Free Republic

New Gallup data show that people are growing increasingly distrustful of major technology companies such as Meta, Apple, and Google, as well as a newer player in the surveillance industry, Flock Safety. Some people are even taking matters into their own hands by destroying the AI-powered surveillance cameras appearing in communities across the country. Flock Safety, a private surveillance technology company founded in 2017, has been earning a reputation as a herald of the much-feared Orwellian “surveillance state.” Although a private company, Flock’s business model operates by selling AI-powered camera and audio detection systems to local and state governments for...

An innocent driver is stopped by a gun-waving police officer who sics a dog on him and he ends up in jail for hours, or even days. It’s happening more and more in America, a new study confirms, and it’s all because the technology for machines to read license plate numbers, and report them, fails. The results are from a study by the Institute for Justice, which confirmed such cases coming up over and over. The list, large already, is growing: A Colorado driver was repeatedly pulled over after officers mistakenly put his license plate number on a Flock hotlist....

Hours before the sun rose on Dallas police Chief Daniel Comeaux’s first day on the job, an elderly man in a wheelchair was shot dead near Fair Park. Two days later, the new chief stood among a cluster of officers outside the suspected gunman’s home in west Oak Cliff. He was impressed by one tool the investigators had used to arrive there: the network of license plate-reading cameras scattered across the city. “I was like, ‘Alright,’” Comeaux recalled saying, referencing the April case months later in an episode of Bridging the Divide, the Assist the Officer Foundation’s podcast, “‘explain this...