The police say that over the weekend, officers found the poles the cameras were mounted on had been cut down and the cameras were gone. Flock cameras are stirring controversy across the country as they compile license plate and other vehicle details in a national database.
  • benderbeerman@lemmy.world
    12·
    2 months ago

    OMG I just saw some white dude running down the road in a maga hat and striped boxers with like 2 dozen flock cameras on cut-off poles slung over his shoulder… straight up interstate toward Vancouver. If you hurry, I’m sure you can catch him!

    • some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 months ago

      FWIW almost no one likes these cameras. It very well could have been a MAGA. I’d imagine certain flavors of MAGAt could very easily be pushed against these installations. Don’t hate, manipulate!

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 months ago

    Quick question, how are these flock cameras generally connected to the Web?

    Is it via Wi-Fi, perhaps 4g radio?

    What frequencies would one need to jam (completely theoretically) to know that the camera wasn’t able to send back video of a person cutting it down.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Mobile broadband. I promise you, if you go around jamming cell towers, you’re going to get the feds on your ass real quick.

      • Promethiel@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        @Cocodapuf@lemmy.world Listen to the above comment!

        This is not amateur hour. Radio waves are not analogous to just DDOS’ing over the Internet. The consequences and effects play out in the physical world.

        You cannot scream into the void without the source being heard.

        Say, I’m writing a story. A work of fiction. Sci-fi, really. Here’s a hypothetical sort of idea that I’m work shopping currently and might as well share:

        Edit:

        The protagonist needs to deal with some surveillance appliances, that use cellular network to communicate, and needs to jam them.

        He goes around, and buys many small solar panels. He wires them to radios that work with Lora/Reticulum/And the Internet. He places them around the local town parks and such, near the surveillance appliances, months before he needs to disrupt them, slowly, unseen.

        Still working on the climax, when he triggers them remotely and they do some cool stuff tho.

        • Bytemeister@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          Your character would get caught. Mainly because electronics boards are absolutely covered in parts made from all over the world. Each one of those parts is batch numbered, if not labeled with a serial number. If your main character wasn’t caught from being the only person with a purchase history that matches the equipment used, they would certainly be caught using forensic analysis of the identifying marks on the devices.

          Your character’s best bet is to realize that the point of sabotage is not to destroy a resource, (complete destruction is a bonus), but to make the opponent either realize that they would need to commit more effort to protect that resource than it is worth, or get your opponent to commit that effort, wasting their time and resources.

          Real life example : Ukraine blew up part of a useful bridge in Crimea with a truck bomb. The bridge has been restored to working order, but now Russia has to check every single truck that goes over the bridge very thoroughly. They’ve limited the maximum size of the trucks as well. The total flow of material over that bridge had been choked, and Russia is doing all the work to choke out their own asset, and they will need to continue to do this for the rest of the conflict, or the bridge will get blown up again.

          So, back to your fictional character… He doesn’t need to devise a sophisticated attack to destroy all the cameras, he just needs to be part of an ongoing uncoordinated campaign of random attacks. Either the camera owners step up hardening their devices, which increases the cost and decreases the number they can deploy, and their usefulness, or, the government entities that use the cameras will need to deploy more police presence to protect the cameras, invalidating the benefit of having the cameras anyway.

          • Promethiel@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 months ago

            You are absolutely correct in all you said! And you also made several assumptions about the character actions; some considered already and some most illuminating! Thank you for improving my fiction!

            Though the goal of the character isn’t at all the destruction of a resource. It is the simple and timely denial of access of the story’s antagonist to their tooling, at a time when they expected it to be working. Like during a bean counting competition at the country fair!

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 months ago

    Nobody stole them… It was just god’s plan for them to go away. Are you questioning god, Sir?