The Digital World Is Becoming a Nightmare
Paul Craig Roberts
Modern technology has provided government with growing capability to monitor our lives. The amount of freedom in a “free American” is slowly being reduced to nothing. Flock cameras are one such freedom-destroying tool.
This article referenced below about police misuse and incompetent use of Flock surveillance cameras should scare you to death. And it is not just about the cameras’ violation of privacy which is supposed to be constitutionally protected. It is also about the police who seem to be uninterested in whether they have the wrong person. Why work if you can charge someone?
The claim has been made that these cameras solve crimes, but they seem to be equally as effective in encouraging and causing crimes by police. Neither the cameras nor the police are infallible. The police do not easily let go of their and the cameras’ mistakes.
The question of privacy has not yet been resolved by the courts. Some federal judges have ruled that there is no right to privacy on public roads, but this argument evades the fact that camera tracking creates a detailed picture of a person’s life–his medical appointments, where he goes to church, his entertainments, who his friends are, his political associations. If it is wrong for a person to be stalked by another person, why can a person be stalked by a camera network?
The presence of the widespread Flock camera network indicates that public authorities value a new crime tool more than they value the Constitution and public opinion. This itself is disturbing.
Until the Supreme Court rules, we will not know whether “crime prevention” has taken another chunk out of the US Constitution.
Meanwhile some people have had enough and are disabling the cameras or taking them down.
Today in dystopia, the US government is monitoring the social media accounts of individuals who oppose the rapidly spreading installation of Flock surveillance cameras throughout the United States.