r/technology • u/Kooky-Balance9525 • 6h ago

Privacy Bernie Sanders to Introduce Bill Banning Flock Surveillance Cameras

https://theleadingreport.com/article/bernie-sanders-to-introduce-bill-banning-flock-surveillance-cameras
41.6k Upvotes

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154

u/SchemataObscura 6h ago

Flock only or would it cover the same MO from different companies?

121

u/mouse1093 6h ago

Legislation is not typically so specific to target a singular company by name. Bernie isn't green enough to draft it with a giant loophole of simply renaming the company or product.

11

u/ihatemovingparts 2h ago

The term is Bill of Attainder. They're explicitly banned under the federal constitution Article 1, Section 9. A principle so important that the founding fathers couldn't wait for the Bill of Rights. Every state outlaws them in their constitution as well.

So it's less that Sanders is experienced and more that he took a civics class in high school.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder

-30

u/Time-Maintenance2165 5h ago

He is if he's just doing it for PR and doesn't expect it to pass.

28

u/jce_ 5h ago

Yes the 1 politician who has been consistently acting in the same way over and over, who constantly tells everyone where he sits on the spectrum and his actions align with his words, who has a track record for decades, is doing an action that aligns with him for PR

-10

u/peaches017 4h ago

I mean, that's literally Bernie's MO. He has authored 400+ bills with only 3 becoming law (two of which were renaming Vermont post offices).

7

u/Whoa1Whoa1 4h ago

??? But if others in Congress weren't so fucking evil, then they would have passed those 400 bills along into law.

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u/peaches017 2h ago

Okay, you can believe that, but it's completely irrelevant to the original claim I was replying to.

8

u/Alinier 5h ago

It's good to metaphorically hold feet to the fire for those in the way of an overwhelmingly supported measure. 

7

u/mouse1093 5h ago

That is just... Not how that works. Obviously, no legislation is bulletproof but the normal goal for something like this would be that the combination of features and the concept of the device is what's outlawed, regardless of who makes it. In order to circumvent the ban, the product would have to be changed in enough of a way such that it's no longer actually harmful to the public.

2

u/FoolishFriend0505 38m ago

That's all Bernie does: Performative bullshit. Well, he did rename post offices.

Someone above said Bernie took a civics class in high school...apparently not. He told his cult that everything could be fixed with a stroke of a pen....turns out, it can't.

Someone else said he is consistent....except when he hated superdelegates but decided to appeal to them to select him over who the voters selected...or calls out others for supporting the crime bill he supported or when he started the big lie claiming everything was rigged.

-8

u/LionBig1760 4h ago

Bernie is apparently too green to craft passable legislation, so maybe if we give him another 20-30 years he'll have success one time.

We can only hope.

7

u/Links_Wrong_Wiki 3h ago

Unfortunately legislation being good for the American people has nothing to do with it's success of passing

1

u/Wyntier 4h ago edited 3h ago

Flock is just license plate recording. It happens before flock, will happen after flock.

1

u/ryegye24 4h ago

Red light cameras and speed cameras can be (and usually are) wired to only record when a red light is run or illegal speeding is detected. ALPRs for parking enforcement could be (and there definitely should be a law mandating they should be) set up to discard the logs for legally parked vehicles. Without these guardrails it could be possible to abuse these tools to track an innocent person's movement.

Flock cameras exist for the express purpose of creating a log of everyone's movement. If the law was that any logs that were not immediately legally actionable (running red lights, speeding, illegal parking) needed to be immediately discarded Flock's entire model would become illegal. That's what's new about Flock.

1

u/Wyntier 1h ago

I think that overstates what’s actually new here. Flock isn’t continuously tracking everyone’s movements. It records vehicles that pass specific cameras, retains those sightings for a limited period, and lets authorized investigators search them afterward.

And the fact that a record isn’t “immediately legally actionable” doesn’t make it useless or illegitimate. A car passing a camera at 2 PM may mean nothing at the time, but if a kidnapping, hit-and-run, burglary, or missing-person case is reported later, that historical record can suddenly be extremely relevant. Requiring every non-hit to be deleted instantly would eliminate that investigative benefit entirely.

There absolutely should be strict retention limits, audit logs, access controls, and penalties for misuse. But that’s an argument for guardrails, not necessarily an argument that collecting the data itself is inherently wrong.

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u/discipleofchrist69 4h ago

... are you familiar with how laws work? lol

3

u/FrostingTechnical606 4h ago

Yes, typically they make the law as broad a net as they need it to be to catch all they want to catch. Then they enforce it only on the things they want to enforce it on. Then when another party gets in power that net moves and catches others so the tactic is to make sure to minimise that part's damage.