"Axon is Flock but worse" will be the next big fight as police departments are pulling a fast one and saying "we got rid of Flock" by switching to Axon.

Axon (among others) has operations hubs for data fusion centers and other platforms for police like Evidence.com, so it’s an easy sell to departments.

Communities are starting to pivot to the wider issue, but a reason that this issue found purpose is that Flock is a more evocative target than “ALPRs”. I think it wouldn’t be a bad thing if “Flock” becomes the generic name.

I live near Durango, CO and this happened last week.

Axon is the default for the on-body camera system. The barrage of cop tv shows use them as part of their promotional relationships. Flock decided to not attack their market, in stead go for the adjacent space.

This happened in a St. Louis suburb recently.

Bonus points: https://fccid.io/X4GS06009/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-8...

"Page 17" in the document shows a spicy little chip.

https://www.quectel.com/product/kg100s-amazon-sidewalk-modul...

Axon not only includes a cell modem... they're on Amazon Sidewalk, baby.

https://coverage.sidewalk.amazon/

That's very interesting, and I've not seen it pointed out anywhere else. Have you?

While highly unprofessional, the "Who's a good boy?!" status message makes me like them a tiny bit more

For those unaware, embedded devices usually have a "watchdog" timer that needs to be periodically reset ("fed"/"pet"/"kicked") when everything is operating correctly or else the device will reboot as a fail-safe.

This log message probably indicates when they're resetting the watchdog timer.

While Axon's system should be under the microscope too I don't think they have the nation wide cloud that Flock is doing and requires specific agreements to share data. Maybe that is getting abused to form a national database but I imagine it was designed so say a county sheriff department and local city PDs could share resources. I don't think most people are that concerned about things like that (though they should be), it is the nation wide surveillance that creeps people out. That and the stalking of course and both systems can be used for that.

Axon and Motorola also do a lot more to court state agencies who have grand plans of monitoring some highway corridor so their buddies at DEA/CPB/SMD/whatever can tip them off and their "drug task force" can make a newsworthy bust.

Flock by contrast courts local PDs who will catch a package thief or two but they really just want to have the drag net at their finger tips so that when some more equal animal's cat gets stolen they can walk back in time and figure out the short list of who could've done it.

Reminds me why a friend picked RCN over Comcast for his Internet. “They’re the more incompetent evil company.”

Also, a reminder that ALPR abuse predates Flock. Flock has just made it more visible. About a decade ago I personally heard a cop let it slip that he had plate-stalked someone for the crime of saying mean things about his department on Twitter. The difference today is that more departments have access to these kinds of tools.

Fixed ALPRs aren't the only privacy problem, either. Many tow trucks have roving ALPRs that feed into big databases. The notion is that it helps them repossess cars that might be garaged at home. That data, however, is for sale to third parties.

I work in a different embedded space but our keepalive heartbeat messages have a payload of <3

Man, ours is just '\0'.

>“Who’s a good boy?!”

That a good watchdog kick message NGL.

Cisco sells IP connected high def cameras. I was happy to stop working on that project, because it was clear that the target market was public facial recognition (targeted advertisement in malls, and other useless/creepy things).