Being against mass-surveillance should be a bipartisan struggle. Given our political polarization, each side is highly distrustful about what "the other side" will do with mass amounts of data about their side. This should be a cause that unites everyone.
We do have some bipartisan initiatives, it’s just that they are not news worthy. Take for example the initial push for banning TikTok. It had unprecedented bipartisan support.
All the evil shit (war, funding genocide, mass surveillance, privacy invasions or curtailing free speech in the name of protecting children) nearly always has bipartisan support.
Having binged on a bunch of modern British detective fiction in the last year or so - Rhys Dylan as an example. The reliance on cameras in society, yes it is fiction, but there is also truth is an interesting thing in terms of what a society accepts.
Why does it matter his political party? Many otherwise good people have fallen for a con of some sort at least once at some point it their life.
The man has some time and uses it in a non destructive manner to do what he thinks will help his community rather than just posting nonsense online, that in itself is commendable . I find the article trying to forment division by naming him a Republican...who cares, human privacy and the imbalance of power is something every American and even non Americans should care about.
A persons political persuasion can tell you something about their values, and the policies they would prefer enacted for a given topic.
Republicans AFAIK have not been on the crusade to end mass surveillance or promote privacy laws to regulate big tech, so seeing a republican man stand up for this right might help you understand that the sentiment of the party is not unanimous.
You don't seem to realize that a cornerstone of American conservatism is limited government and the promotion of human freedom. His antipathy towards unnecessary state surveillance of individuals who have committed no wrongs seems entirely appropriate for a Republican.
“ The man has some time and uses it in a non destructive manner to do what he thinks will help his community rather than just posting nonsense online “
Because the media in the USA gives a good deal more credence and puts more importance on conservatives. They do the same for rural people. That's probably a reflection of our politics.
Because the modern GOP is itself a con.
Its great that he is protesting flock cameras but he should also be protesting his own party, which is engaged in unprecedented corruption, murders american civilians, attacks democracy, and seeks to disenfranchise our daughters and wives.
I cannot stand it that disingenous and ignorant people pretend this isn't the case, you can all go to hell.
> $300,000 for architecture, engineering, and environmental reviews, plus $150,000 for construction management. Multiple rounds of public feedback, commission reviews, and administrative paperwork required extensive paid city staff time.
WTF this is it! This is the solution. Every single Flock camera should be required to have an environmental review and multiple rounds of public feedback!
> “We’re private citizens; we don’t need this stuff,” Gunn told CL. “And they’re reporting now that the Chinese have already picked up all of our voter registrations. They’re picking up more information on us, on how we live, and you know there’s a reason for it.”
This is the kind of comment that makes me think that a person is old - and therefore has had their values shaped by the concerns of the mid-20th-century - gets most of their information about the world via cable news, and isn't thinking very carefully about what is and is not likely to be a problem in their life. My dad, of similar age to this person, constantly gets angry about the Chinese getting some kind of information about ordinary American citizens, while being unable to clearly articulate exactly what this information is and why specifically this is a problem.
Leverage. Some of those people will turn out to be significant political figures.
We live in an information-driven world. Our economy is driven by information. Geopolitics is driven by information. War is driven by information.
An historically adversarial competitor country that is able to slowly amass lengthy dossiers on our public figures private lives will have an asymmetrical advantage in any geopolitical engagement. This doesn't even require scandal, the traditional leverage. Just the ability to see a few of someone's cards makes knowing what move they will make next, and what bluffs to call, significantly easier.
For the record, I don't think our own government, or any other, should have this information either. As was demonstrated back in 2015 by CA, this type of information can be used to effectively manipulate and influence people's decisions.
Curious if hoisting an Ipad on the end of his pool skimmer that just showed a video of random cars and their license plates, causing the camera to register a bunch of false positives?
If done obliquely enough... e.g., just making a tracker and having the ability for people to report broken cameras, you're probably fine in theory. In practice, this is a litigious society, so you'd want to build this anonymously.
In a country where not attending a protest gets you 30 years in prison, and attending a protest where you set off a firework gets you 70, and where a government thug can pin you down and execute you on the sidewalk, and get recognized for his heroism and bravery... you tell me.
