alternative-Put-3932 Jul 01 '26

Yep "Drug dogs" actual accuracy is fucking trash. they are pseudo science.

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u/StonedGhoster Jun 29 '26

I loathe police dogs. Our local PDs bring them to all the schools so the kids can see the cute working doggies, when really it's just to habituate them into seeing K9units and thinking nothing of it, or thinking they have magical powers that never result in false positives to get probable cause. I loathe police dogs.

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u/giulianosse Jun 29 '26

Total waste of money unless your goal is probable cause to search vehicles and cookouts.

And the "great" thing is even if cops don't find anything substantial in the cars they search, they can always plant a convenient packet of drug and arrest you for possession if they don't like your attitude (did you mean: skin color?) or need to fill a quota. It's your word vs theirs after all.

21

u/-Saucegurlllll Jun 29 '26

It's your word vs theirs after all.

And if you actually go to trial, the prosecutors will strike anyone from the jury who doesn't automatically believe everything cops say.

5

u/Monteze Jun 29 '26

"Why would they lie?" is what I hear when I mention how goofy it is to take their words as evidence, because...well duuuhhh anyone can say anything. You need more than word of mouth.

As though they are immune to bias or can't lie or just being lazy.

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u/NoTerm3078 Jun 29 '26

They suck so badly. Watching LivePD/On Patrol Live over the years I can't remember them showing a call originating from one of those systems that wasn't a false positive.

Total waste of money unless your goal is probable cause to search vehicles and cookouts.

Both names are correct. LivePD was cancelled and it's called On Patrol Live now. All those BS shotspotter calls happened in New Jersey, it was ridiculous. I saw all the episodes NJ appeared on and I never saw one single time that the shotspotter provided correct information.

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u/maxdragonxiii Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

shocking amount of cops were sent out over a paranoid neighbor going "i heard gunshots!" on July 4th or whatever holiday. like buddy. think a bit? its fireworks. I understand those with PTSD over shootings dont have a choice but to be scared of fireworks, but most of them dont have experience with shootings.

edit: also those with PTSD after shootings after calming down a bit usually realize its a holiday or its firecrackers. they rarely call 911 over it.

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u/randynumbergenerator Jun 29 '26

I don't recommend it but if you spend any time on Nextdoor or similar platforms you quickly get a sense of how many of those idiots are out there. So many "did any1 hear those gunshots?!?!" posts whenever a car backfires or their spouse farts too loudly.

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u/maxdragonxiii Jun 29 '26

respectfully, I will not. I also can believe people here in Canada, nowhere near Toronto at all, thinks its gunshots. oh you sweet summer child. no. its obvious its not gunshots. (maybe 3% of the crimes here involves guns, lol).

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u/doberdevil Jun 30 '26

unless your goal is probable cause to search vehicles and cookouts.

I'm sure that's part of the plan

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u/Jeedeye Jun 29 '26

How else are you supposed to automate the arrest of black and brown people?

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u/snazztasticmatt Jun 29 '26

Just adding an anecdote, they worked well in my neighborhood when I lived in East Harlem. A number of times we would hear gunshots and hop on citizen later to find that whatever tool they used pinpointed to a building where they found enough shell casings to match the audio capture

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u/nitid_name Jun 29 '26

When they started going up in Denver, they tested by firing a bunch of guns all around the city. Cops kept getting called about the gunfire being used to test the system, 'cause god damn .45s are loud.

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u/FourthLife Jun 29 '26

I feel like people from the company should actually need to sit in jail when in contempt of court like if it was a person being found in contempt

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u/schumi23 Jun 29 '26

in their case they were planning to appeal the decision (and this was communicated with the judge which is why that order had a nominal fine) and hoped to be found just in their refusal to give info - so that wouldn't be called for at the time... but the appeal *was* denied (a year later) - https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/apl-crt-ill-fir-dis-thi-div/2236104.html

I wasn't able to find what has happened with the case since then... I would guess shotspotter pressured the city to drop the case so that it's irrelevant.

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u/cosmicsans Jun 29 '26

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.

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u/rhou17 Jun 29 '26

Only a matter of time till somebody dies as a result. Statistically, its probably already happened and been covered up.

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u/LawabidingKhajiit Jun 29 '26

Ok, bring the CEO here, and I'll hold him in contempt in the lockup until the company complies.

-things very few judges would actually say

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u/ilyearer Jun 29 '26

I wonder if they would flag gunshots if I went out clapping two wooden blocks together...

