I woke up to a bizarre headline in my local newspaper one day earlier this week here in Newnan, a small city of roughly 46,000 population in Coweta County, Georgia.
As most of you know, I’ve been reporting for quite a while on the AI spy cameras blanketing America and their role in the rapidly developing surveillance state. Atlanta-based Flock Safety has more than 118,000 of these surveillance cameras in more than 6,000 American cities and towns. Axon and Motorola are also major players in the police surveillance business, so it’s not just Flock, even though Flock gets most of the attention.
So you can imagine my eyes popping out of my head when I looked at the August 4 edition of The Newnan Times Herald and saw the headline: “Three Coweta sheriff’s employees resign after audit flags Flock Safety access.”
The article contained scant information other than to tell us that three employees of our local Sheriff’s Office had been forced to resign after they were caught misusing video data they accessed from the county’s Flock surveillance cameras in violation of department policy.
According to the Sheriff’s Office, the three employees met with their department heads to discuss their use of the AI-powered Flock tracking system after an internal audit flagged their activity. During those meetings, each of the three employees “resigned before the audit process was completed and before an internal investigation was opened,” the article stated.
The sheriff’s office did not identify the employees, describe the nature of their positions, or specify what activity triggered the review. Whatever they did, it must have been very embarrassing to the Sheriff for him to so quickly dismiss them with no further information provided.
At the end of the article, it was casually reported that our local Sheriff would provide us with no more information on the unethical activity of his three employees, and that the entire case had been turned over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations (GBI). Any further information will have to come from the GBI, which pretty much guarantees that we will never get any substantial information on what type of mischief occurred in Newnan, Georgia, because we’ve now essentially got Georgia cops investigating themselves.
If this case is anything similar to others across America involving the misuse of Flock cameras, we likely have a situation where law enforcement was spying on people in the community or tracking their movement, perhaps an ex-spouse, a girlfriend or hoped-for romantic interest, or some other personal use of the Flock surveillance technology that had nothing to do with actual law enforcement.
Here’s what should infuriate every citizen of Coweta County and every other community where these cameras are popping up along every major highway, secondary roads, bike paths, parks, shopping center parking lots and walking trails: If the police use this technology to track all of us, that’s allegedly good and proper. But if one of their employees uses it to track a particular individual, that’s considered bad.
Why not get rid of the cameras altogether? Americans don’t like being spied on by their government. It’s a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and needs to stop. Until it does, we have no privacy and live as slaves. The prying eyes of government are watching our every move, then using the information in secret ways only they are privy to.
On this topic of surveillance cameras, I’d like to share what may be the most thorough article I’ve seen yet on why we should fight to get these spy cameras removed. The article was authored and posted to Substack Friday, August 7, by Dr. Joseph Sansone, a psychotherapist and author of the book Psychopathic Authoritarianism: A Disease of the Soul. Below is an excerpt from his must-read article titled “Flock Cameras are a Systemic Manifestation of Severe Psychopathic Authoritarianism.” Read it to the end to get not only a brilliant psychological analysis of our sick society, but the all-important historical perspective.
Before you read Dr. Sansone’s important article below, please help support my work. You can do this by ugrading to a paid subscription or making a one-time donation of any size to my GiveSendGo. You can also send a check via snail mail c/o Leo Hohmann, P.O. Box 291, Newnan, GA 30264. Thank you for your financial support and for sharing these articles.
By Dr. Joseph Sansone
Flock Cameras have sprung up all across the United States. These cameras are all across America, from Florida to California. From Blue State to Red State, regardless of which political party is in power, these cameras are appearing. It is simply amazing how Republicans and Democrats can all work together, or at least look the other way, while a prison-style surveillance grid is being deployed along our roadways from sea to shining sea.
Flock cameras are AI-powered, solar-powered Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). The cameras take a snapshot and create a digital fingerprint. The cameras read license plates and identify the registered state and create a vehicle fingerprint by identifying the vehicles’ color, make, model, and body type, even retaining specific details such as roof cracks, bumper stickers, dents, trailers, or scratches. It also retains metadata such as the exact timestamp, direction of travel, and location.
Allegedly the cameras allow police to create real time hot lists to compare vehicles against crime databases and retroactively search the activities of vehicles related to crime scenes. Police can also track vehicle histories across state lines. This must be why we have a crime-free America.
Make no mistake. The cameras are not being deployed to catch criminals. The cameras are being deployed to criminalize citizenship.
These cameras create a permanent map of law-abiding citizens and can record exactly where you sleep, work, worship, or socialize, completely destroying the right to move anonymously in an alleged free society. The cameras can be used to target political dissent by tracking who attended rallies and protests and can retroactively search the cameras surrounding the event to log the vehicle descriptions, license plates, and identities of every attendee. Cross-state surveillance allows one state to police actions in another state.
