Ok, another idea.

Admittedly, this is not exactly a low tech solution, but…

One could use an fpv drone with a paint covered sponge duct taped to the front. Once the lens is covered in paint, you can either call the job done or go in closer without worrying about being seen by the camera.

You could use a can of spray paint instead, but then you need some kind of system to activate it, which complicates things.

I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just saying like destroying them isn’t magically going to get rid of them. It’s gonna make them want to double the amount of them.

I’m not saying don’t go out there and do whatever the fuck you want to the cameras that’s your own thing, idgaf what you do to the flock cameras.

Just like going based off of the time I’ve spent on this planet, if you go and destroy shit it’ll just make them want to add more of them and double their efforts to make it so people can’t destroy them.

That’s common sense: If someone kept taking your shovel every night you’d eventually lock up your shovel.

That’s why I brought up shoplifting as a comparison. If you steal over and over again, you’re subjected to the consequence of now having to ask for the object from the employee. If you do an act of violence at an amusement park, they’re more likely to install metal detectors as a consequence.

So the consequential outcome is inevitably more cameras. Yes you may get some areas to not buy anymore but the reality is there will not be a good outcome.

ALRIGHT THAT’S THE CORRECT WAY TO CELEBRATE HALLOWEEN, LETS FUCKING GO.

Need to agree on a common costume, otherwise someone is going to stick out as the one guy wearing a luigi costume and coincidentally all the cameras were destroyed by one dude in a luigi costume.

Having a standard “uniform” tells the authorities who to watch and follow before anything happens.

Better to have a general strategy of “costume you can easily change / remove.”

inb4 Mr Perennial Pumpkin cancels Halloween

I’m dressing as a Flockjack for Halloween! I wouldn’t mind Halloween shifting to be an annual purging by the people of government surveillance.

We could just cut out the middle man and purge the rich.

Just spitballing, we could call it, oh i dunno The Purge ^^TM^^ or something.

(Trivia: on windows, alt+0153 will give you the ™ symbol - it’s ctrl+shift+u+[some hex string I can’t remember] on linux! If you’re on mobile, godspeed.)

Unfortunately, alt codes never worked for me because I don’t have a numpad. L to all my fellow 80% or smaller keyboard users. Works fine on Linux though, the number is 2122.

Alternatively Compose + tm works if you have Compose key enabled. Easier to use than memorizing Unicode code point numbers, for the supported characters at least.

Take back control, people

Flock will be on the alert October 31.

But I have observed you can wear a Halloween costume, including masks, any day starting October 1st without attracting (the bad kind of ) attention or seeming out of place. It’s fun, economical (get more use out of costume) and I encourage everyone to do it as often as feasible. Whether you deflock your neighborhood or just provide cover for those who do, you’ll also be confusing the cameras and messing with the data.

They can “be on the alert” on Halloween and it wouldn’t matter. Not like they can post a cop at all 200,000 of their cameras.

And then its a national lockdown for a month, no elections mind you, while new cameras are installed nation wide.

Practical Democracy

My kinda trick or treat.

Every Day is Halloween - Ministry

Americans rediscover the origins Carnival and Saturnalia.

Guessing you mean:

During these festivities, there was a temporary release from social obligations and hierarchies to make way for the overthrow of order, joking and debauchery.

?

Which is… yeah, the whole origins of “trick-or-treat”. Not sure it quite needs rediscovering.

Why wait 2 months? Just do it whenever it’s convenient.

It’s a night you can freely walk round with a mask on

Looking at ICE, any night is.

I really feel like you could astroturf MAGA rednecks into destroying flock cams with the right propaganda campaign. And probably a bunch of other shit they think they believe in. But there are conservative think tanks already engaged in this type of online propaganda pushing them in the other direction.

All of their media makes up fears that they will be robbed, car jacked, shot, or have to answer to a supervisor of a different gender or race than you.

Bullshit like flock cameras, more police, and ICE are obvious answer when their pea brains are soaked in fear hormones every waking hour.

Just don’t forget to leave any electronic devices at home.

You could just wrap your phone in tinfoil, but there is an exact way that you have to do it. If you have ever been somewhere remote without signal, your phone will nuke it’s battery trying to find signal by increasing the antenna’s power. You have to put it in airplane mode to save your battery. Not matter what you do, even turning your phone off, the antenna will be live sending some signal. The takeaway is that even with a hacky Faraday cage, your phone will try it’s hardest to phone home and could win with a tiny tear in the foil.

