{"id":20095,"date":"2026-08-17T20:21:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T20:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=20095"},"modified":"2026-08-17T20:21:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T20:21:32","slug":"what-flocks-defenders-are-missing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=20095","title":{"rendered":"What Flock\u2019s defenders are missing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>That includes stalking. The <em>Washington Post<\/em> recently identified 50 cases in which officers misused systems from Flock and its competitors, often to stalk and harass women. One woman in Wisconsin alleged that her officer ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times. Another woman was being stalked by the chief of police, with nobody to report him to.<\/p>\n<p>Flock has responded with practices aimed at ensuring that officers have a proper cause for every search, like using software to flag abnormal searches and requiring searchers to enter a criminal case number.<\/p>\n<p>The changes come with big loopholes, though. For example, officers can enter bogus case numbers, just as they\u2019ve lied to get around other Flock safeguards. The policies also don\u2019t address some of the broader concerns from civil liberties and privacy groups that Flock is turning what was sold as a crime-stopping tool into a mass surveillance network. These criticisms have led to a growing backlash that already has some cities canceling contracts and some states trying to pass laws to limit or ban license plate readers entirely.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Amid all this, there have recently been several arguments defending Flock: If these cameras help solve crime, what\u2019s the big deal? On a good day they might help catch a kidnapper, and if not, they\u2019re simply snapping pictures of my car that nobody will bother to look at.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Putting aside the unanswered question about the extent to which Flock\u2019s systems actually <em>do<\/em> solve or prevent crime, this all skips over a more important question: What <em>kind<\/em> of crime-fighting system has Flock chosen to build?<strong> <\/strong>Its network works the way it does because of a series of decisions about what information to collect, who can search it, how long to keep it, and how widely to share it. Those decisions set the terms of the bargain between security and civil liberties. Believing that technology should play a role in solving crime should not mean blindly accepting the terms of that bargain.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>#Flocks #defenders #missing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That includes stalking. The Washington Post recently identified 50 cases in which officers misused systems&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20096,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[3810,12944,1949],"class_list":["post-20095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-defenders","tag-flocks","tag-missing"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326.jpg",1200,600,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-300x150.jpg",300,150,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-768x384.jpg",640,320,true],"large":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-1024x512.jpg",640,320,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326.jpg",1200,600,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326.jpg",1200,600,false],"covernews-featured":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-1024x512.jpg",1024,512,true],"covernews-medium":["https:\/\/news678.top\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP26153043646326-540x340.jpg",540,340,true]},"author_info":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?author=1"},"category_info":"<a href=\"https:\/\/news678.top\/?cat=7\" rel=\"category\">Stories<\/a>","tag_info":"Stories","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20095\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news678.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}