ChunkMcHorkle

Link to Wired article for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with Redact

I’m pretty sure it’s paywalled but adblock takes care of it for me. If anyone needs an archive link let me know.

The article does not specify the timeframe involved, but does give the totals:

The audit identified 983 search entries involving 97 identifiable license plates from Georgia, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina.

South Carolina plates represented most of the activity. Forty-eight South Carolina plates accounted for 788 search entries, according to the records. Department documents also noted that most registered vehicle owners identified in the audit were Hispanic.

983 searches, most centered in a different, neighboring state. For the record, Savannah is near the GA/SC state line, but still a couple hours from the nearest city in southeast South Carolina, a lot of land that is mostly rural; about the same distance to the nearest big city in Florida, also rural land; and five or six hours from bumfuck eastern North Carolina, where there are no big cities east of Raleigh. Lots of little towns, a few bigger towns, but mostly rural throughout.

What that means is that NOBODY in Savannah PD was overseeing Flock usage until people started making a stink about its misuse, because that’s a lot of very visibly out-of-state searches.

It’s not like you live in New Jersey and half the plates you see are New York or Pennsylvania, a situation where this kind of search spread would make sense for someone working local cases: for them, that tri-state area is a local spread. Rather, it’s that this officer lives in a mid-sized city in the middle of a large rural area, working local cases involving local people, but has an absolute fuckton of searches for license plates from everywhere else.

She said she rarely used Flock herself and generally accessed it to help investigate missing-person cases involving behavioral health patients.

I’d also put money on the ICE husband not just doing it for himself and his own cases, but telling his ICE buds, “Hey, I’ll run your plate for you,” meaning that he handed it out as favors and that the searches were not just for his own cases, but those of other ICE agents, all with varying degrees of actual legal cause or right to do so.

I do, but for the most part you’ll only see Cambridge Analytica mentioned by independent media, very little in the mainstream. In fact, if memory serves, it was The Guardian (which is independent) that did most of the reporting at the time, such as the article I just linked.

There seems to be a concerted effort by the media to diminish any public recognition of large-scale, coordinated efforts using social media to manipulate elections and voters, making sure that each particular incident is reported in a light entirely separate from the rest, as though it’s a one-off and not exactly like a few dozen others.

As someone who engages in good-faith discussions, I like participating in those comms. Bad-faith participants do not limit themselves in the same way.

I can understand how you might think your proposal is a solution, but in the US the amount of political content is overwhelming and comes from every direction, especially online.

There is NO such thing as just blocking when it’s everywhere, and if you can downvote it you’ve already read it. I need to not see it at all when I am not in the fact-checking kind of mood for it.

So the most perfect way to avoid the firehose of propaganda is to remove oneself from it altogether. See y’all in November – or December, if shit gets real.

For myself, I am spending less and less time online as the US midterms approach and I would not be surprised if others are doing the same. My time is better spent offline at the moment, but I haven’t really left. Just taking more and more breaks for now.