Honestly just easier to leave it at home. Or in your vehicle, assuming you didn’t pass by the camera on your way, and leave it sufficiently far enough away. I doubt they can read RFID from cards yet, even at a close enough distance to cut the pole down, but might want to leave those at home as well.

Why is it so hard for people to just leave their electronics at home?

They’ve become so attached that they get anxious without them.

“Oh man, I gotta park far away so it doesn’t read my plates and info from the car… Well I’ve gotta bring my Galaxy watch so it counts all the extra steps I’ll be taking.”

They may well get lost outside without them.

Leaving the electronics at home also seems easier to explain in case you’re stopped, compared to trying to explain why you have a phone wrapped in tinfoil in your pocket.

I also heard that people are focusing on a Spiderman costume in particular. It’ll be popular since the movie just came out and it has full face coverage. You can also order a size larger and wear extra clothes to hide your real body size.

People ask this for every boycott or nationwide movement. The real answer is that more people do it if more time is given.

Theres a reason those facebook posts or tiktoks of “We’re boycotting ___ right now indefinitely!” Never really gain traction. Having one day where normies get to join in too and the data gets a sharp spike in activity is how change is noticed and effective.

“5 flock cameras are cut down nationwide weekly” is much less evocative than “On Halloween, 50,000 flock cameras were taken down in 3 hours” or something

Please do, you’re point for the work all over the world (China may be already lost, or not, depending on how well you do), London likely too. Also, please, sustained (go nuts on Samhain though, keen symbolism) but after Flock, there will be subtler versions, expecting you to lose momentum and just fade. They will be detectable, vulnerable.

Want to know why all the AI (GPU) centres are being built? Deliberately or not they will be used to process camera feeds (why let that compute go to waste).

The tree of freedom is watered in the blood of patriots. Well actually, get the other side to bleed, or preferably convert, good cause and all. The principle of being bloody serious about it when oligarchs (or upper class British) have control still stands. Step forth, the only thing you have to lose is a future of climate fire. And possibly next weeks meals, but history is replete with cases where that paid off (or not, bloody anarchist truth tendencies)

I really, really hope people don’t go out en masse and destroy every single Flock camera that is unconstitutionally filming and profiling them, because it would be a terrible crime to do so. Definitely do not do this people.

Not American. What is flock? Is this like a ring doorbell? Are people suggesting to destroy personal property of their neighbours?

Or is this like some government cameras that are in public spaces filming ?

Government contracted cameras in public spaces.

Wow. Thanks for informing me. Stay safe guys

You’re welcome. I hope it’s a nice day where you are.

Canada. Its generally okay here but we do stupid shit like this too, just way less thank flock. I’m sure it’ll emerge in some form.

Not just cameras. They also have RFID, WiFi, Bluetooth, and probably other crap I don’t remember. The idea is that even if the face rec doesn’t identify you, they still can by probing for credit cards and mobile devices. Disgusting.

Fair point. I was trying to be succinct, not intentionally vague.

Or is this like some government cameras that are in public spaces filming ?

It’s a nationwide network of cameras used by federal, state, and local governments to track and profile people in public. It doesn’t just record, but builds a database of information on every car, license plate, and person that’s filmed, so it’s seen to be very dystopian.

Even worse, the tech gets it wrong and mistaken identity is common, and it ends up endangering people due to the violent methods US police employ. However, it’s privacy concerns that are foremost, because there’s an amendment in our country’s Constitution that should prohibit this kind of privacy violation.

If you’d like to learn more, I made a YT video on the topic recently.

Wild stuff. That is far worse than I thought was going on.

What a scary timeline and I hope the country and sort out this stuff and reform this type activity.

They’re not just cameras. They also log nearby mobile devices. They’ve gone from a few hundred nationwide to over 100,000 in like 2 years.

Uber is going to start implementing the same thing, so mobile Flock that you wouldn’t be able to take down.

Someone could deploy devices that clone signals they hear and replay them at random to poison all the data. But they definitely should not do that.

don’t forget how many of them are just straight up creep cameras, installed pointing at childrens pools, playgrounds, peoples homes, etc.

It’s a revenue stream for Flock. Allowing members of the Epstein Class to view the stream of children.

explains the millions of hits per month on the cameras.

