Comment by cucumber3732842
2 days ago
>they will absolutely be legalized on some party line vote in the middle of the night.
Or they'll be legalized piecemeal and you'll get sneered at by the useful idiots for opposing each incremental step based on principal.
they'll find a particularly violent crime and use that as the strawman... "Oh you dont want this? well i guess you support violent immigrant mass murderers then!"
and then before you know it the state has implemented its mass surveillance apparatus across the entire country. And we though china's social credits were bad? just IMAGINE what those predatory tech bros are cookin up.
As a higher level comment points out, my fear is that Flock will end up being the straw man, happily torn down in favor of more outwardly palatable but privately onerous player(s).
They could even start identifying "pre-crime" :)
Not as far fetched as it sounds even. Plenty of not-quite-a-crime things they could track if desired.
It's not far fetched. They usually dress it up in dogwhistle words like "at risk individuals" to make it seem like help rather than the threat it is.
Go look at what HN was saying and upvoting during the big data era. Endless scheming about orwellian ways to identify and "dispatch enforcement resources" on the pettiest thing. We're talking like buy a spool of romex get a letter in the mail from the .gov reminding you about code compliance. Or combing through small business financial to try and identify businesses that probably aren't high margin enough to be complying with all the rules. Real "I'm watching you" crap like that. And we're all supposed to go along with it because these people have our best interests at heard and/or mean well.
You take these same evil individuals and replace database integrations with pervasive cameras and AI and they will impoverish us all by grinding us under the thumb of government and say it's for our own good.
I mean, is that even a strawman? You can oppose mass AI surveillance and acknowledge the price of that is more crime.
Exactly. Freedom isn't free. If I have to pay for it with locks on my doors and having to be discerning about which truck I buy $5 steaks out of the back of lest my house get burgled or I get ripped off that seems like a pretty fair deal.
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