While some people may want to characterize our region's current surveillance structures, which include Flock cameras, as necessary to public safety, their potential as part of an authoritarian web of social conditioning is a serious threat. By allowing these systems to continue to exist, we provide the current regime with the infrastructure they need to force their Project 2025 reforms on everyone and track us down if we don't comply. Whether you have felt the effects of it yet or not, this web of cameras around our state is definitely within spitting distance of authoritarian surveillance overreach and is belligerently pounding away at the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
What we are seeing in real time today, every day, from all around the country, are violent arrests of people with no warrants announced, by masked men who refuse to identify themselves, who restrain their victims, read none of them their rights, shove them into unmarked vehicles, and speed off without telling anyone where they are being taken. At the same time, Flock is investing in remote-operated drones, now has a partnership with Amazon Ring cameras, and has a documented track record of national searches with "ICE" as the reason for access (1,400 in Denver alone). This company has already shown itself, through these searches, to be complicit and an accomplice in a national kidnapping ring run by our federal government and would likely cooperate with any federal search warrant of customer data. That should be a terrifying reality for all of us and make us realize that those violent arrests, which offer no due process and immediate deportation to third-party countries, can be weaponized through this system and used against any of us. We should all be speaking up now before we are silenced.
Sam Fogleman, Erie
The eight Senators who caved to Donald Trump will go down in infamy just like Neville Chamberlain. Their cowardice is astounding. You cannot give in to a bully and expect him to go away. Hitler didn't stop at the Sudetenland, and Trump won't stop at SNAP and the ACA. The march towards fascism will continue until someone stands up to him. Hitler got only 37% of the vote, but that began his slow, steady march towards a brutal Nazi dictatorship. Millions of lives could have been saved if not for Chamberlain's betrayal. You don't start a fight unless you're in it to win. Those 8 cowards walked off the field when their team was on the 30-yard line after having imposed 40 long, anxious days on the American public -- for what? Just so they could step up to the mic and brag about their lack of will and disdain for their oaths of office? They abandoned us, and we need to find a way to do better. Many of us put our lives on the line in combat to defend what our great country stands for, and the infamous 8 spit in our faces.