‘Reporter’ celebrates mass surveillance, showing exactly why we shouldn’t have billionaires

Fanatically pro-‘Israel’ rag The Free Press has embarrassed itself again, this time by singing the praises of a US mass surveillance camera system. In a recent report, stenographer-playing-the-role-of-journalist Maya Sulkin sings the praises of the Flock technology.

The system is a network of over 100,000 licence plate reading cameras across the US that send the data they collect back to authorities, who can then precisely track the movement of millions of Americans. What The Free Press didn’t disclose is that they and Flock share a mutual investor — Andreessen Horowitz, a company founded by billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

This was pointed out by an actual journalist, Adam Johnson, who correctly labelled Sulkin’s piece as a “straight up infomercial“. In it, she describes people’s rational fear of ubiquitous cameras as a “panic”. She then goes on to scold the citizens taking action against the cameras. These include people who have sliced the devices in half with an electric saw, and rammed them with trucks.

The Free Press — “Infomercial” masquerades as journalism

She concludes by reassuring viewers that Flock is a wonderful, crime-crushing miracle that we should all celebrate. Her final line is:

To be blunt, they’re not interested in you unless you’re a kidnapper, a thief, or someone who intends to do harm.

This is reminiscent of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s famous line, in which he said:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

He said this to encourage everyone to hand over their data to Google. It ignores the basic principle that essentially all humans value privacy as a basic right, even if they’re doing nothing ‘wrong’. As far as we know, Schmidt has not offered up his browsing history for all the rest of us to see.

Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg was eager to inform us that “privacy [is] no longer a social norm“, and so we should let Facebook hoover up all our personal info. Like Schmidt, Zuckerberg wasn’t inclined to practice what he preached. To secure his own privacy, he bought up houses surrounding his own, to create an additional buffer between him and the rest of the world.

Now The Free Press, a vessel of other billionaires, is telling us not to fear the latest form of mass spying, one that unites corporate and state interests.

Flock system shared info with ICE terrorists

Chad Marlow of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told Democracy Now:

So, basically, automatic license plate readers or ALPRs are cameras that take a picture of every single car that goes by it. Not just the cars that are suspected of criminality or have done something wrong, but every single car. They record the information about the car, including where it is and when it was there.

Then they put it into a database – and this is where it gets really scary – because now you have pictures of every innocent person who drives by in a database that is kept for a month or more and shared throughout the nation with all of Flock’s law enforcement customers and in fact, even internationally with people associated with Flock.

He continued:

Flock always says it doesn’t sell data, but Flock saying it doesn’t sell data is like Ford Motor Company saying it doesn’t sell steering wheels. Yes, I understand the larger product is cars, and it’s monitoring vehicles, but it’s that data that is part of the Flock product just like a steering wheel is part of Ford Motor Company’s car product. [The] more information it can collect and the more it can share, the more value that their product [has].

404 Media showed that Flock shared data with terrorist gang ICE, Trump’s racist paramilitary outfit that has been smashing rights and murdering people across the US.

This latest attempt to manufacture consent is a stark illustration of why billionaires simply shouldn’t exist. They construct mass surveillance systems because it’s profitable, and it enables them to gain more power relative to the average person. They then use the tech to aid authoritarian regimes like that of Trump. Finally, they utilise their vast resources to buy up media companies, and try to tell us all this is simply in our best interests.

This level of information asymmetry between citizen and state is never in our interests. However, it’s ultimately the wealth asymmetry that precedes it that is the greatest danger we face.

Featured image via DailyCamera

By Robert Freeman

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