Comment by Tadpole9181
12 hours ago
This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
People are allowed to leverage trust in society to make tradeoffs. Or should we ban all forms of delivery because it can be abused at the extremes of the system to mug the drivers? Should every single store have every product locked behind glass and armed guards to light up any shoplifters, lest it be their fault for being robbed?
You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace. And even then, they would only be buying time. The fascists will install their own mass surveillance anyway whether you like it or not. They're fascists!
Maybe blame every Republican and Republican voter for installing a fascist government instead of a city that had the audacity to think they could leverage stability to make their lives a little better.
And, for what it's worth, I know folk here like to pretend "this is just to spy on you", but that's just your rhetoric. The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available. And the analytics collecter can be useful for all sorts of civil engineering, policy, and architectural decisions.
Now do I agree with the mass surveillance? Do I think the motivations were entirely pure? No, not really. But do I think you're being a bit of a drama queen and blaming the wrong people? Absolutely.
> You're acting like they should have known the President would take complete control of the government and all other branches should cede while a Gestapo was deployed against the populace.
People should know Germany was a republic before the Nazis took control.
>This is just victim blaming people for assuming they lived in a polite society with safeguards for their rights at a higher level.
Karen (I actually have spicier thoughts about exactly who's at fault here but "Karen" will have to do) who provided the political will to set up the cameras is not the victim here.
Her hapless landscaper (or whatever) is the victim.
This was not unforeseeable. This was playing with fire. For years we build up the police state's capabilities and made it VERY cheap to run (with all these cameras and whatnot). Something like this was unenviable. If not the feds going whole hog on something that some states didn't agree with it would likely have been some states doing their own similar thing in some other policy area. Every government accountability group, every privacy group, they've been screeching for years. It's not like every warning wasn't sounded.
>The city doesn't care about where you go. But this kind of data is used frequently rape and murder cases, as traffic cameras are often some of the best evidence available.
This is a BS red herring. "serious" crime has been very solvable for years with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc. But all that takes "work" (read: nontrivial amounts of money and labor the expenditure of which must be authorized and somewhat justifiable), a single unaccountable bureaucrat can't do all the heavy lifting of determining who to dispatch the boots on the ground to go after from the comfort of their desk
The entire purpose of the government having these systems like Flock is exactly what it's being used for. It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever) without the oversight of Amazon, Verizon, etc, (companies with public images they care about) saying "hey man, this is too much, we don't like the look for our business" and pushing back. The only reason we're even hearing a peep is any strife here is because the local governments interests aren't aligned with the feds.
The city doesn't care where "I" go until I check the right (wrong) boxes and then they'll be waiting for the chance to harass me. The government didn't "care" until something flipped, and then the .gov was all over them. The same is true for you and everyone else.
And yes I'm being sloppy with with my wording and my reasoning, I could not be, but I don't really care to write to that high a standard.
> This is a BS red herring.
"I don't respect facts I don't like" is not a very respectable point of view and makes me not want to engage at all.
> with cell location data, metadata, private security cameras, etc
I'm sure you'd argue that the government should have access to all of that data and it could never be used for "jackbooting"?
EDIT: Even if you did genuinely support all that, you're doing exactly what this city did! Making a subjective judgement call about where to put the proverbial line, but still giving the government the ability to use this data because you value its ability to benefit us / provide safety guarantees.
All that data can just as easily be stolen and abused by a fascist government.
> It's so that the .gov can still do jackboot things (like round up illegals, or whatever)
You are quite literally posting in the context of TFA about them turning them off explicitly because they did not intend them to be used for "jackboot things". FFS.
I don't think you understand.
The police (local or federal) don't have integrations with private CCTV, historical location data, etc, etc. When they want that stuff they have to email someone, ask someone, have a reason, maybe even get a warrant, etc. Heck, even to snoop on someone's facebook they create a paper trail going through the law enforcement portal This is not a big deal for "real crime" but for stuff the public doesn't actually support serious enforcement of it's a big PITA, creates a risky paper trail they don't fully control, there's potential oversight, etc. All that constrains how far they can go without local public support.
Being able to just "go fishing" from your desk like you can with Flock (and to a lesser extent Ring), like the NSA can with all our emails and metadata, etc, etc, and all that other 1984 type dragnet stuff, is a categorical difference and nobody should have that power.