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You Know About Flock Cameras, Meet Nema Nodes: They Turn Streetlights Into A Surveillance Network
(www.gadgetreview.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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So you're saying it's basically USB? A camera can be plugged into a USB socket, should we be scared of them?
If your city council wants to turn your city into a surveillance state, they'll do it regardless of which technology enables it. Pay attention to local politics, elect people opposed to surveillance and those who would support laws preventing it. Don't get paranoid about open standards that make your city more efficient.
I don't think paranoia about the connection standard was the goal here. It seems more likely to me they wanted to increase awareness of the fact there are FAR less obvious (and absurdly easy) ways for governments to spy on citizens than Flock's installations.
Even if the goals of the government for installing such hardware are above board, they aren't known for being the most mindful of security so these systems can often be hacked and abused by malicious entities. It's something that really does need well thought out limitations set.
The issue is that they can do it without anyone knowing, it has no approval or denial process involved. You hear about flock now, but this is a new technology that most aren't looking at and isn't regulated.
If there was a hidden, little-discussed USB port at the top of every streetlight, that might be a cause for concern, yes
99% of just about everything is hidden and little-discussed by this metric. That doesn't make it concerning, it just makes it information you don't know yet.
It's concerning for many of the reasons that Flock cameras are concerning. If you don't understand this, I don't know how you ended up on this community
We should push back against all of it
It's not even USB. All data connections are wireless and either through a phone connection or a Wi-Fi mesh network (and calling it a mesh is generous, in practice this will be a dodgy daisy chain of connections running down the road).
That's fine for updating the timing of lights to match sunset, but it sucks for data heavy applications like video surveillance.