They are essentially a public live traffic report so that the news agencies are not running helicopters amok to get the same footage; and many of the cameras are in tight locations where it would be hard to fly helicopters or drones without irritating neighbors or being a danger to public safety.
Here's an example from just last month in my city: https://www.wbrz.com/news/license-plate-readers-popping-up-a...
Crime, etc. are always the reason given. But my city has repeatedly shown they cannot be trusted with these kinds of powers.
Here's more information from the ACLU on this exact topic: https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/chilling-effects...
> Knowing or suspecting that we're being watched can stop us from engaging in certain kinds of behavior, even when it's perfectly lawful. For example, it might affect our decision to go to a certain barber (what would my other barber say?), meet up with a friend (what would my mom say?), eat at a restaurant (what would my trainer say?), or take the scenic route (is it suspicious that I'm not using my normal route?)
Keep in mind that just a few decades ago we had the Red Scare. We harassed and ruined the lives of people over thoughtcrime, for simply supporting the notion of alternate economies or just accepting those who did. Imagine the scope of that if we'd had the surveillance network that we do today. And there is no indication that we won't have a similar event in the near future.
Lastly, I know your question is in good faith and thank you for asking for clarification. That said, it's important to consider that manufactured normality isn't a valid reason to not question authority. It's quite easy for Corpgov to do anything at scale long enough that new generations are born into it and wholly accept it without question.
All expressions of governmental authority must be constantly challenged and defended, and any possibility of chilling effects should be investigated thoroughly, time and again. This is our duty as The People, the fourth branch of the government. This is the critical check and balance which keeps things from becoming irrecoverably fucked.
Turnkey totalitarianism.
Totalitarian control is turnkey in America if the "wrong guy" gets in. It's funny because the voters aren't demanding limits, and yet each election cycle is life or death not just because of the he escalating propaganda...
I think voters know that we are close to total oppression, on a subconscious fear level.
Whether in the next four or forty years, someone will do it.
You realize you're just moving the goalposts, right?
Do you have any actual examples of "resistance" that have been stifled by this "chilling effect"? I understand your hypotheticals and the point you're making, but we can conjure hypotheticals for any situation or context, all without any specific relationship to truth.
We can look at contemporary research of highly surveilled institutions: https://cdt.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Student-Activity-...
> Of students who indicate that their school uses monitoring software, many report a chilling effect on their behavior and self-expression online — six in ten students agree with the statement, “I do not share my true thoughts or ideas because I know what I do online is being monitored,” and 80 percent report being “more careful about what I search online when I know what I do online is being monitored.”
We can review recent past high-profile, surveillance-oriented regimes like Nazi Germany, or the McCarthy-era Red Scare and Cold War. There is a multitude of personal accounts from that era, where anyone of note had to be extremely careful about what was said, to whom and where.
Over and over throughout history, good things, like giving shelter to persecuted refugees or slaves, has been considered illegal. Citizens were told to snitch on one another. If drones were available then, you'd have seen them in every single nook and cranny.
Politicians today wear nice, pressed suits and often conduct themselves pleasantly. But only a fool would buy into their brand of symbolic mind control. The reality is that many governments today are as evil as ever due to the scale and population today. And the ones that aren't, are in danger of becoming authoritarian. Authoritarian and populist movements have been sweeping through the West.
Any technology we implement today represents codified procedure, whether codified in law or not. And that codified procedure will absolutely be used to enforce an arbitrary morality as defined by the incumbent party. We've seen this for a century with cannabis and the global war on drugs. We see this now with abortion, where citizens in Texas are encouraged to snitch on women who seek abortions.
So looking forward, we can avoid hypotheticals while pointing to clear patterns in history, for those who need empirical evidence. We can also just establish self-consistent, ethical political frameworks which disqualify such unwarranted mass surveillance, simply on the grounds that regimes can change while codified procedure can be repurposed, and that mass surveillance erodes trust, without even needing to point to past atrocities and compromised governments.
Happy to discuss further if this doesn't satisfy you. I can also draw from my own life experiences living under surveillance and child abuse, and the extreme chilling effect it caused, if you want anecdotal data.
The rest of your examples have no relevance to the original claim, and are (again), largely hypothetical. They're "real examples", but the connection between them and the original claim is still hypothetical. This is why I called your earlier responses attempts to move the goalposts: you have yet to provide any evidence that directly supports your original claim, while instead providing "evidence" of similar things that aren't directly related except through careful framing.
