11.8 percent (15.0 million) of U.S. households were food insecure
at some time during 2017.
Yes, that's about 1 in 9. How much would it cost to ensure those
people didn't go hungry in the wealthiest nation in the world?
From:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/interactive-charts-and-highlights/
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Even paranoids have real enemies.
(Delmore Schwartz)
I try not to be credulous about conspiracy theories absent some
actual reliable evidence, there are just so many of them these
days.
however
I got to thinking the other day about this idea I've heard
expressed in a variety of media (radio, TV, online forums) that car
ownership is expected to largely go away in not-distant future -
that everyone will simply rent a car short-term as needed or
subscribe to a service that makes one available, et cetera. I have
some doubts that people in rural areas will go that way, but our
population is more and more concentrated in cities now.
It dawned on me yesterday (yeah, I'm slow sometimes) that if nearly
no automobile is privately owned, there will be practically no
privacy as to your whereabouts when traveling farther than your
feet (or a bike) will take you. From time to time people get up in
arms regarding loss of privacy when using air travel, train travel,
and the like under the accusation that we are headed toward a
"papers, please" society where you can't travel without showing
identification and your movements being recorded.
We may soon find ourselves in a country where the government
knows where you've been, who you've visited, when you've been
upstate to see your Aunt Sally... If the government would like
to track any group of people it believes are working against
government goals or programs (or individual politicians' goals, or
an intelligence agency's goals) a ridiculous amount of information
on our whereabouts would be at their disposal to vilify us, work
out who else we might be conspiring with...
We really ought to enshrine our right to privacy in the US
Constitution now rather than relying on the 9th Amendment or the
increasingly neutered 4th Amendment to protect us from constant,
pervasive surveillance. The Founders tried, but we have moved
beyond needing mere reasonable means to defend our rights - our
leadership have declared open war on our right to privay and
refused to defend it from the thefts of corporations. We have done
no better ourselves, signing away our privacy for baubles and
convenience.
I recall a Radiolab podcast[0] I listened to some time ago where
they described a system that was being used in a major city that
used stored digital high-resolution, wide-area video footage of the
city from a camera in a plane high over that city to produce a
record of all activity all over the city, indexed by time-stamp and
position. They could then 'scroll' back the past path of a vehicle
that had been used in a crime, both in space and time, retrace a
suspect's past week of movements if necessary to see if they were
anywhere suspicious, verify alibis of their whereabouts, look for
other crimes they may have committed, potential accomplices to
investigate... you name it. Due to the limited information it
provides it's almost the perfect tool for raising suspicions about
you, there are so many stories you could write to connect the dots
of a daily person's life if you were a motivated prosecutor.
It sounds like science fiction until you realize it was developed
for use in Iraq to find out who was placing IED's so they could be
tracked down. Also, it has already been used in Baltimore, Maryland
among other places in the US. All brought to you by a private
company with the cheerful name of Persistent Surveillance Systems.
Of course, Bruce Schneier warned us about this approaching
surveillance state over a decade ago[1] and yet here we are.
Of course I don't have any reasons to carry out activity that would
cause the government to retrace my steps in this manner, or dig
through my license-plate-scanning data from the past year, or
anything of the sort. But that's hardly the point, now is it? We
live in a society where plenty of government officials and
employees are tempted to use their authority in inappropriate,
illegal, or even very sleazy ways. You don't need any personal
reason to want to keep your information to yourself, there are
plenty of general reasons helpfully provided.
For instance when it came to light that the NSA was storing tons of
data and surveillance on US citizens, it eventually came out that
some NSA employees with access to those systems used them check up
on wives, boyfriends, and other people they knew. It wasn't even
really surprising, power like that will be abused unless there are
safeguards and oversight by the general public. (It may be
surprising to some that the agency had instituted no safeguards to
prevent such misbehavior, if only to keep those workers 'on task'
and not wasting Company time.)
Further, if a law professor tells you that you should never talk to
the police[2], well, doesn't that tell you all you need to know?
Anyone interested in how actual encounters with the police and our
justice system go ought to listen to the entirety of the third
season of the Serial[3] podcast. I am myself pretty cynical
regarding the functioning of the US justice system at all levels
and it still disturbed me, mainly for the fact that when egregious
abuses were shown to be deeply embedded in the system there was
really no effort or mechanism to root them out.
There are very sound reasons why we should be pushing back against
additional, warrant-less surveillance methods. Probably the only
real way to do so now that the cat is out of the bottle is to
prevent them from using those methods against us in court or to
reassert the intended depth and breadth of the maimed 4th Amendment
in new legislation. I don't have a lot of faith in that being
feasible, so the end of private vehicle ownership worries me.
Is this paranoia? I suppose time will tell. The pendulum of
individual rights versus government power swings back and forth
over US history and sometimes we learn some lessons and make some
progress. From my perspective we have continued to give the police,
prosecutors, and the intelligence community far too much leeway to
investigate, track, and surveil us with very limited oversight and
accountability.
[0] https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/eye-sky
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/automatic_licen.html
[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvkgnp/law-professor-police-interrogation-law-constitution-survival
[3] https://serialpodcast.org/
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