Seems as though you can’t do anything these days without being spied on by the fucking Government:
Recent revelations confirm that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has been aggressively expanding its use of facial recognition technology, raising significant concerns about mass surveillance and unconstitutional tracking of law-abiding gun owners.
For years, gun rights advocates have warned that the ATF’s use of facial recognition would lead to mass surveillance of American citizens—particularly those who exercise their Second Amendment rights. Despite repeated claims that the ATF doesn’t engage in biometric tracking, a 2021 Government Accountability Office report revealed that between October 2019 and March 2022, the ATF conducted at least 549 facial recognition searches.
Of course, it’s not actually the ATF doing this (a.k.a. plausible deniability):
The technology was largely powered by third-party vendors, including Clearview AI and Vigilant Solutions, both of which have amassed vast databases of billions of images scraped from social media, DMV records, and security footage. This means the ATF has been leveraging private sector databases to track and identify gun owners without their consent.
The full scale of this surveillance remains unclear, but newly surfaced documents indicate that the ATF has been working with FBI fusion centers, state and local law enforcement, and even foreign intelligence agencies to develop more comprehensive tracking capabilities.
Here’s the thing: I don’t want to be spied on by anyone, let alone these government thugs.
I don’t care that it helps “security” or any other such panacea. Take your snooping devices and go fuck yourselves.
That said:
Oh, and new-FBI Director / ATF Acting-Director Patel? Take a long, hard look at those “FBI fusion centers” and make them less malevolent — lest you too be labeled as just another government thug.
Information, we’re always being told, is power. And I want the government to have a lot less of both.
So Kash will lead the FBI and the ATF, or as Biden called it the AFT
I hope Kash gives both agencies a much needed enema.
It should be observed that the Fourth Amendment does not specify an actor (unlike the First) in its proscription. All it says is “shall not be …” being universal and absolute. Violations of the citizens’ right to privacy are forbidden. Period. End of discussion.
The actual language is:
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“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Anytime we speak of a right, we should ask
1) who possesses the right? here “the people.”
2) what exactly is protected by the right? their “houses, persons, papers, and effects.”
3) protected from whom? from the State, not necessarily from your nosy neighbor
We should also always remember that the Constitution did not grant rights, it protects a pre-existing right; an “unalienable” right, to use the words of Jefferson in the Declaration, still the most important non-sacred text in human history.
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This is not a “universal and absolute” protection – and I say this as as strong a defender of individual liberties as you can imagine. “Open Fields,” for example, are not “houses, persons, papers, or effects,” and thus a warrant is not required to search them. This is also why public video surveillance is not forbidden by the Constitution – one has no expectation of privacy (a term used by the SCOTUS in Katz v. US, BTW) in a public place. It is why law enforcement can use FLOCK cameras to track your vehicle by scanning license plates.
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I’d vote to limit the use of video surveillance and biometric scanning. But that has to be by statute in Congress or the states, not on the basis of the Constitution. The Constitution, as consistently interpreted by the SCOTUS, does not bar video surveillance or biometric scanning.
Whether they are good policy is another matter.
The difficulty and weakness of one’s “Reasonable Expectation of Privacy” is that as technology suitable for surveillance and computerized analysis of data are developed and used, the reasonableness of anyone’s expectation of privacy in any circumstance is so severely eroded that any expectation of privacy for one’s financial transactions and records becomes virtually non-existent.
Privacy will become known as the Twenty-First Century Myth, just as Equality was the Twentieth Century Myth. ,
Don’t disagree. And Congress and legislatures here have a role to play. It doesn’t help that we all have a universal espionage machine in our pockets, spying on ourselves and anyone we interact with, and pay for the privilege. We have all traded privacy for access to easy goods/services and communication. Personally, I think that’s a poor trade, but it’s the world we live in.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Legislatures simply have to stand up and draw those lines. The problem is, we don’t really want them drawn; drawing those lines means that some bad guys are going to get away with some crimes. And it means that we give up some of our “free” stuff. Of course, nothing is ever free, we’ve traded our information – our privacy – for internet access, etc.
I might also note that a suppressed .22 would make quick work of those cameras. Just sayin’
haven’t the crackheads been told that there is a lot of copper in these cameras? that would solve the spying very quickly
Don’t circuit boards contain recoverable amounts of gold and silver?
The difficulty and weakness of one’s “Reasonable Expectation of Privacy” is that as technology suitable for surveillance and computerized analysis of data are developed and used, the reasonableness of anyone’s expectation of privacy in any circumstance is so severely eroded that any expectation of privacy for one’s financial transactions and records becomes virtually non-existent.
Privacy will become known as the Twenty-First Century Myth, just as Equality was the Twentieth Century Myth.
Oh, how I miss the more reliable forum commenting system.