Do you have any examples directly relevant to the original statement? Here it is again, in case you've lost track:
> They scan license plates all through the city and use this technology to create a chilling effect which allows their authoritarian regime to remain unchallenged.
Please argue in good faith and don't revert to sarcasm. I asked in my last comment for you to specify which part of the prior comment you had issue with, it would have been good to mention the specific part you were challenging at that time and not only just now, as my comment indeed touched on multiple related issues.
So if you want specific information regarding NYC and the license plate issues, I can give you some links from reputable sources. I also recommend following up these sources with more research to corroborate claims or answer any further questions you may have, or if these sources simply do not satisfy your curiosity and rightful demands for hard proof.
https://www.nyclu.org/report/automatic-license-plate-readers
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/documents-uncov...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/auto...
The above research report mentions a US Supreme Court ruling specifically mentioning a chilling effect with respect to surveillance, United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/565/10-1259/case...
"Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse"
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor
And in another comment in this thread I mentioned the stop-and-frisk program in NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
I could point to this and multitudes of other incidents where the NYC government has grossly overstepped their bounds. I can also point to a high-profile case in my old city of Fort Worth where city officials and police were using government databases to stalk and harass individuals, even ex-girlfriends, and the police chief and head IT guy also got harassed and litigated for attempting to expose it:
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/former-fort-worth-police-c...
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/fort-worth/article2...
Here's what the cops in my current city do: https://www.wbrz.com/news/brpd-narcotics-officer-exposes-wro...
> "At least three to four nights a week they would have us riding through the neighborhoods," Ardoin said. "If you saw a random black person walking around the street and hasn't done anything, they would tell us just to jump out the vehicle, grab them and pat them down without probable cause. I voiced my opinions several times, and I didn't agree with that."
It's why we called the police the "jump out boys" growing up. I personally was subject to years of targeted police and government harassment in my small town, which severely impacted my life. I shudder to think about what those creeps would do with a full ALPR kit across the parish. My state's police force has repeatedly shown that they cannot be trusted to follow the law, and they constantly get caught harassing, stalking, spying, selling drugs, guns and more.
You wouldn't understand unless you grew up in a real police state like Louisiana, with an incarceration rate of over 1%, higher than any independent country in the world. You may have had the privilege of not being a targeted demographic in such a state and thus having the law usually work on your side, and so the potentials for abuse, and the inevitability of such, may not seem immediately obvious to you. You seem interested in learning more and I can only provide so much, so I would definitely recommend following up with more research.
If it's the "authoritarian regime" part you want proof of, and my given examples of general corruption of US police forces is not sufficient for you, you can google some NYC-specific cases, but I assume you're more interested in the effects of mass surveillance and ALPRs.
Given your remark about good faith efforts, I'm forced to conclude that was actually projection, and you're not interested in having a good faith discussion.
I read your first three sources (skimmed the last of those, really), and in all three, the "chilling effect" you claim still remains a hypothetical. There's lots of "could" and "can" in those pieces, but no "did". I still see plenty of large-scale demonstrations in New York City, and in fact I hear of more of them, not fewer, at time goes on. Some of that is availability of said information/coverage/my information bubble, but it's certainly not evidence of a "chilling effect", despite the vast increase in city-wide surveillance that New York City has seen over the same time period.
The evidence you present here is worth less than my own lived experience in this case, simply because it tells what could happen without contextualizing that within what has actually happened.
Take the second example from your second source, about the DEA planning to use ALPRs at gun shows[1]. If you ignore the sensationalism, the story is actually boring: the DEA and ATF considered whether or not they could use readers at gun shows to help track illegal gun sales. They didn't end up doing it, likely because it would have been illegal to do so.
This is the system working. This is not evidence of a them using this technology to enact an authoritarian surveillance state. This is a state that has broad access to this kind of technology, and then often doesn't use it because it's legally obligated that they not, unless they can provide the proper justification.
It's also an example that is (again!!) unrelated to the claim you are making.
The rest is just more of the same Gish Gallop, and I'm tired of engaging with you on this. Even if your intent about having a good faith discussion is sincere, in practice you are still not engaging in a good-faith way. What I asked for was simple: evidence of a concrete statement you presented as fact. What you've given me is a laundry list of closely related things, but nothing that actually matches the context of the statement you made.