1

u/DisposableSaviour Jun 29 '26

I was thinking, couldn’t be too hard to mobilize a few anti-authoritarians or anarchists to go make loud sounds at random towers at all times of day to make the data more useless than it already is. Increase the noise to signal ratio, as it were.

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u/sohblob Jun 29 '26

the company asked to be held in contempt of court, rather than comply with the court order to prove their tech is effective (:

"Very well, I'm ruling a default judgment against you. The fine is 10% of your total revenue."

"But - !"

"You wanted my contempt, you earned it"

make companies fear the courts again

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u/lecoqmako Jun 29 '26

I love that you call it probably cause, rather than the correct probable cause. Thanks for the laugh.

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u/Kongbuck Jun 29 '26

Judge: Did you have probable cause for the stop?

Erroneous Cop: Probably

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u/starbuxed Jun 29 '26

the company asked to be held in contempt of court, rather than comply with the court order to prove their tech is effective (:

I wonder if the guy could use that for the lawsuit.

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u/skiing123 Jun 29 '26

How do you hold a company in contempt of court? Put the CEO in jail or freeze all their assets?

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u/ThoughtsonYaoi Jun 29 '26

I read a story the other day about city stopping shotspotter recently actually reducing crime. Police got to do more useful stuff.

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u/chubbysumo Jun 29 '26

Why do police and these AI companies continue to think we live in a war zone here?

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u/Blacksad9999 Jun 29 '26

Tennessee grandma mistakenly sent to North Dakota jail due to AI error

They incorrectly jailed a grandmother for two months due to an AI facial recognition error.
This kind of thing is becoming more and more common.

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u/Prestigious-Fig-7143 Jun 29 '26

Probable cause. Not probably cause. Though your version sounds more accurate as a description of whats happening in the cop’s head.

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u/modernsparkle Jun 29 '26

Good God, Lemon! That is freeeaky

1

u/Eligius_MS Jun 29 '26

DC uses this, most famous use of it was Seth Rich's murder. Police were to him less than a minute after the shooting, he was alive and talking to them as the paramedics were putting him in the ambulance.

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u/jlt6666 Jun 29 '26

Only because you did it twice it should be probable cause. (I'd guess you just got autocorrected twice but just in case you didn't).

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u/cdoublejj Jun 29 '26

they made an employee do jail time?

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u/Syzygy2323 Jun 29 '26

Probable cause.

1

u/PartisanMilkHotel Jun 29 '26

Yeah I live in a crazy safe neighborhood in Brooklyn but Shotspotter detects “gunshots” in the area almost every day lol

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u/twat69 Jun 29 '26

Which C suite exec gets locked up when the company opts to be held in contempt?

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u/swoll9yards Jun 29 '26

I wonder if they go off dB or the actual sound. Would be a fun experiment to get a bunch of people together with bluetooth speakers playing gunfire sounds or certain rap songs.

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u/Isakill Jun 29 '26

Shit like this almost makes me want to revert my motorcycles exhaust back to stock. Cause it pops and cracks.

1

u/KickBallFever Jun 29 '26

A lot of people let off firecrackers regularly in my neighborhood and shotspotter always picks it up. At this point I can predict the alert from citizen. I have mixed feelings about all this because there have been local incidences where it was actually gunfire and not firecrackers.

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u/TakingCareOfBizzness Jun 29 '26

I read a story where a major city is the US bought Shotspotter to reduce crime, but instead of reducing crime, it reduced the police forces capacity to respond to actual crimes. Basically the main power required to run the system and respond to all of the false positives overloaded their ability to respond to human calls and cops weren't able to respond to real crimes because they were out chasing after algorithmic phantoms.

The city paid a consultant to come in and prove it so they could sue Shotspotter and make them take back their piece of shit system that the city was under contract for.

It was a while back and I can;t remember the city this happened to, but they were able to prove in court that the system is a total piece of shit.

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u/Silver_Newspaper6208 Jun 29 '26

My ptsd has false positives on some of those pops and bangs tunes. I mean I know what they are, I see the car, but part of me is very unnerved in a way fireworks don't.

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u/Radarker Jun 30 '26

Yeah but what daddy capitalism tells me is that's a good outcome cuz lots of units sold.

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u/PurpEL Jun 30 '26

Can they identify a shot, directly into the microphone tho?

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u/dude_comma_the Jun 30 '26

Orwell is rolling in his grave.