This is all done without a search warrant or probable cause. General warrants were one of the primary causes leading to the American Revolution.
Flock cameras criminalize citizenship and create the further unlawful disparity of power between civilians and the government they employ. Flock cameras further the inversion of power that already exists between government and the people.
Flock cameras will be used to restrict driving and enforce energy or climate lockdowns. In cities like London, massive networks of ALPR cameras are actively used to enforce the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) and congestion boundaries. If a human enters the zone with a non-compliant vehicle or during restricted hours, they will be mailed an excessive fine.
As the illegal war with Iran continues, will this lead to energy lockdowns or driving restrictions?
Flock cameras would certainly be used to enforce such restrictions. Imagine if Flock cameras existed during the COVID tyranny era. The severity of the oppression would have been much worse.
Massachusetts, California, and Oregon are already exploring ways to restrict driving by taxing Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). Flock cameras can easily be used to support a tax-oppression scheme based on miles traveled. Gas taxes are already accomplishing this, however that is not oppressive enough. An energy lockdown in the foreseeable future would almost certainly utilize Flock cameras to punish drivers.
If not stopped, Flock cameras will be used in the future to geofence civilians into 15-minute cities. Leaving your designated area will lead to fines and imprisonment. The cameras will also be used to enforce proximity laws limiting civilian interaction based on social credit scores.
It is naïve to presume these unlawful cameras exist for benign purposes. The only reason to increase power over others is to satisfy an intent to exert power over others. Think of it like an object in motion staying in motion. An entity seeking and consuming power continues to do so until stopped.
It is vitally important to conceptualize the deployment of Flock cameras not merely as an unconstitutional violation of the 4th Amendment, and an abuse of technology. Flock cameras must also be viewed as severe pathology, a systemic manifestation of Psychopathic Authoritarianism, enhanced by technological advancement.
In my upcoming book, Psychopathic Authoritarianism: A Disease of the Soul, I detail the individual and systemic pathology of Psychopathic Authoritarian Disorder (PAD) and the recurrent societal manifestation of Psychopathic Authoritarianism. Fear and control are vital elements in the Psychopathic Authoritarian system as it drives the Dark Tetrad of sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. I describe this in great detail I my book, so I will not do so here.
A system of government that monitors civilians without a warrant or probable cause is akin to an insanely jealous lover that monitors your every move, questions your every action and interaction, and violates your basic autonomy and freedom of consciousness. Such behavior is not remotely normal or healthy. A healthy well-adjusted person would not put up with such nonsense. Likewise, a healthy collection of individuals would not put up with such nonsense on the systemic level from government.
If your romantic partner had zero trust in you, it would be naïve to place trust in them. If the government has zero trust in the people, why would the people place any trust in that government?
Whether it is monitoring online activity or monitoring your movements on the roadway, a system of government that engages in such activities is a rogue system of government and must be rebuffed.
On the other hand, the government has what seems to be a perpetual stream of secrets. Secret programs, secret agencies, classified programs and documents, secret wars, and so on. The idea that a government can legitimately have secrets is antithetical to the concept of a Constitutional Republic.
The people controlling the money supply, media, and the government are suffering from severe PAD. Understanding the surveillance state as a severe pathology is necessary to facilitate the reconceptualizing of a proper relationship between government and the people. Psychopathic Authoritarianism is a disease of the soul that has become a systemic threat to our species.
Regardless of the situation, Psychopathic Authoritarians utilize it to argue for more power and control. This is not a healthy functional response to the current domestic or world situation. Once you realize that you are dealing with people with a dangerous pathology it then becomes imperative to create restrictive boundaries and limit power to those with PAD.
Contrast the attitude of those with PAD with that of James Madison. James Madison was a combat veteran and was present in the darkest hours of the American Revolution and fought at the battle of Trenton, the turning point of the war. As President, during the war of 1812, after the British burned the White House to the ground, and First Lady Dolley Madison had to flee the White House salvaging the unflattering iconic portrait of an elderly George Washington, even after that, Madison, the father of the Constitution, did not violate the Bill of Rights. Madison did not use this event as an excuse to usurp liberty. Madison had faith in the freedom and Natural Rights preserved in the U.S. Constitution.
When people with severe pathology at work entailing a lust for power that supersedes all reason, seek to usurp human dignity and human liberty, Americans must keep James Madison in mind. With the White House burning to the ground and his wife fleeing the scene, Madison valued human liberty and dignity more than the lust for power.
In Federalist paper number 40, Madison, while paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence, asserts that the right to revolution is transcendent. Such an understanding mandates a government that treads lightly. The United States government and the 50 state governments, including local governments, are operating illegally. This situation must be corrected.
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