Flock 摄像头与无处不在的监控：一篇道德批判

Flock cameras are everywhere. They're anti-human (the term is misanthropic), they're anti-freedom (oppressive), and given this site's predominantly US-based audience, they're un-American (unpatriotic).

Flock cameras are everything the conspiracy theorists incoherently yammered on about with microchips in vaccines. And they are the highly visible, hyper-local infrastructure of oppression.

But what if I told you that Flock cameras are only an evolution of that infrastructure? Your Amazon Alexa, your Ring doorbell cameras, the Nest thermostat controlling your furnace, the digital "smart meter" that regulates the electricity to your home, the online banking you use to manage your money, the phone that never leaves your side... even the apps you let run in the background.

Make no mistake about it: Windows, Android, macOS, iOS, quite possibly even the software that runs your WiFi router – they're all willing participants in a global network of extreme, invisibile, ubiquitous surveillance. (The term is panopticon.)

And that network is just as invasive, equally as corrosive, and requiring the same loud, vigorous opposition that Flock has received. Like the cutting down of a Flock camera and smashing it to bits.

But before we get to that, we need to have a baseline for what is right, what is wrong, and what is moral.

Not right, but righteous.

I remind myself daily that a given action can be socially wrong but also morally correct.

For example, it's wrong to destroy public, private, or other people's personal property. But it's also righteous to destroy oppressive infrastructure – no matter who owns it. In my opinion (as an armchair moral philosopher), it's a net good to destroy oppressive infrastructure. That makes it morally correct.

It's also wrong to trespass. Yet civil disobedience – protest for the redress of grievances by peacefully occupying spaces you're not welcome in – is not only good, but morally correct. It's also a right, despite what some untoward legislation may have you believe.

It's not right to threaten people's lives or livelihoods, but it's also righteous to haul a facsimile of a guillotine into your municipal meetings and speak favorably of the French Revolution while they're debating the finer points of welcoming datacenter colonizers or installing Flock cameras.

Without righteousness, we'd be lost as a species. In situations like the above, it's not only righteous to take such actions... I believe that, on some level, there's a moral imperative to do so.

But I can hear some ask how can there be a disconnect between what's right and what's righteous?

Well, in the US at least, we give the ultra wealthy far too much influence over what's considered good and bad. How? Let me count the ways:

1. Owning media outlets
2. Launching advertising campaigns
3. Cloistered, ultrawealthy stooges penning op-eds
4. Government contracts with suppliers of the Military-Industrial complex
5. Corrupt campaign finance and SuperPACs
6. Commodifying your social life

Suffice it to say you can close your eyes and throw a rock in the business world and it will hit bump into some kind of corrupt, collusory practice aimed at degrading decency and warping the public's perception of right and wrong.

A great example would be Donald Trump's unelected, unappointed sycophants occupying a shadow cabinet that's not subject to rules, to regulation, or to your vote.

💡

If you didn't know that that was happening, ask yourself: what's Jared Kushner's (or Natalie Harp's, or Laura Loomer's) official position.

Trick question: they don't have one.

It also seems apparently okay that there's naked corruption happening at every level. Unconstitutional emoluments landing in the twice-convicted Felon-in-Chief President's pocket.

Why do I say this is apparently okay? Because the shills in Congress are not holding any of them to account. None of the coropocrat, lobbyist-funded lawmakers. Not the Republicans and not the Democrats. Therefore it is seemingly okay.

The fact of the matter is the ultra wealthy have weaponized their money over common decency. Epstein, Nintendo, Gates, Sony, General Motors, Bezos, Metallica, Zuckerberg, John Deere, Musk, Musk, Musk, Musk... and these aren't isolated incidents. Nor are they even the choicest of examples. These are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head while writing.

The Criteria for Immorality

I don't see the world in black and white terms. But there are certain things that I would consider categorically morally wrong. If you make decisions that actively harm people – be it physically, emotional, mentally, or invasively – what you're doing is wrong.

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Invasively • adverb
The disregard for an individual's inherent rights, especially the right to privacy.

This harm can be to anyone. Be it individuals, neighborhoods, communities, groups, identities, ethnicities, faiths, nations, or mankind as a whole.

It's also an order of magnitude worse if you have influence, power, authority, or control over people.

Conversely, I'd consider it morally good to take actions that materially improve everyday folk's lives. Things that promote the general welfare, that provide economic opportunities, that weaves the social fabric between neighbors, that educates or edifies, that fosters faith in humanity, or that restores, recognizes, or guarantees the innate rights of all people.

Now that we've defined it, let's examine this criteria's utility:

Flock is bad, mmkay.

Flock cameras are spun as "automatic license plate readers." Indeed, they do just that. They scan license plates as citizens move about their neighborhood, their nation, and the world.

