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Is there anything I as an individual can do to push back against Flock cameras or broader mass surveillance in the US?
Reading 1984 as a sixth grader I was horrified by Big Brother and the authoritarianism illustrated in the book and always felt that if those things came to life it would be right and imperative to fight against them, and every year I’ve seen more and more authoritarian overreach that disturbs me.
I do not vote as I believe it’s a massive waste of time at best. I am not fond of solutions such as “call your congressperson” or “show up to your local council and demand change” because these are similarly time wasting activities in my opinion.
I am frustrated by the acceptance of the public for these technologies with terrible implications for the present and the future. I don’t want to break the law in order to fight them and don’t want to become more of a target, which seems inevitable if you want to speak against it publicly. I feel very disappointed in people around me and the modern west when I realize the state of mass surveillance today.
Flock's strategy specifically revolves around grooming political candidates and running through executive branch work, so there's not a ton you can do on that side short of making their candidate contributions more visible and highlighting some of the company's sketchier spends. Rossman's been doing that a bit, albeit to mixed result, but that's a lot better than most. And destroying the physical cameras is less than useless; in some cases Flock ends up paid twice, but regardless they've got to have a replacement budget, just because building deployed cameras to be resilient is a loser's game.
The more... esoteric versions require looking at past successes, and with the caveat that I'm operating solely from public discussion:
Baltimore has a massive distributed camera and recording system, first in its class, combined with a massive shotspotter deployment, and... it's completely useless, and that's a policy decision. Video isn't stored for long to start with, the camera selection went heavy on PTZs and then set them up in an intentionally unfocused (literally and figuratively) sense, the privacy and compliance training means no one who's actually trying to solve serious crimes can get into the system, a few dozen other problems. Downside: it's only a past-facing decision: making it into the privacy nightmare opponents paint it as is a sub-million USD and sub-year project. But you can't undelete data (in this case). But you're stuck with Baltimore mayors to do it.
Carpenter and progeny, and courts willing to draw it to its most maximal ends. It's an ad-hoc general free-floating right to privacy, it's only really useful for the guilty, even its successful cases have a 'first hit's free' problem, and it's not exactly principled, but it covers any privacy question you want so long as it's nontrivial, and it has some bipartisan support.
Sure, but on the limit some level of destruction will work. Will your city council replace the cameras 4 times each? 10? At some point it will be untenable. Flock is happy to replace the cameras and bill the city according to the "Camera Protection Plan". The city has some limit on what they will spend.
At the limit where the city will go bankrupt from it sure, but below that level you're unlikely to convince the city not to put cameras to protect from crime by going on a property crime spree. Your actions will likely justify putting more cameras to try and catch you vandalizing the cameras.
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