And this is why calling them “license plate readers” is hugely disingenuous, to the point of being straight up propaganda. The term vastly downplays what they can do. They don’t just scan license plates. They scan nearby devices’ Bluetooth and WiFi signals. They scan faces. They scan gait to determine specific limb proportions. They scan tattoos and birthmarks. They scan bumper stickers, dings/dents, etc… If you walk in front of a camera, it will use every trick in the book to try and figure out who you are specifically.

Safety+Creep or Liberty?

Definitely don’t remind people to leave their phones at home or use a Faraday bag to shield their tech.

Indeed. Not having those signals to trace could make it significantly more difficult for law enforcement to identify you, and we certainly don’t want the essential job of law enforcement to be inhibited.

Also people shouldn’t be wearing masks. That would be make them even harder to identify for law enforcement.

People also shouldn’t pair those masks with infrared-blocking sunglasses or goggles. Because the cameras can see in infrared, and will see straight through regular darkened lenses.

Camera can still track you with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, keep that in mind

It can’t if you leave your phone and electronics at home, which you should be anyways.

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/…/260522023127.htm

Only the most dastardly vandals would leave their phone (and all other Bluetooth devices) at home, plugged in charging, auto-lock fully disabled, on their home WiFi, with YouTube set to auto-play a playlist. That would create a watch history that the vandal could later use to prove that they were active at home at the time of the crime. Again, you definitely shouldn’t do that.

I do though

they probably are constitutional, but only because the constitution says nothing about tge government buying data from private companies.

yep, flock exists purely to get around the 4th amendment.

People are downvoting you, but you’re right. It’s one of the reasons why the constitution is weak in the modern era, and in need of massive additions. It just is too vague, too geared towards a world that no longer exists, and hasn’t existed for over 70 years.

they are? I guess the votes haven’t federated yet

They were, but it seems you’re being upvoted now.

9th amendment.

It’s the best amendment, despite being, legally, the most useless.

I would argue that it was meant to cover the kind of situation where a private company is given government permission to gather surveillance data from the citizenry, in exchange for access to said data.

Let’s hope the momentum continues.

Are there good ways to kill a flock camera from a distance?

Could aiming a laser at the lense damage the ccd in the camera?

Please oh please, No, a laser that is powerful enough to destroy the sensor, is more than powerful enough to blind so many people, at the same time even.

Do you happen to know how sensitive these sensors tend to be? Because I honestly don’t, but it’s possible it may not take much…

A witch costume with actual spell casting?!?!

One-watt 532nm green laser or a .22LR bullet. The bullet is probably safer.

That’s fair. Yeah some Halloween costumes are all well and good, but for the rest of the year, it would be great if there’s a way to destroy these cameras without getting caught on camera yourself.

The thought behind the laser idea was just that it might not draw a lot of attention.

If anyone has better ideas, please do share them. My goal is to come up with less risky ways of dismantling them than getting right up there with a ladder. The .22 might be the simplest solution so far.

Seems like a mask and no electronics on you would be a far better solution here. Perhaps even a fancy mask celebrating the great Spooky Season holiday.

Subsonic rounds with a suppressor will help too. ;)

The unlicensed suppressor will get you into just as much trouble as destroying the camera. Plus, suppressors don’t eliminate sound. It’s not like in the movies where you get a quiet “thwip” noise. The suppressor simply takes the gun from “almost guaranteed hearing damage without proper PPE” to “was that a firecracker? Or someone hammering a nail?” Sure, there can be quiet shots with the proper suppressor and ammo. But if you’re bootlegging it to avoid licensing requirements, you’re probably not using the optimal setup.

My setup is just a “snap” and then the bullet whizzing down the range. I love it.

Drop a ballon of paint on the solar panel?

Lens, internet connection, solar panel.

Not sure how many are dependant on solar alone tho.

C’mon, Americans. We know you guys are cool. We believe in you! Shake this shit off!

Now do Ring cams.

U got any good alternatives to recommend? I was given a ring camera as a house warming gift, one of the nice flood light cam ones. Want to get away from ring but also don’t want to buy more crap LOL but I want to add a camera to the rear of my house and refuse to have ring recording me on my patio nor do I want to up my subscription. Keep migrating toward self hosting my camera system as the best solution but fuck I also don’t have the time to go setting that up right now … Rambling here but in search of good advice 🙏

Reolink

Specifically their PoE model. You can record to any ONVIF capable NVR, like Frigate, and restrict access to the feed to only the local network or your own VPN. No sending all your video feeds to a third party that grants the police access.