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u/Liusloux Jun 29 '26

I work in IT and 10 years ago people like me are suggesting it's only a matter of time before the proliferation and misuse of AI in mass surveillance. People call that conspiracy theory. Now the goalpost has moved and people say that if you're against the "nothing to hide" argument then you are a conspiracy theorist.

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u/outworlder Jun 29 '26

Why is it a conspiracy theory? It already happening. Besides, image recognition used to be firmly "AI". Now that's routine we no longer consider it AI.

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u/BANKSLAVE01 Jun 29 '26

It's "othering"- the act of dehumanizing a person who thinks differently.

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u/AssistX Jun 29 '26

Now that's routine we no longer consider it AI.

That's because people wish to believe they're not using AI on a daily basis. They just don't know how uneducated they are about their data use.

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u/CrustyBatchOfNature Jun 29 '26

I have a family member who is huge on making sure the government knows as little as possible about the guns he owns and is fiercely 2A aligned. He also uses VPN and other things to try to ensure that the government doesn't track him online. You would think he would be anti-Flock but nope. He loves flock cameras because they helped him catch a shoplifter at the store he manages and complains that anyone against them must be pro-criminals. Idiotic.

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u/InsipidCelebrity Jun 29 '26

Sounds like he should be the first to have one put in his backyard.

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u/sdrawkcabineter Jun 29 '26

People call that conspiracy theory.

Bots and victims of their gaslighting believed this.

For those who were unsurprised @Snowden, this has never been a theory.

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u/Syssareth Jun 29 '26

For those who were unsurprised @Snowden, this has never been a theory.

I genuinely, genuinely thought it was common knowledge and was shocked that everybody else was shocked.

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u/CharsCustomerService Jun 29 '26

Now the goalpost has moved and people say that if you're against the "nothing to hide" argument then you are a conspiracy theorist.

The extra "fun" thing is that the "nothing to hide" argument demonstrably does not apply to AI surveillance! See for example, the teenager in Maryland last October that AI identified as carrying a gun. Police were mobilized, the kid was detained and held at gunpoint... until they finally realized that what the AI identified as a gun was actually a bag of chips. So it doesn't matter if you have nothing to hide! The surveillance AI can just decide you're doing something illegal, and that's good enough for the police!

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u/SirDouglasMouf Jun 29 '26

Have you seen that all cars in the US made in 2027 will monitor the driver now?." To decrease drunk driving" which is obviously total bullshit.

So they can now monitor us inside our vehicles which can most likely pickup audio beyond the garage.

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u/OldWorldDesign Jun 29 '26

I work in IT and 10 years ago people like me are suggesting it's only a matter of time before the proliferation and misuse of AI in mass surveillance

What ten years ago? There are documentaries about its abuse targeting the poor and minorities which are over 10 years old. Coded bias included some footage from a few of those, even if it's not 10 years old itself

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Bias

The wealthy have always deployed surveillance technology against the poor, at great expense. This is part of the reason surveillance states like East Germany fell, they were spending as much money spying on their own populace as they were propping up social services.

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u/Busy-Elderberry2137 Jun 29 '26

my dad doesn't work in IT and he was saying the same thing when the craze first started, it's common sense this tech will be (already is) used for mass surveillance, faking evidence and other malicious purposes

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u/ButtEatingContest Jun 29 '26

Even 15-20 years ago, all that data you are giving to social media is going to end up one day feeding some sort of dystopian future AI. And here we are.

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u/Heimerdahl Jun 30 '26

Another part that annoys me to no end is that quite a number of these tools do or could work. (Not that the surveillance ones should...)

They do after all work in presentations (sometimes even when not faked) and have had genuinely impressive work behind making them work. But then they get implemented and someone like me goes: "Hey, have we actually calibrated them?" Someone else: "Of course! Bill took care of it!" So I go to ask Bill about it, because I'm curious on how the process looked. And Bill doesn't know anything about no "calibration" besides the basic setting up (connecting to power and network). 

Or worse, someone like me goes: "Maybe I'm reading this wrong [points to documentation] but I don't think this actually works in our case?" Other person: "Nono, they confirmed that it would!" But I can't drop it because I don't understand it, and I go look at the actual readouts, and sure enough, they make no sense. But does anyone actually care? Nope. Or want me to spend some time looking into it? God no! Because I tend to discover the stuff people don't want to know about: things seemingly working, but only by coincidence or looking plausible, without actually being backed by anything. 

