I am not harmed when I go through a toll plaza or an express lane.
Nor when I pass a flock camera.
You are boxing with phantoms, I think.
Nor when I pass a flock camera.
You are boxing with phantoms, I think.
You are not, or at least, you think you are not.
How far removed are we from the federal government revoking the passports of everyone who attended a No Kings rally, anywhere in the country?
Do you think it is Courts and the looming Midterms; or are they just flummoxed by the lack of good surveillance data?
It's really a fantasy and a silly Taboo.
Our Democracy will live or die by politics, not silly rules on data collection at the margins.
Mass surveillance at scale is not a trivial problem to solve, but Flock is both making it happen and making it clear that they are fine with enabling bad actors to take advantage of it.
Like maybe the "cheap cameras everywhere" part is novel + important, but "central data store" truly is not.
Slippery reasoning like this is how silly taboos get perpetuated.
Plus, data in FBI custody is nominally subject to laws and oversight in a way that privately held data is not.
Not a fantasy and the taboo has already been broken.
While losing access to global entry without due process isn’t the same thing as revoking a passport, it’s awfully close.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-30/minnesota...
At this point, the only way to preserve democracy would be to mostly dissolve the federal system, leaving states as democracies without the heavy hand and massive financial leverage from above.
States are closer to the right size for democracy to be resistant, but I think we’d need city-states of the metropolises, and big states like California would possibly need to subdivide.
Many trans people have already had their passports revoked, for some there is no path to obtaining one again, and it is deeply unsettling to me.
Yet. The jewish people had no problem that the government had detailed lists including the religion. It helped the Nazis killing many jews. Total surveillance will always be abused like every other invasive law.
First it’s against child abuse and terrorist, then organized crime, then crimes like theft, then littering and jaywalking, then swearing in public
Or was it the Genocidal Intent?
The first mass killings, on the Eastern Front, made no use of such sophistication and had no need of it.
It's always Politics.... Terrible ones in the case of WW2 Germany.
You‘ll never know when the next group with bad intent get access to surveillance data.
Every crime organization would be glad to have the opportunity to find witnesses in witness protection. Was a lot harder back then.
In places where the germans had access to identity information survival rates among jews was much lower. The Danish government refused to provide data about Jewish citizens to the occupying germans, and simply didn't comply in general with anti Jewish efforts. 99% of Danish jews survived the war.
In the Netherlands, where there was initially a policy of compliance, the occupying germans got their hands on the lists of jews and only 25% of Dutch jews survived.