I hate this timeline. :P

"I only help with official U.S. government information and services.

If you have a question about a federal benefit, agency, or how-to (passports, taxes, Social Security, veteransâ(TM) services, and similar), ask that and I can look it up."

I guess it got removed. :(

Nah, we went to back to usenet, FidoNet, etc. ;)

One time $10K is low. How about $10K per day? I will take that!

Ooh yeah. That's a good one. Remember THEM!?

I am an ant, not a human.

Ditto. "Wipe them. All of them."

Good point. It's something that really should be addressed. But the Constitution was designed as a limit solely on the government's powers, and it's up to the government as described in the Constitution to write laws that restrict what private entities can do, within the bounds of their enforcement powers as provided by the Constitution.

This isn't a new problem. After Snowden, the US realized they could pretty much just outsource the NSA's spying. And they have.

And the other thing is: none of this is really relevant. There's nothing unconstitutional about sitting in a public space and recording the license plate of every car that passes. There's nothing unconstitutional about building a network of people doing that and storing it in a giant database. It was just infeasible to have a bunch of people doing that. Now it can be automated.

There's nothing unconstitutional about compiling data about people that people agree to hand over as part of the license agreement for using a thing. Once that information is owned by a private entity, there's nothing unconstitutional about the government buying it from that private entity. It's just the government receiving data that was either generated in a public setting or that was willing given in a private setting. (At least, legally. I doubt most people realize how much data on their lives companies collect, and I doubt most people realize they agreed to hand it over.)

Maybe handing over data collected in this fashion should be against the law. Maybe there should be privacy laws preventing it from being gathered in the first place. But there aren't, and neither party is interested in changing that. Which leaves us with the reality that nothing Flock was doing is illegal, and that the replacement systems localities are using aren't illegal either.

I really wish more people understood this. The Constitution only protects you from the government. It does nothing to protect you from private companies collecting your information, and do they ever. As electronics get more advanced, the amount of information private companies are collecting is ever increasing. TVs listen in on every conversation. VR headsets map out your house. And cameras installed on street lights record every vehicle they see.

Which brings me to the second very important point about Flock cameras people forget: pretty much every town that is canceling contracts with Flock isn't getting rid of license plate scanning cameras. They're just replacing them with cameras from other companies that do the same thing. Companies that people haven't heard of and that therefore haven't raised the same complaints.

Does it have an internal cellular?

I think the infographic they put out said that the "always listening" features were not available in the EU and China. Although honestly I don't see how anyone can trust the hardware when the "always recording conversations" features are part of the SIP.

I can't wait to see how many places ban this Apple Watch entirely. First, there's no way this is legal in two-party consent states, and I don't care how Apple tries to re-define "record."

Secondly, I don't think anyone really cares how secure Apple says "Private Cloud Compute" is, no one is going to trust that a device that's designed to "listen" (but not "record") every conversation in the vicinity isn't "recording" especially when it can produce an AI summary of a conversation.

There's no way this Apple Watch will be allowed in government buildings or anywhere else that people may not want to be recorded, no matter Apple's privacy claims. I expect to see "No Apple Watch Allowed" signs start appearing all over the place once this releases.

For me, I want a newer smaller and lighter iPhone like mini, SE, 4S, etc. 13 mini is starting to get old and slow!