Tag
Surveillance
-
You Never Had That Right
The last Flock dodge is two claims glued together: you never had a right not to have your plate read on a public road, and the future-despot file is a fantasy because we have not invented new crimes out of thin air. The first confuses a …
-
What the Courts Actually Said
The Flock scoreboard in court is currently their side, and pretending otherwise is a gift to the other side. It is also not the Fourth Amendment. A panel can be wrong about the thing it is construing, and this fight is not over.
-
Leave You Alone
The new pitch for Flock is that a camera on every road is a civil-libertarian tool, because it means fewer traffic stops. Precision at the stop is real. It is purchased by recording everyone first. That is not leaving you alone.
-
Sold as Privacy
Age checks are moving into the operating system and being sold as the private option: one yes-or-no instead of a passport copy on every site. The private option is a gate. On a phone, two companies hold it, and Congress wants to hand them …
-
You Might Be Right
The Free Press posted a video telling people to stop destroying the cameras that are ‘actually stopping crime,’ and framed objecting to Flock as something only a kidnapper or a thief would do. Here is the argument taken apart, …
-
Papers and Effects, Restored
The Database of Ruin diagnosed the machine assembling itself out of cameras, phones, and purchase records. This is the other half: a proposal to flip the legal default so that a fact describing a person belongs to that person from the …
-
Sold as Local Control
Officers running these systems usually describe them accurately: chokepoint cameras, a short retention window, no facial capture. What they describe less accurately is who actually controls the data once it leaves the camera, who can see …
-
An Open Letter to Flock
You say you fight crime, delete the data, log every search, and that the misuse is someone else’s fault. Those answers do not survive contact with the product, or with the Fourth of July.
-
Flock Is the Most Un-American Company in America
A private company has quietly built a national surveillance grid that records where every car in America goes and rents it to any police force that will pay. It is the general warrant the country was founded to destroy, sold as a monthly …
-
The Database of Ruin
Privacy was never mainly protected by law. It was protected by friction, by the sheer cost of watching everyone. We have driven that cost to zero, and what we are assembling in its place is a single machine that holds something ruinous …