This isn't aimed at you specifically, but I think many technologists seem to innately misunderstand the slippery slope hypothesis which helps form the bedrock of American politics.

Too many seem to fall into the familiar problem-solving mode, ready to provide compromises or solutions while forgetting that once the infrastructure is in place, it can easily be modified later to undo the compromises which facilitated its acceptance in the first place. There is an inherent power asymmetry and it's not generally in favor of those building and using the infrastructure.

▲

shevy-java 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Indeed - Flock cameras showed this.

They also actively undermine the US constitution. Will be interesting to see whether the remaining judges have any power to change this or whether they were also integrated into the new dictatorship model.

▲

pbhjpbhj 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Surely it's not the camera per se, it iss the people who are installing them. One key driver is lack of efficient law enforcement.

Do you force people not to give up their own liberties? In a democracy?

Although better privacy laws would cut off the access of non-customers to the data of those customers devices.

	▲	soulofmischief 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So much of this discussion is moot because the point is there is a slippery slope. It doesn't matter if there's an unconstitutional war on drugs which creates distrust and massively diverts law enforcement away from serious crime and instead towards ruining the lives of poor families. It doesn't matter if we're in a new age of McCarthyism or not, or if we're in the middle of a hyperfascist political coup and I don't even feel comfortable protesting in public in my city now that people are getting 30-year felony sentences for moving boxes and the city's new cameras and police drones can track me from my home to anywhere downtown and back. These things could be true or not. It's the fact that they could be true which means that we cannot allow ourselves to slip into an unretractable surveillance capitalist hellscape. That means people must have avenues to stop things like this. Petitioning city hall doesn't seem to be working; in fact, it's waking many people up to the fact that their local governments are not working for their interests, as mayors openly discuss banning discussion about data centers. Laws exist because some people won't play nice otherwise. It is asymmetrical to put the burden of defense of liberty on the individual. The individual is the last line of defense against the government, and when it is the individual's turn to act, it's because law has already failed. We need to act, and fix the law, so that I don't have to act like a paranoid psycho around others in my life who are wholly unequipped to understand or even care about this problem.