The flip side of this laziness is that now, when my elected representatives tell me "these are just license-plate readers that don't record video", I have evidence to show them that's false.
If Flock had done a more competent job of securing their system, it would be harder to demonstrate this in a compelling way. To a technically-inclined person, it's obvious from the get-go that somewhere in Flock's pipeline, video is being recorded and archived, and is therefore vulnerable to misuse. But the more they're allowed to keep the implementation proprietary, the easier this is to sweep under the rug.
Don’t worry, your elected representatives won’t be bothered by trivialities such as facts either way.
They can be recalled and/or replaced, as many have who voted for data centers.
They fought against datacenters. Now they are running for local offices - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/15/datacenters-... - September 15th, 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49375000 (citations)
Only a handful of states have any concept of a recall election.
Indeed, have to wait for elections when recalls aren’t an option. Elections arrive eventually.
Exactly. It helps they also control who can even run for office in any meaningful way. Nobody fights the left harder than Democrats. Good luck finding a representative that is against data centers, flock, Israel, congressional stock bans and pausing and regulating AI, views overwhelming popular with the majority of the actual American public.
My experience is that nobody fights the democrats harder than "leftists".
Funny. In my experience, nobody fights the “leftists” harder than the Democrats. I think the Republicans fight the Democrats harder than anyone else, and aside from the “leftists”, no political group seems to really fight the Republicans.
You are misunderstanding basic political terminology then, if you think it's somehow odd that leftists are against Democrats. Democrats and Republicans are both capitalists and liberal in the classical sense, both of which leftists oppose.
>Good luck finding a representative that is against data centers, flock, Israel, congressional stock bans and pausing and regulating AI, views overwhelming popular with the majority of the actual American public.
That is rapidly becoming Democratic party orthodoxy. At the very least there are a sizable number of Democrats who fit that.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted, but hackernews is very anti-democratic in nature. One thing politicians quickly realize, especially local ones, is that you do have to be accountable to voters at the end of the day. One or two bad stories is enough to sink a local race too, or at minimum require a massive spend to overcome the negativity.
Local politics is where you understand how effective a handful of people can truly be.
Happy to read people are understanding the true power they have collectively instead of as individuals.
Oh yeah, totally agree, the HN zeitgeist is what it is.