This is really fascinating.

Countries Lumpers lets crime get out of hand for the purpose of installing surveillance.

But they don't install it where it will help crime, no no they put it in suburbia. Why not put these where the crime is?

Officer allegedly used Flock license plate cameras to track boyfriend's ex-wife: Police chief

There is a neighborhood in a very wealthy area in Los Altos that installed their own "system" and the police need to request access to the cameras recordings.

They're now selling swarms of drones to go with the cameras.

I have seen the drones in action instead of a police car or helicopter chase, this is a good use IMO.
I doubt they are using drones to just watch people without some cause, it would cost too much money.

#5 | POSTED BY LAMPLIGHTER

Your link isn't a swarm of drones. So NOPE.

Flock, Mass Surveillance, and the Collapse of Crime

Joshua Reed Eakle says that "in America we believe that liberty is more important than security." Do we? This isn't a statement I find meaningful. We clearly don't maximize liberty in every possible situation, but rather usually consider tradeoffs. Most of us would be happy for the police to detain us for a few minutes in order not to be hacked to death. And nobody says get rid of jails because, even if we are sure most people there are guilty, some innocent person is surely being locked up somewhere, and we must always choose liberty over safety. What is relevant is what kind and how much liberty and security we're talking about.

That is to say that there's no way to avoid cost-benefit analysis in situations like this. They pretend this is about larger principles, but it seems that anti-Flock advocates are going based on their own mood affiliation, which has a bias toward the status quo and against new forms of technology. We barely register large, multiyear drops in the murder rate, even though they cumulatively represent thousands of lives saved. At the same time, a couple dozen stalking cases facilitated by Flock will become national news, and while regular victims of crime are collapsed into unanimated numbers, those victimized in a novel way get the complexities of their inner emotional lives put on full display. When we're dealing with status quo problems, we express harms in terms of statistics, while moral panics are written about in the language of poetry.

I don't want to live in a surveillance state at all," said member Jordana Bloom.

Why? Its scary statement ... "surveillance state" ... oooooh scary like communists!

But you allow your phone to track your every move..... we do so willingly for better ads.

Wouldn't stopping crime, lowering crime, be a better reason to track your every move?

Here's another PRO flock article.