Comment by ProllyInfamous
11 days ago
3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988)
>we don't seem to want to
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
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Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article.
Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred.
Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
Psst anyone at Covenant Eyes[0] want to sign up for the obvious assignment here??
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...
> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
You'd prefer train stations don't have CCTV? What about when an attack happens?
That’s what this ENTIRE conversation is about… the (ostensible) trade off between surveillance and security.
In the case of an attack, I’d wish for a gendarme not a recording that would let me relive the experience.
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If I had a choice, I think I’d prefer not to have my death recorded and viewed by many strangers.
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I'd argue they should be better positioned, to minimize off-railroad property intrusion.
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The CCTV won't do shit to stop me from being attacked, it's a camera, not a cop. It's only useful for figuring out who to blame after the fact.
But there are other ways that we could figure out who to blame after the fact that don't require everything you will ever do to be recorded, forever.
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How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
One problem is that seniority confers power. Throwing out a long-serving incumbent substantially reduces your district’s effective representation.
That could be improved by getting rid of de jure preferential treatment for things like committee memberships. You’d still have informal power from seniority though.
I think long-term ("establishment") politicians are more-inclined to have been bought-out; new blood is more likely to make new alignments, churning up the dirty space that is politics.
Lesser of two evils sort of thought process...