Or UniFi, Hikvision also Akuvox for doorbells/intercom

Yeah this is always been my problem. I kind of do want CCTV cameras on my house because I do live in a sort of high crime area, but I don’t see why I should have to pay a subscription to a company just so they can train an AI on my camera footage.

I’ve always been a fan of UniFi products. You keep the data, handle it how you will.

ReoLink appears to keeps things off the cloud. But their doorbell cameras do not support rtsp or anything, its something proprietary. But regardless, they appear to use some form of ddns to allow the camera to stream directly to your phone without going through the cloud.

This needs to gain traction…

World wide…

70 days time…

Basically we need to get the word out to not use products from those aligned with Trump and thiel.

So every major company, got it

Basically 🤷

If I were a teenager I would be playing a very different version of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors.

You do realize this is counterintuitive. They’ll just add more and keep upping the anty and then the people will push back again and it’ll go back and forth a bunch of times before eventually either they’re removed or they’re so hardened in security that people are forced to submit.

Not defestism talking, it’s more like the way things work. Like when you shoplift, they add more security over the objects and then eventually you have to ask for that item to be removed under lock by an employee because so many people stole said items so many times.

Or like how there’s metal detectors at certain theme parks and amusement parks because of violence ruining people’s good times.

It’s the same shit in a weird way. Like one does one thing in an act of defiance and then another rule pops up and more social changes are enacted to prevent those things from happening. Same will happen to flock cameras.

The more destruction the more they’ll just add shit to them.

Or a great excuse to declare Martial Law in response to widespread domestic terrorism - and suspend November elections because reasons…

In my shitty MAGA and evangelical suburb, they welcome Flock.

you don’t have to… ;-)

Even in wealthy ‘liberal’ neighborhoods they welcome them as well, because they assume they help protect them from ‘the poors’.

The data probably shows which conservative religious men are meeting other men regularly for sweaty, breathless one on one ‘political discussion’

I would be careful calling this “de-flock” because one of the more prominent groups against Flock is called Deflock and they already get lies from police calling them a terrorist organization despite never advocating for anything like tearing them down. If I really was putting on my tin foil hat, I’d say this was an intentional false flag operation called “de-flock” to further muddy the waters with regards to the Deflock organization. That’s a bit much, though.

Note that I’m not saying folks shouldn’t be participating, I’m only saying a different name for the activity would be prudent.

We had millions in the streets for NO KINGS. Your telling me we can’t get 80k Flock/Axon cameras down.

Tips on how to protect yourselves when you have to, you know.

Masks, camouflage outfits park somewhere far?

Hallowe’en on its own provides a significant strategic advantage. The closeness to elections is a bit sus though

Use Faraday pouches or leave your phone at home this Halloween. Flock cams gather Bluetooth, cellular, and WiFi data as you pass by them

Probably the rock in a shoe trick as well if that’s actually a thing.

It is. If vindicator had gait tracking in 2006, flock absolutely will have it.

or walk like a desert-dwelling fremen, without rythym

It’s part of the same issue - lack of US GDPR.
We need to demand US GDPR because there are other issues - companies like Lexis nexis are buying your stolen data from the dark net and reselling. Facebook pervert glasses, google siphoning our data and others we don’t even know about

We can make all the rules we want, but the rules don’t matter.

Lack of spines in people we expected to enforce our rights got us here. It’s no good making more rules when the ones we have are ignored.

Flock is approved for drones 🤦🏻‍♂️

flocksafety.com/…/flock-aerodome-drone-as-automat…

www.budk.com/…/35975.html

Thankfully capitalists still willing to sell ya the rope to hang them with.

Time to invest in Sawzall and blade manufacturers.

Large bolt cutters are quieter.

Once again Hallowe’en is getting back to its roots.

PS: I wrote a thing in 2024. Sorry, I don’t know how to do intra-lemmy links.

Their solution will just be cameras you can’t see. My mom worked in security 40+ years ago and they were using pin head cameras that were invisible to the human eye.

Destroying them is not going to solve the problem, but I suppose it may be a good start.

That’s why it’s important to go to your city/town council meetings and put the brakes on data centers. Cameras are much less effective if the infrastructure to transmit, process, and store their feeds can’t be built out. Vote out and recall anyone who is supportive. End privatization of utilities so we can yank their electricity too.