This is not a good-faith discussion in practice, because you refuse to keep the discussion narrowly focused and instead just gesture wildly at a bunch of things that are related (but many of whom are still arguing hypotheticals!), and that you feel should stand in for the evidence in asking for. But it doesn't, and given your repeated deflections, I'm forced to conclude that you don't have said concrete evidence.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-future/dea-planned-monitor-gu...
You misunderstand the entire chilling effect argument, and are looking for some kind of mysterious hard evidence which you are just going to have to locate on your own. To a rational person, the simple argument of government overreach and regime changes, and examples of such as I provided, and the concept of the authoritarian ratchet is enough to support limitations on mass surveillance. Discounting it all as "gish gallop" is incredibly uncharitable and negative.
Your claim and subsequent lack of concrete examples are a prime demonstration of this. Many of the sources you cited in your last comment contained more rhetoric than logic, so it's somewhat ironic that you're trying to claim to be a rational person whilst being swayed by such arguments.
I made a convincing, well-cited argument as to the prevalence of police and government abuse of existing surveillance tools across multiple US cities, and established that NYC has an authoritarian government. I linked to pieces from prominent organizations specifically dealing with chilling effects and ALPRs, which can be used as the basis for further research. I linked to a Supreme Court ruling in which a judge specifically mentioned how surveillance causes a chilling effect and a reduction in freedom of expression.
You are unwilling to accept any of this and also unwilling to do your own research. You mistake a well-rounded argument for gish gallop. You're looking for "logic" and not "rhetoric", but those are such vague, moving targets. These are all references which I provided you on short notice due to your own refusal to research the subject. These are not the pieces which "swayed" me. I have been reading deeply about this subject for decades and I cannot possibly be bothered to compile an extensive list of books and articles which you will probably discount and not read, I cannot simply transmit my knowledge to you. At some point you have to do the work yourself and connect the dots, if you have a specific form of evidence you are looking for, spend some time looking for it.
It's honestly a given that mass surveillance creates a chilling effect and erosion of trust, and the onus should really be on you to disprove it.
But it isn't, and this is the entire problem with your argument: you've assumed your conclusion to be true. This leads you to ignore basic initial questions, like "do you have evidence for this specific claim?"
When pressed, it turns out you don't, and instead you substitute hypotheticals (that you again assume to be true!), but then blame me for not already believing them to be true.
Again, I can point to specific things that call your original statement into question, such as the continued presence of protests and mass demonstrations in the very city you claim to be subject to this "chilling effect". Instead of providing an explanation as to why that's consistent with your original claim (it isn't!), you then point to more sources with the same hypothetical, and expect me to take them as truth.
The problem is, there's a distinct lack of evidence for your repeated claims, and additional hypotheticals do not fill that void.
So no, I do understand, and I understand why your argument is flawed. It's simple, really: the "chilling effect" makes sense on the surface, is plausible as a hypothetical, is sometimes true, and is used frequently by sources you already trust. The problem is that it's just a hypothetical, and there a myriad of counterexamples exist which call it into question as a blanket rule, all of which you discount out of hand with no explanation, or simply refuse to acknowledge in the first place.
It's a hypothetical I've seen repeatedly claimed as truth throughout my entire life, only to see its predictions fail to manifest in the vast majority of cases in which it's invoked. What other choice do I have than to question its validity? Your refusal to acknowledge this lack of predictive power does nothing to convince me, in contrast to my lived experience, that it does indeed have predictive power in the first place, and in fact only does the opposite.
I've also repeatedly told you that I understand the hypothetical, and what I'm interested in is concrete evidence of the hypothetical's predicted effects in a specific place where you've claimed it is present. But instead of providing this evidence, you just repeatedly cite more examples of the hypothetical effect being claimed, along with its implied predictions... Surely you can see that this was not what I asked for, is redundant to your original claim, and does nothing to demonstrate the hypothetical's predicted effects in a specific example where you've claimed it as fact? Why are you expecting me to be convinced by just repeatedly making the same assertion over and over, finally just saying "it's a given"?
You made a claim stated as fact, and I asked you for evidence of that specific claim. You have not delivered it, and instead have made it clear you just assume it's true without any evidence at all! How am I supposed to be convinced by that?
Hochul's support of the IDF and the ongoing Palestinian genocide and attempts to silence and ostracize opponents of the genocide clearly marks her as an authoritarian in my book.
You can see the data feeds here, actually. https://webcams.nyctmc.org/map. You can hardly make out anything.