But they're also part of an interconnected, global network of surveillance technology. This network employs facial recognition to track individuals. The company profits from this network, their ubiquity gives them power, and their highly visible nature undermine the trust we should place in our neighbors and our neighborhoods.

"Law enforcement" have access to this private, unelected, inscrutable panopticon network. And they have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with the ability to pry into our daily activity. Some have used this data for personal purposes. One Kansas cop used license plate reader data to stalk his estranged wife.

Harming individuals, undermining communities, engaging in invasion and robbing folks of their right to privacy. All of it for personal or private gain.

Thus, the metrics for immorality we outlined above work on virtually every level when it comes to Flock Security. So I'd call such metrics a good heuristic for sussing out the bad.

And we're all extremely pissed off over it. Good.

We should be.

The Flock in your algorithm.

Facebook and Instagram – indeed, all of Meta's products – use algorithms to mentally and emotionally abuse their users. What I call psychological violence. Their stated goal is to to keep their users addicted to doom scrolling "engaged." They also are a massive, invasive privacy pest.

Zuckerberg has made his entire fortune from mass surveillance. Surveillance that everyone seems to think is okay because it's couched in the euphemism of "advertising."

Make no mistake about it, the dossier Meta (Facebook & Instagram's parent company) has on you? It is – at the very least – equally as invasive and destructive to your privacy as Flock's cameras.

Think about it: Flock's historical log of where you've physically been can be used to infer who you are and maybe even what you believe. But what about the things you search, the posts you like, the websites you visits, the apps you use, the things you share, or the thoughts you post to your timeline?

In the early 2010's, before the modern age of AI, we saw this theory borne out with the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook's hyper-intimate surveillance network was used to sway the 2016 Presidential election in the US and, wide consensus argues, it also interfered with the Brexit referendum in the UK.

Given the above it's clear Meta's existence as a company is, by our above criteria, immoral.

So is X. So is TikTok. So is YouTube.

Their continued existence is mass psychological violence. They are immoral.

They are a crime against mankind.

The Flock in your living room

Manufacturers don't do a good job of hiding it, yet somehow most folks don't understand just how disturbing their "Smart" TV is.

Last year, a piece of malware named Gafgyt turned a bunch of "smart" devices into a botnet. Devices like your TV were pressganged into part of a criminal operation. Think about that. Your device, your internet access, your electricity? Being stolen from you and used by criminals.

That's not all. Residential proxies are used by companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, and others to disguise their AI chatbot's traffic as normal residential traffic. And hundreds of "smart tv" apps are gateways to residential proxies. Your "smart TV" used to feed art and labor theft. Nice. 🔥🔥🔥

But it's not just organized crime syndicates (like cybergangs, NVIDIA, or OpenAI) co-opting your hardware. Most modern TVs are equipped with microphones. Plural. Why?

Not to improve your viewing experience, not so you can use your voice as a means of changing the channel... no. It's so the TV can Shazam the content you're watching (and to listen in on your conversations).

Some TVs take screenshots of what you're watching on your TV a few times a second. They do a Windows Recall-like bit of AI on it, and then sell that information off to feckless, inhuman creatures who pay pennies to profile you and assault you with ads.

If you don't want your license plates read, you shouldn't want your TV spying on you. Let alone have that Alexa sitting in the corner monitoring everything you're doing and manipulating your purchases.

The Flock in your pocket

Unless you've taken fairly dramatic steps to preserve your privacy, your phone is a datasuck. Regardless of the prevailing marketing double-speak, both Apple- and Google-flavored phones are scooping up huge amounts of information about you.

Your location (even more invasive than Flock, mind you), who you're with (with more precision than a stationary surveillance camera), what websites you visit, what apps you use, and for how long.

And the apps on your phone — from companies like 𝕏 (derogatory), OpenAI, Meta, Amazon, Google, or any app that distributes malware advertising. They all have their own nefarious ways of monitoring you.

Some malware records your microphone and exfiltrates your private conversations for cloud-based processing. Some malware takes screenshots of everything you do on your device and sends that info to a third party. Also Windows Recall.

Google is fully aligned with the privacy invasion. I will admit that they do have an interest in curtailing spyware apps. It's partly about public perception... but it's more in service of establishing a monopoly on data collection.

They want to be the sole hoover of your most intimate details. They want to be the only ones with the right to train their AI on your behavioral data. Cause, hey, if we've learned anything off the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it's that there's a ton of money to be made from quelling public dissent and being the throne-bearers of a fascistic regime.

Meanwhile, Apple has made token gestures towards curtailing this kind of malicious behavior. But make no mistake about it: they're also an enabler. Starting right at the beginning, they popularized the idea of smartphone apps. This directly contradicted Steve Jobs who said progressive web apps were the best way to write apps for iOS. (They still are, by the way... despite the artificial limitations of Safari.)