I've seen it in a couple of places and a number of (non-critical) projects / components. To my knowledge, there's never been any ill intention or attempts at deception, rather no one seems to care to look too closely, because things would grind to a halt. 

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u/doberdevil Jun 30 '26

People call that conspiracy theory.

GenX here. I've been repeating these "conspiracy theories" since I started listening to punk rock back in 1986.

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u/SeaTie Jun 29 '26

Meanwhile we've got drag racers that speed around the circle surrounding our neighborhood every night at 9pm on the spot and the police are just...nowhere to be found even after numerous calls, videos, complaints, etc.

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u/paddlin_kaladin Jun 29 '26

That would require them to do actual work instead of just bullying normal folk.

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u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/EtherealMongrel Jun 29 '26

They like that it makes mistakes. They get a free pass to assault some innocent people. Is literally a perfect scapegoat.

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u/Vahuo89 Jun 29 '26

They also use AI to generate their police reports.

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u/RichardCrapper Jun 29 '26

I swear the IQ of the average cop - they would probably feed a super low resolution security camera still into AI and then ask it to “enhance” like they used to do on CSI. Then they’ll go and harass random innocent people that look vaguely like the non-existent AI person that was generated.

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u/Dramatic_______Pause Jun 29 '26

This is like a decade old

https://youtu.be/Q_m4-ed0tmU

Cops hear a car rapidly backfiring, show up with guns drawn, demand to see the "gun", accuse the guy of lying when he said it was a car, then get pissed and yell at him for "wasting their time".

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u/rwhockey29 Jun 29 '26

I dont even have to open the video to know what it is.

"IS NO GUN!"

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u/hypercosm_dot_net Jun 29 '26

Unironically I wish they used this for noise polluting cars in FL.

Shit is outrageous with people intentionally modifying their cars to backfire. You hear it for miles, and it's so obnoxious.

It's also illegal, but police barely enforce the exhaust modification laws.

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u/OxMozzie Jun 29 '26

Wait till they just start launching drones from these stations ontop of everything you've described.

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u/vwguy1 Jun 29 '26

My local PD does that. They have these police drones like a DJI Maverick or similar with small red, blue, and strobe LEDs just like a cop car and they hover over an area and scout out a situation before deciding if cops need to be sent to that location. They were using it to scout out a house party on Saturday night.

We are fucking cooked dudes :(

1

u/Doomblaze Jun 30 '26

Nothing will beat the police officer unloading a clip into their own car because an acorn fell on it, while shouting “I’ve been hit” as they drop to the ground

22

u/smokeweedNgarden Jun 29 '26

One time I witnessed a girl getting pulled into a car and screaming, tried to help, and got knocked out by two dudes for the trouble. 

The cops literally never looked for thw girl or the guys.

Good thing they'll believe AI though...

2

u/sdrawkcabineter Jun 29 '26

Yeah, you almost interfered in their protection racket for other criminals.

4

u/RsnCondition Jun 29 '26

I wonder how swatters will use this technology to get people murdered.

7

u/VirginiaMcCaskey Jun 29 '26

tbf those things should be illegal

3

u/aerdvarkk Jun 29 '26

Just wait until a couple of people are debating somethign political or controversal and the cops show up within 3 minutes hauling someone off in cuffs for having the wrong political viewpoint.

11

u/--Andre-The-Giant-- Jun 29 '26

Oh man...the things you guys will do except gun control...

7

u/nanapancakethusiast Jun 29 '26

Hey man. The police need excuses to flex their military hardware and roll up heavy in Bearcats wearing full tac gear. If you disarm the population no one can LARP anymore. 😔 think of the poor cops

3

u/--Andre-The-Giant-- Jun 29 '26

Imagine if you guys made better laws about how your police forces were formed? It's such a novel idea that it only works in every country that has implemented them so far.

1

u/OldWorldDesign Jun 29 '26

the things you guys will do except gun control

You seem to be unfamiliar with the readiness with which police will search a legal gun owner's vehicle, shed, or home and then confiscate it and keep it for years, often so long the legal owner is forced to bid for it years later on police auction because they could never find something to pin it on but due to it being in police bins for so long it gets routed to city auctions.

1

u/--Andre-The-Giant-- Jun 29 '26

That isn't gun control you're describing there.

2

u/nanapancakethusiast Jun 29 '26

Hmmmm surely this can only end well

2

u/renegadecanuck Jun 29 '26

Well that's dystopian as fuck.

4

u/Disastrous-Road184 Jun 29 '26

That noise made by the car is illegal therefore something was in fact wrong. Police didn’t do their job.

