Category: Surveillance Society

Strike Another One

Government Thugs, Surveillance Society

Oh, that’s just dandy:

In a recent J6 case it has been revealed that Liberty Safe Co. gave the FBI background access codes to the safe and vault owned by the investigative target of the FBI, Nathan Hughes.

As the story is told, the FBI (federal govt) contacted the safe manufacturer and asked for a secret code that would open the safe. The FBI had a search warrant for the premises.  Liberty Safe Co. gave the FBI the access code that would allow them to open the safe, without relying on (or asking) the owner to open it.

Of course, Liberty Safe [irony alert]  tried to weasel out of it, but as Sundance puts it:

This is a ridiculous position easily avoided by saying, “we don’t own the safe.”  The bottom line is to avoid all the Liberty Safe products that allow them to access your private holdings, including gun safes and personal papers.  If you own a Liberty Safe, just get rid of it.  It’s compromised. Write it off to a lesson learned and forget about it.

I only use safes with a keyed lock, for more or less this precise reason.

What Woody Said

Big Brother, Surveillance Society

In one of his rare funny moments, Woody Allen once referred to people glued to their cell phones as “connectivity assholes”.  Here’s a story which, if true, provides ample proof of the pitfalls thereof:

Amazon reportedly shut down a customer’s smart home after the delivery driver claimed he heard a racial slur coming through the doorbell, even though no one was home. 

Brandon Jackson, of Baltimore, Maryland, came home on May 25 to find that he had been locked out of his Amazon Echo, which many devices, including his lights, are connected to.

Yeah… so much for that “convenience” that people are always bleating about when the discussion moves to “smart homes”, “self-drive cars” and all that similar nonsense.

So don’t complain when Big Tech, or Big Brother, or Biggus Dikkus turns off your lights, takes your house through “emininent domain” then bends you over the desk and gives it to you good and hard in your connectivity asshole.

Watchful Eyes

Law and Order, Surveillance Society

Over in Britishland, a young mother named Nicola Bulley has gone missing while taking her dog for a walk one evening a couple weeks ago.  There have been all sorts of theories (coupled with the usual bollocks from people unrelated to the case who have nothing better to do with their lives):  that she fell into a river along her walk, that she was kidnapped, that she decided to do a runner (leaving behind her two small children), and so on.

No investigations have turned up anything at all — the Britcops are getting all sorts of crap for their slipshod investigation — and her disappearance has remained to date a complete mystery.

(Here’s a sample of articles on the topic.)

Here’s what disturbs me about all this.  For a small village, there sure must be a boatload of CCTV cameras around.  Here’s a photo map of the “blind spots” in the CCTV coverage — which are tiny — which means that there’s an awful lot of geography that’s apparently covered, and isn’t a blind spot.

To me, this means that surveillance cameras Over There are practically ubiquitous.  One might expect, perhaps, that densely-populated urban areas might have cameras all over the place (as seen in the gloomy 2006 Red Road  movie);  but in a remote little village like St. Michaels-On-Wyre?

I bet it’s not just in Britishland, either;  it’s probably growing Over Here, too;  and that gives me the creeps.

Of course, if anyone has proof that this is not the case, then I stand corrected.