What about the "Do Not Track" option in iOS? Well, Apple's response to the epidemic of privacy invasion can be – at best – described as performative half-measures. TechDirt calls iOS's Do Not Track option "privacy theater." Meaning, just like TSA security at US Airports, it provides the perception of security without doing anything to actually improve security. And, also, much like TSA security, we end up paying through the nose for it.

In fact, this year Firefox removed their Do Not Track feature because, at best, most websites ignored it. At worst, its inclusion gave tracking scripts more information from which they could effectively fingerprint you.

Yes. The Do Not Track feature was actually a net negative on your privacy.

I'm not saying it's the same on iOS. But I'm also not not saying that. Call me cynical but I believe, at best, it's a "feel good" option that does jack-all to actually help.

In other words: it's marketing bullshit.

The Role of the (modern) Copyright Regime

It's important to note the role that copyright law plays in this dark, invasive panopticon. Modern copyright and intellectual property law has been transmogrified into a means of digital oppression.

Now? Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Flock, Disney, Nintendo, Tesla, and John Deere – some of the chief architects of copyright's perversion – are wielding it as the bludgeon it has become. It is widely considered illegal to help someone repair their tractor, their car, their phone, or their game console.

Keep in mind "repair" could mean fixing something that's broken (like disabling the surveillance features of your device), or doing vulnerability research to keep you and your neighbor's data safe.

Regardless of your prosocial intent in violating intellectual property law, copyright has been contorted into a weapon of oppression. Meanwhile, you're prosecuted for "pirating" an album while their friends at Anthropic, OpenAI, and NVIDIA get away with content and labor theft on a scale the world has never before seen.

Rules for thee and not for me.

That's why I'm a strong advocate for foundational, ground-up Intellectual Property reform which considers only the interests of the common citizen and is absolutely hostile to all business interest. And all international treaties on copyright must be declared null and void.

The Solution

Get angry

Look, I get it. Flock is highly visible privacy invasion. It's the kind of thing that we can all immediately identify as bad. It's an icon towards which we can focus our outrage.

The spying and the privacy invasion on the software side of things, though? It's a different story.

In this realm, we're dealing with abstract concepts. The idea that your phone is constantly listening. Where the apps are always screenshotting your behavior and prying into your private conversations. It's much harder to grasp. There's no figurehead – no image – that we can latch on to or call the enemy. We need that icon.

So we should use Flock – the image of physical surveillance – as the figurehead of our rage. We need to get angry. Not just at Flock cameras. The cameras are just the last-mile cog in the infrastructure of digital oppression. Even if we cut down every single camera, the network still exists. With the flip of an ineffable digital switch, the cameras at stop lights can become that same last mile cog.

Just as easily as your smartphone's cameras or its GPS radio are now. And you carry it with you everywhere you go.

It's not enough to destroy Flock's cameras, the enemy is the centralized, cloud-based infrastructure that puts querying our big data within reach of immoral business leaders and even unscrupulous public officials.

Divest

iOS and Android can't be trusted. If you have a Google Pixel device, there's a decent chance you can actually flash a custom operating system on it called GrapheneOS. And it's pretty easy to do.

Unfortunately, it's not accessible to most folks using Android devices. And make no mistake about it: that's the way Google, Verizon, and others want it.

But you can also divest from the closed, private, inscrutable cloud-based systems which are the underpinning to this invasive panopticon. I'm talking Gmail, OneDrive, and iCloud.

But it's more than that. Shopping on Amazon or at Wal-mart. Watching YouTube. Liking a post on Facebook or Instagram. Paying for a Netflix (or Disney+ or HBO) subscription. Mindlessly scrolling through algorithmic feeds. They're all a part of the criminal, coordinated misanthropy which is steering the seats of power towards that dark, inescapable panopticon.

If you don't like Flock cameras, it's time to start opting out of the invisible surveillance apparatus that is quietly powering Flock to begin with.

Exercise your Right to Protest

Get out there. Occupy your neighborhood. Remain peaceful while fighting back. Take control of your digital autonomy. Take ownership over your compute power before it uses you up.

We must all engage in other forms of civil disobedience, too.

Vote

Vote for candidates that understand these issues and who will fight for digital rights. Repeal the DMCA, repeal the CFAA, pull out of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, pass real and muscular right to repair legislation which requires hardware and software vendors to provide mechanisms for disabling software lockouts.

Use Decentralized Alternatives

Turn on airplane mode on your phone unless you absolutely need to make a call. Pick up a Meshtastic radio for every family member. Petition your local government to install Meshtatic repeaters for emergency communication. There's so much that can be done offline.

About the Author:

Gardiner Bryant

I'm an educator, free software advocate, and storyteller. My passion lies in Linux gaming, self-hosting, the fediverse, and the human stories behind the tech we use every day. I believe in privacy, justice, community, and integrity.