So much for the land of the free.
And I don't remember voting for the installation of all of the surveillance cameras on every traffic signal either. They've been in place a number of years now, but I recall no actual pubic debate about it, or discussion of the costs, I just remember they gradually just quietly appeared. I see Merrily's post above, so I assume some or all of these cameras also record audio. It probably all gets stored, indexed, and served to various government agencies (and even worse, some private ones) from the monstrous data center they've constructed in Utah.
All my life we've joked about such things, now it's reality.
The dark side of this, and of drones, has yet to bite us, but it will. The fascist police state is being rolled out gradually, to allow people to acclimate to their incrementally lost freedoms.
The only way I can think of to address these problems is to get money out of politics, so we can have actual debates about what it is we want government to do for us, instead of learning after the fact what government is doing TO us.
The first step in that is to refuse to work for any condidate (freudian typo) who accepts corporate money. The entire fascist police state is the capture of our government by corporate money (which drives the war machine, extraction industries and cheap labor pools).
Bernie's candidacy is a great start. Also the list of Bernie Democrats tells us who is worth supporting. Once we get some people elected without corporate money, we will establish proof of concept, people will see who the genuine public servants are, and see the others as the frauds that they are. This is the road we must travel. On the journey, sing nasty songs to streetlights, you know they're listening.
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