Flock – Chilling Effects: Long Island's Emerging Open-Air Prison

That sounds very weasel worded, if they get license plate readers from someone who does.

> Except as provided in Section 6700, 6702, and 6703, any vehicle which is registered to a nonresident owner, and which is based in California or primarily used on California highways, shall be registered in California.

I’m an American living in Turkey at the moment. My airbnb host tells me that as a white collar software guy, he personally knows a large fraction of people who have been detained in prison for 1,2 or 3 months for having parties or fake traffic violations.

Of course i don’t love the ever-tightening shackles of algorithmic pricing, which is already well in place for insurance, finance and banking.

But the situation in Turkey reminds me that we are only one “national emergency” away from your freedoms being ripped from us with zero recourse. The chilling effect here is real.

The casually interested, confidently wrong argument can be summed up pretty easily. There is a risk v reward calculation with mass surveillance. What’s the reward? I don’t know the details, but apparently police love the tech because it makes catching bad guys easier. What’s the risk? Unfathomably and Immeasurably high, in ways that we won’t always get to know, or find out years later.

Any refutation of said high risk argument should be something like “relax, guy!” The corporations and state authorities are never gonna use their surveillance of innocents in ways that have any real consequences.

Flock is gathering far, far more intrusive data than "cellphone pings" including hoovering up bluetooth signals and other identifying information. The court may not have ruled on it yet, but it is absurd to think that the courts would think that the government needs a warrant to collect cellphone pings but doesn't need a warrant to collect far more blanket data, including facial recognition on a mass scale. Hopefully we will get a ruling on this sooner rather than later.

>Well why not? It seems like a lot of the flock discussion takes a bizarre twist where people go "It's useless to try to limit it, we need to ban it outright". Like okay? Do we ban the police when one goes rogue? (I guess that's kind of a bad question to ask, given that "defund the police" was trending a few years ago)

This is a bizarre take. Police are a necessary component for running a society. Blanket surveillance is not. This is self-evidently true because society still functioned before the recent past when they introduced blanket surveillance. Equating, or even comparing, a core and necessary function of society, like policing, with a new and completely optional and unnecessary blanket surveillance system is absurd (and that's the polite term).

I mean worth a shot right? Do we need armed government funded domestic violence perpetrators? Can anyone make the case for the current situation from first principles?