Hey if anything we should keep protesting. You should read about what the British did to Indians protesting for independence. Protest in spite of consequences is a singular act of bravery. The cops want people to give in.
The United States, the first two in Texas and the latter in Minnesota.
In that bit, an unarmed man was murdered, the killers scatter like roaches, the federal police is covering for them, while actively preventing the state from giving the guilty a fair trial and a swift sentencing and imprisonment.
(What they did is a state crime with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, and also a federal crime that carries the death penalty.)
Anyone with eyes can see that those killers are guilty. You don't need to split hairs on that, you can look at the video yourself.
As anyone else, though, they constitutionally deserve a fair trial where the onus is on the state to prove that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, before they can be sentenced. My assessment of their guilt has little bearing on the state's ability to do that.
Proving that guilt would be trivial if the federal government weren't actively complicit, by preventing such a trial from taking place. There's no need to cover for it, it's behavior is unconscionable and treasonous.
In the US, someone got 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. The zines were used to charge the person as a terrorist. Here are the zines that were moved:
i've said this before on Hn but I called the sheriff to discuss these in our neighborhood and asked if they could search for our whereabouts and he said "only if there's an active crime for your plate", so I said "what if the governor imposes a 'bird flu curfew'?" and after some kerfuffling said in theory yes they could then use it to track offendors.
The other issue is that the company obviously has access to the streams nationwide, and they likely don't have the same oversight that a local police might have to document when/how they are used, if they have any oversight at all.
Why “republican” man?
Editorials like this piss me off. Just say “Man from Florida”. Why bring party politics into an article that isn’t about party lines?
I was gonna try to pull up the data to prove you wrong, but then the data disagreed with me, what the heck! what do I do now! ad hominem, I guess: uhhh your penis looks dry!
If there was regular prejudice between 76 vs 77 yr olds, then yes. It’s similar to saying “white/black man”. It adds no value beyond sparking a prejudicial emotional response.
It’s CNN/Fox news style sensationalist entertainment writing rather than news/journalism.
The developments of political parties’ positions are themselves newsworthy, as well as the ways in which writers attempt to frame them. You’re right to notice it.
Most of the people very against Flock are more left wing and I feel like another left wing protest about it isn't particularly engaging. I'm sure putting Republican there gets way more interest as Republicans turning against them is necessary to have anything actually happen.
If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.
Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.
So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.
Better to say the current US government is run by authoritarians, doing everything they can to convert the US government into an authoritarian one. And they've gotten way farther than they should.
We're a backsliding democracy, and risk backsliding into fully consolidated autocracy, unless we mount effective resistance.
But this isn’t new. Government overreach has been a long recurring pattern throughout US history literally since we were born as a country. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, et al, exercised powers and authoritarian tactics that shocked their contemporaries just as much as Trump is doing today. Not using history as an excuse, just to point out that this is a feature of US politics not a bug. We have managed to remain a free society for 250 years despite all the horrible, anti democratic sometimes barbaric things our leaders did, because 1) every generation got organized to defend civil liberties and 2) our “system” was cynically and explicitly engineered with competing centers of power, among other things, under the assumption that every single leader would eventually try to grab power.
Eh, I think there's a kind of survivorship bias in this POV: "We've survived authoritarians in the past, so the system working as intended, everything is fine".
I don't think things are working as intended, even if they've sort of worked by accident so far.
I think it's better to look at more contemporary backsliding democracies and fascist regimes from the 20th century onward to really understand our trajectory. Russia (Putin), Hungary (Orban), India (Modi), Germany (Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (Franco), etc.
The American Right has trying to Orbanify the country by explicitly copying his model. Hungary was able to eventually oust him, dealing a blow to that whole project, but time will tell whether they will be able to keep him and his allies out for good. Our wanna-be Orbans are still there.
The corruption we're seeing in the Trump admin has no precedent in American history, and is the kind of large scale open corruption only seen in autocratic regimes or failed states.
The founders envisioned that branches would jealously guard their power, but congress right now is essentially a duma. The judiciary is still mostly standing, but the Trump admin is defying court orders at an alarming rate, and the longer these guys hold power, the more they will be able to work on the courts.
Last month I said to my wife that we should start paying homeless people to hold their signs while standing in front of the radar speed cameras the city has been putting up around our town.