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Louis Rossman: Politician calls constituents criminals with no right to privacy [video] (youtube.com)
78 points by walterbell 51 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments


A private citizen is most protected from their governments when decision makers in society have no expectation of privacy. Monitoring them 24/7 with everyone on the planet having access to the feeds at any time would afford the most protection.

Every conversation they have, every thing they write down, everything they do on a computer or phone, everything their staff does, says, writes down, or does on a computer or a phone, everything all of these people do: who they have sex with, whose comedy shows they go see, where they spend their vacations, all of this should be entered into the public record.

Not even national security is a compelling reason for secrecy. The only legitimate need is to wage war against other nations, but the majority use case is to conspire more effectively against the public for profit or to increase authority. In a world where every country on earth is forced into a similar regime, the default case is everyone watches the political situation and can react accordingly if things go wrong. If war sentiment precipitates quickly usually the cause can be traced to individual actors, and those people can be removed from office by the people of their respective countries if the sentiment isn't generally shared. If the people decide they want war anyway, they can direct their governments to resume secrecy for the duration of the war.

If you are not a decision-maker in society this is ideal for you, and it is probably worth suffering WW3 to enforce it globally.


Show the same politician himself coming home as recorded by his Ring camera. He will suddenly become biggest privacy proponent in the whole country.


I'd assume they'd just do like European politicians do (so I hear), and advocate solely for privacy for politicians, not others. (advocate, as in write bills excluding themselves from being monitored)


You are probably talking about chat control [1]. If it passes it will break encryption in the EU and yes... politicians, police and military are exempt. It is going to be a total disaster for everyone.

[1] https://fightchatcontrol.eu/


Is running for local office enough to get exempted?


It's how they used to do things. The U.S. congress was exempt from the Civil Rights Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, and others until 1995 and the Congressional Accountability Act. Congress is still exempt from the Freedom of information Act and some others.


he would not. he would direct police to arrest anyone involved, or random people if the culprits can't be found, then spin it into a need for stricter surveillance on people's personal computers so they can't violate the privacy of public servants. like the gentleperson below has said, but worse


It worked for porn VHS rentals.


If we’re here (buying another layer of the panopticon) then the next logical step is to create an ADSBexchange-like citizen network, and let people track back.

You can already slap together something with an RTSP stream and Frigate on an individual level. Some people have great views of the road, and some people could just count cars.

Frankly, I can see a lot of benefits for citizens if they could understand and verify which locations police enforce with their physical presence.

As an aside, where the public transparency and oversight for these schemes? It seems like such a powder keg.


https://hackaday.com/2025/09/18/a-deep-dive-on-creepy-camera...

> uses a Raspberry Pi 5, a Halo AI board, and You Only Look Once (YOLO) recognition software to build a “computer vision system that’s much more accurate than anything on the market for law enforcement” for $250

https://github.com/bennjordan/ALPRovingGround

> adversarial noise attacks on license plate recognition systems (see my PlateShapez demo).. create an output dataset to train more effective attack models.. small, hardly-noticeable, random gaussian shapes to confuse AI license plate readers

"Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers", 70 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452

"Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices", 250 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45473698

"Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202


    >0:10 I point it out.
    >0:11 I said I would vote for this every
    >0:12 single time and I'll say it again. Um,
    >0:15 uh, camera technology and your
    >0:17 expectation of privacy when you're
    >0:19 driving around um, is none. And there is
    >0:22 no expectation of privacy when you're
    >0:24 driving a stolen car. Uh, you don't have
    >0:27 that expectation. That's the law of the
    >0:28 United States.
That's what the councilman said. All other context was clipped. As far as I can find, the rest of the 8 minute video is the host going on about that statement.

Is it incorrect? Judge for yourself. But the headline, "Politician calls constituents criminals with no right to privacy" is obviously false.


Often people are stopped using a premise of what's called a "Terry Stop" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_v._United_States) which permits police to briefly detain a person based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. If new reasonable suspicion for a different crime arises during the stop, that new crime can be investigated, provided the entire stop's duration is not prolonged beyond the time that the original stop would have taken.

And body cameras suck ass in terms of audio, they control when it's turned on and off, etc...

The best defense is to film them as well. Have cameras in your vehicle and home that stream directly to the cloud. Make sure that all the dialog is recorded.

Cops will do what they do - there is no stopping that at the individual level.

But what you can do is make sure that every movement and word is recorded for later scrutiny for due process. The days of banning cameras outright is gone, the data is sold and they purchase it. The only way to handle the invasion of privacy is to control the information.

Radio scanners made in the US today have a block in the 800Mhz range while everywhere else, that is not the case - reason? Newt Gingrich being caught talking this same shit over an analog cell phone. Yet, we still live with the stupid laws long after the technology, their antics or political relevance have moved on.


Source video with quote in regards to Flock Cameras from the City of Dearborn, Michigan councilperson : https://youtu.be/Jh2wfR7wyS0?t=3146


I expect there will eventually be enough cameras publicly streaming public spaces for anyone to be able to track any vehicle anywhere.


public is public. private is private.




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