Any time you hear the phrase “Real Time Crime Center,” it means that your government is stealing your privacy. It’s the police watching everywhere you go, everything you do. It’s one of the primary reasons that America is NOT a free country anymore. Period.
Unless we pass some massive national privacy laws in the next few years, this country, as you’ve known it, is gone. There’s no freedom when you’re being spied on, and any excuse given is complete b.s.
I’m sure these things do, in fact, make local cops’ jobs easier, and that is a real thing. It looks like a tough job. But making their jobs easier is in no way worth shedding the Fourth Amendment (ya know, the one about unreasonable searches and seizures, and yes, this is unreasonable), which protects their privacy, too.
The fact that these are popping up at the same time that Trump’s masked goon squads are terrorizing citizens and non-citizens alike in big cities doesn’t feel like a coincidence. It’s simply Authoritarianism 101.
I am so unbelievably proud of all of the patriots standing up to this, risking their lives and freedoms to keep us alive and (I was going to say free, but we have a lot of work to do to make America free again, including tearing down every single government camera, and the quasi-governmental ones.).
Mussolini’s definition of Fascism was a combining of the government with “private” enterprise, a merging of everything under one banner, which is, of course, what’s happening now.
But America has a long and storied history of turning bad situations around: slavery, The Alien & Sedition Acts, Jim Crow, McCarthyism in the 50’s. It’s time (long past time actually) to turn the Surveillance State around…or else this is going to keep happening.