It’s good to see people pushing back on the likes of Flock Cameras.  But this is a much bigger issue.

Surveillance has been privatized.  Things only the FBI used to be able to do, and then only with a warrant, are done routinely, millions of times a day in the US by private companies. An entire industry has emerged to support these private surveillance networks, which are really built to serve law enforcement, at least for now.

Stricter personal data privacy laws, similar to what Europe has, would go a long way to solving the problem.  What we have in the US today is, sadly, a surveillance/ police state unlike anything in history.

The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State

A few days ago I watched the cryptocurrency documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.  It’s not a hard hitting expose or even very informative, in the sense that you won’t learn much about the history or technical details of, say, Bitcoin.  This threw me off at first.  But it is very watchable and even entertaining.

It’s really about the groups of people that rally around things like cryptocurrency and how they believe things that, well, maybe shouldn’t be believed.  It also seems the film was completed at a time when cryptocurrency was still in its relative infancy, not yet adopted by the mainstream.  If it doesn’t engage you, you may want to hang in there until the end. There is a “payoff” that (I think) is worth waiting for.

Everyone Is Lying to You for Money