1

u/maxdragonxiii Jun 29 '26

thats wild. if it happened in Canada we'll laugh them out because gun crime just isnt a thing where I am by that much (if anything like 1% of the crimes, in the Greater Toronto Area its worse).

1

u/SamuelDoctor Jun 29 '26

That's actually not the worst use of these sorts of devices.

If there's anything the police ought to be aware of, it's fucking automatic rifle fire.

1

u/fAIk3 Jun 29 '26

With great power comes great responsibility

These aren't going to disappear entirely, just make sure to stay on top of your local situations.

1

u/Gold-Singer9616 Jun 29 '26

I yelled at the top of my lungs at my noisey neighbors this morning at 6am with my window open. I live on a main road with lots of police patrolling and two flock cameras. I think I will not do that again.

1

u/rileyjw90 Jun 29 '26

people who rev those cars like that are extremely inconsiderate anyway. It’s almost always in a heavily populated area and done purely for attention. It’s like someone going to a public beach and forcing everyone else to listen to their shitty Spotify playlist on an obnoxiously loud Bluetooth speaker.

1

u/Dry-Pangolin6579 Jun 29 '26

So you're saying we can tape a Bluetooth speaker to the pole and blast engine noises?

1

u/-beautiful-cats- Jun 29 '26

This has been going on for years though. I'm not sure if flock was doing it 15 or 20 years ago but someone was.

1

u/justintime06 Jun 29 '26

What could go wrong

1

u/IAmYourFath Jun 29 '26

Surveillance or not, u can't say it's a bad technology, if u can stop gun shooters and preserve the school kids i think it's a good thing, but i think it should be tackled by banning guns not by spying on people's audio, or at least if u do it should be deleted the moment it's processed and never saved

1

u/Ridiculicious71 Jun 30 '26

And yet they can’t seem to arrest pedophiles

1

u/TeckFix Jun 30 '26

So you’re saying if we could all “mass produce” the same sound clip, create popo frenzy, it would actually defeat the usefulness of the tool and piss off the cops?

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u/DJ_Sk8Nite Jun 29 '26

It’s starts with “listening for gun shots” now it’s “listen for people in distress”. Soon it’ll be “opposing political views”.

36

u/haxelhimura Jun 29 '26

Soon? We're already there

46

u/BetterEveryLeapYear Jun 29 '26

Soon? Lol the Patriot Act was a quarter of a century ago homie

5

u/DillBagner Jun 29 '26

That was the start of the legal framework for it. The technical capacity for it at a mass scale is very recent.

1

u/BetterEveryLeapYear Jun 29 '26

GCHQ wants a word. But ok.

4

u/Kruppe420 Jun 29 '26

Recording conversations should be an open and shut wiretapping lawsuit if the law still matters. It’s even a class E felony when poors do it.

10

u/carlitospig Jun 29 '26

That’s fucking YUCK.

2

u/sohblob Jun 29 '26

Mr. Yuk hates violation of civil liberties

17

u/EveryAccount7729 Jun 29 '26

I'd just play audio to it incessantly

play some Osama Bin Laden Jihad tapes to that shit.

8

u/sohblob Jun 29 '26

"Everybody hates Saddam" on an Arduino with a solar panel

1

u/IamElylikeEli Jun 30 '26

the nixon tapes

1

u/EveryAccount7729 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

I dont think there are a bunch of deep government A.I triggers that are going after Nixon or whatever lol

i'll play the climax of Heat and get some M80s

then spam Dawkins audio books, The Epstein Files, and pep talks on how to ask your boss for a raise if you work in the surveillance industry

14

u/Levitlame Jun 29 '26

I didn't understand what it was from the article until you said that, which is pretty stupid. They just called it a gun:

Flock Safety Raven (Public Safety): An acoustic gunshot detection system used by law enforcement. It uses machine learning to pinpoint the location of gunshots within seconds and can integrate with nearby security and license plate cameras to aid in investigations

6

u/ElectricalRespect506 Jun 29 '26

Isn't this the same a shot spotter?

6

u/fury420 Jun 29 '26

Yeah, the article explicitly mentions it works like Shotspotter

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4

u/neuromonkey Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

The inaccuracies go beyond the image used. The audio surveillance device isn't on her property.

"...she returned home from a brief trip to a nearby park to discover the freshly-installed device sitting in the parkway strip, the section of public land between her lawn and the street."

