TONIGHT 8pm ET Are You Smarter Than a Politician? @KyleAnzalone_ @jasonditz @AntiwarNews @Antiwarcom As always, you're in control. The chat determines the scores. piped.video/live/7dz1r-7iPww…

I'm sorry to report that Alasdair Whitney of the Institute of Justice has taken a shameful position on Flock cameras, and at a critical moment. He argues that the cameras and network can stay up and collect all the data they collect today, as long as the government agrees that accessing the data requires a warrant. We already know that this government will spy on us in secret and without a warrant when a warrant is required by law. Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA, which was doing just this. This was the one time the government was caught; how many other instances are there of the government illegally spying on us that we don't know about? And they persecute Edward Snowden for telling us this truth to this day. Does that sound like a government that has changed its ways? And we're supposed to trust this government with a warrant requirement? Alasdair Whitney didn't even ask or suggest that we should have some oversight over how the data is stored and collected. It's sitting in a cloud held by a private company that can do whatever it wants with it. There are no protections at all! And we're supposed to let this government, which spies on us in violation of the Constitution, have in place a surveillance network of control and subjugation nearly identical to those used by authoritarian regimes like North Korea and China? Shame on the Institute for Justice for being so weak at a time when we need strong voices the most.

25 years ago, this might have worked. Today, we simply cannot trust either the companies collecting this data or our governments to obey the law and get legitimate warrants. Keep in mind that warrants are a deliberate violation of rights, but supposedly justified by very strong evidence that serious crimes have been committed, and only a bit if evidence is lacking to prosecute. Instead, warrants are now frequently abused as dragnets to "go fishing" for something that can be used to bring charges. This is why an honest and correct warrant specifies the precise items to be seized and their location. The danger here is that the dragnet has *already* scooped up everything continuously for years, so the warrant only has to outline the SQL queries to bring up all info on a specific car, person, or place from the panopticon's myriad databases. Remember, the *databases* are the dangerous and 4A infringing part of this, not the cameras.