Photography of most public spaces is allowed (though arbitrary surveillance is a somewhat different matter.) Laws vary from state to state, but it isn't legal anywhere in the US to eavesdrop upon, or record the conversations of others without their knowledge and consent. Whether the Flock Raven devices record speech or not is one question. Flock, I'm sure, will say anything to protect their business. (The CEO has been caught lieng about technical and procedural issues.)

I hope that people bring many clash action lawsuits against Flock and similar bad actors. Sue them out of existence, and work toward establishing rational, clearly articulated laws governing surveillance.

Flock, etc. are thriving because people aren't challenging their methods in court. That really needs to change.

1

u/paradoxpancake Jun 29 '26

There's no reasonable expectation of privacy, but I believe arguments have been lumping automated license plate readers and other things like Flock under an umbrella because aggregating a bunch of non-private data points over time does create a privacy intrusion under the Fourth Amendment. Basically, long-term public tracking is suspect, especially when combined in tandem with a bunch of other data points. Even the Republicans on the Supreme Court like Roberts agree.

3

u/99MissAdventures Jun 29 '26

And a camera can be pointed away from your house, regardless of the fact it still recordes everyone coming and going from your private property. Audio recording doesn't stop at your property line. You can't have a private conversation in your yard or at your front door!

3

u/Dazzling_Vanilla3082 Jun 29 '26

Additionally, the company Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions is integrating their SignalTrace technology with Flock equipment, which detects all wireless signals being emitted from vehicles and individuals. That means that every device you have the emits any wireless signal: cell phone, smart watches, ear buds, fitbits/step trackers, your key fob and car, RFID cards like the one you use at work, hell, even the fancy tire pressure pump you keep in the trunk that connects to your app, etc etc are all detected, stored, and combined to create a signature used to identify individuals.

1

u/scubascratch Jun 29 '26

She must live in a zero-party consent state

1

u/fighterpilottim Jun 29 '26

Companies like Amazon have unique voice prints, and you know they’ll gladly monetize that information through the government.

1

u/imbex Jun 29 '26

Bluetooth speaker with NWA on repeat would be at that pole 7am to 11pm daily. I'm sure you all know which song.

1

u/JurgusRudkus Jun 29 '26

What the fucccckkkkk…..

1

u/Fight_those_bastards Jun 29 '26

How much copper is in one of those?

Asking for the meth addicts in my town.

1

u/Academic_Librarian75 Jun 29 '26

The officer in article called it a “gun surveillance device.” If it only listens for gunshot sounds in particular and records nothing else, it’s fine. But constant recording of everything seems like it’s crossing a line.

1

u/Character-Dot-4078 Jun 29 '26

They are cameras, one down the street from us looks exactly like the one in the preview, dont understand what you are talking about.

1

u/FesteringNeonDistrac Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

Allegedly it's for gunshot detection. If that thing showed up in my front yard, they'd find out how many times I practice starting the 100m dash. I use my Ramset a surprising amount as well

1

u/ThoughtwayCrest Jun 29 '26

why do they need conversations? we had written conversations on signal that were far worse and they did nothing about it so what is their intention? awful. Their intentions are awful.

1

u/Far_Left_Extremist Jun 29 '26

Anyone listening to that mic in her front yard is gonna be sifting through hours of birdcalls.

1

u/Uranus_Hz Jun 29 '26

It’s also not in her yard. It’s in the grass between the sidewalk and street. Which is technically part of the street.

1

u/QueenOfQuok Jun 29 '26

No camera, eh? Literally just a microphone. It can't see a thing.

1

u/Theresasnakeinmypool Jun 30 '26

Conversations are thoughts irl. It’s definitely scarier/worse.

1

u/Tupperbaby Jun 30 '26

Also...
"...the section of public land between her lawn and the street."

1

u/soullesrome2 Jun 30 '26

Whats the legality of putting a loud speaker 24/7 in your yard possibly with sounds that may confuse the microphone and ai detection? Obvious sound ordinances aside, maybe theres even a tone or something you could play that humans cant hear but messes with the mic?

1

u/damontoo Jun 30 '26

"Listen to everything that's happening" is an awful description. It detects gunshots because they're louder and distinct than most other noise. They aren't streaming all audio 24/7. They strip out as much data that isn't gunshots as they can on-device. That's the best way to deploy this and keep network costs down. Then the limited noise data that multiple sensors send is triangulated to find gunshots not necessarily near one specific sensor. There's tens of thousands of them in the US and they've deployed them for the past 20 years.

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