Tab Clearing...

• Your favorite gadgets are getting way more expensive again. Thanks AI bubble!


• Cop caught on video stalking a woman by using a license plate reader.


• Waymo robotaxi delivers teen hooligans to the cops.

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Surveillance States

Perhaps unsurprisingly, cops keep getting caught using Flock cameras and their surveillance database to stalk people.

Welcome to the panopticon.

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The Panopticon...

This sounds horrible and dystopian...

BusPatrol plans to scan the license plates of all vehicles the buses drive past, and then let law enforcement search that data. The plan would essentially turn school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles.

Basically turning your local Anytown School District's bus fleet into mobile Flock cameras.

They've already drawn scrutiny from Florida to Pennsylvania.

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Tab Clearing...

• When you click that opt-out button on a website, have you really opted out? A new audit thinks not. That audit looked at web traffic associated with Microsoft, Meta, and Google and found they all failed to honor such requests.


• "How a Navy photographer snapped an iconic Artemis II astronaut photo" (As a fan of candid portraiture, that photo slaps.)


• The only ones qualified enough to shoot their partners.

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Tab Clearing...

• A peace officer talks accountability: Acting like the good guys should...


• Recovering undersea fiber optic cable for recycling is a fascinating process.


• A fascinating blog post on the evolution of the English language: How far back in time can you understand English?

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Death Ray Spray-and-Pray

Apparently the valiant men and women of the United States Customs and Border Protection agency were using borrowed Army anti drone lasers to protect us from the scourge of children's mylar party balloons (or, since I suppose they could have drifted north from Ciudad Juarez across the Rio Grande, los globos).

A Pentagon plan to use a high-energy, counter-drone laser without having coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration about potential risks to civilian flights prompted Wednesday’s unprecedented airspace shutdown over El Paso, Texas, multiple sources told CNN.

Two people familiar with the matter said later Wednesday that Customs and Border Protection, not the US military, was in control of the laser technology when it was used this week around El Paso to shoot down balloons.

I'm having flashbacks to that time they shut down the entire city of Boston for a guerilla Aqua Teen Hunger Force ad campaign featuring Lite Brites.

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Tab Clearing...

• Children and Grandchildren of Immigrants Abduct a Native American


• This guy monitors the movements of the "shadow fleet" of sanctioned tankers from the rooftop of his home.


• ChatGPT wrote a suicide lullaby for this man based on his favorite childhood book, Goodnight Moon.

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Special Edition Tab Clearing...

• We're the Only Ones Disorganized Enough: ICE accidentally extends job offer to Slate reporter


• We're the Only Ones Authoritarian Enough: Cop Used Flock to Wrongfully Accuse a Woman Then Refused to Look at Evidence That Exonerated Her, Body Camera Shows


• We're the Only Ones Warrantless Enough: Federal Agents Used a Battering Ram to Enter a Minneapolis Home Without Valid Warrant, Video Shows

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Tab Clearing...

• "The Lies Russia Tells Itself"


• "The excellent tactical training I gave cops is why policing today is such a hot mess."


• American Nightcrawlers

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Nothing fishy there...

Well, the release of the Epstein Files turned out to be something of a disappointment, since the Justice Department had made sure that ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ and ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ were heavily ⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️ and redacted. Then a bunch of photos were removed from the site yesterday afternoon. Representatives Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) are making Impeach Bondi noises.

Meme makers had a field day...

Tab Clearing...

• Why did they used to dye pistachios red?


• The internet is full of sick fucks.


• FBI warns of crooks posing as feds.

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Tab Clearing...

• "The Squirrel Hunters" -This guy's writing is so good. I need to add him to the sidebar.


• Charges changed in Chicago.


• Jim Grey spotted some pretty cool cars this time around.

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Tab Clearing...

• Fed law enforcement surge is burning unmarked vehicles normally used by the FBI for counterespionage and surveillance. Agents unamused.


• No, the F35 and F16 flyover was not done to drown out the press conference held by the Epstein victims.


• Absolutely clownshoes.

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Smile, You're on Candid Camera!

Surveillance cameras, both private and government-owned, have become nearly ubiquitous in an era when digital video sensors are small and inexpensive, bandwidth is nearly too cheap to meter, and storage is (at least relative to a couple decades ago) effectively unlimited.

It was therefore likely only a matter of time before a municipal police department would be caught red-handed using real-time facial recognition technology to scan the input for the faces of suspects. According to the ACLU and WaPo, New Orleans Police Department had been doing just that for a couple years.

They pinkie-swear that the program has been paused since April, though.

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Sauce for the Gander...

From yesterday's batch of Executive Orders:

Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.

(b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

If a Democratic president had issued this, people would be howling, and don't pretend otherwise.

Tab Clearing...

• Apparently seasteading is in the news again.


• Are em dashes a sign of ChatGPT-generated content, or just a literate and very correct writer? (I tend to be extremely casual about typography and layout here at VFTP, while Bobbi is a stickler for correct formatting at her blog.)


• "If you have nothing to hide, citizen, you have nothing to fear!": More antics from the party of small government and personal freedom. A bunch of script kiddies amalgamating a bunch of previously siloed federal databases into a single point of failure is a breathtakingly bad idea and an irresistible target for future abuse.

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Tab Clearing...

• Robocop: Look, there in your modem! It's a fed! It's a bot! It's both!


• Remember when Republicans decried using the IRS as a political weapon? Good times.


• I know you're going to find this hard to believe, but it looks like Fyre Festival 2: Electric Boogaloo is shaping up to be yet another fraud fest.

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Tab Clearing...

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation is worried about the so-called "Take It Down" Act.


• As many as 12,000 North Korean troops involved in the Russian counteroffensive against the Ukrainian salient in Kursk.


• How is a cop supposed to keep an eye out for people violating 23 V.S.A. § 1095b (Vermont's ban on cell phone use while driving) when he's too busy watching Matt Walsh YouTube rants about trans people or whatever? You can tell it was distracted driving because he was so distracted he hit and killed a bicyclist.

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Privacy Nightmare

Technically you don't have any reasonable expectation of privacy while you're just driving down the open road, on public thoroughfares.

I don't know that the Founding Fathers had thought through the implications of license plate readers, though...

Matt Brown of Brown Fine Security made a series of YouTube videos showing vulnerabilities in a Motorola Reaper HD ALPR that he bought on eBay. As we have reported previously, these ALPRs are deployed all over the United States by cities and police departments. Brown initially found that it is possible to view the video and data that these cameras are collecting if you join the private networks that they are operating on. But then he found that many of them are misconfigured to stream to the open internet rather than a private network.

ALPR being "Automated License Plate Reader", of course. These cameras are common enough tech that you can buy a variety of them on Amazon.

You may recall the fun I had with a botched license plate read back in the early days of this blog if you've been around long enough.

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Negligent Discharge

So one of the NYPD cops, an ESU* officer at that, cranked off a round in the Columbia building that was temporarily occupied by student protestors. He was using the weapon-mounted light to find a way to navigate barriers in the dark. Fortunately the bullet didn't hit anyone.

There was absolutely no reason to have an unholstered firearm in the middle of that Punch & Judy Show. That was a job for a handheld light, not the SureFire U-Boat screwed to your Glock. 

People act like just having a light on a pistol turns it into some sort of dual-purpose tool and next thing you know they're using it to direct traffic or look for stuff they dropped under their squad car in the dark. I swear to gawd, it's only a matter of time before we hear about some Officer Fife using it to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.

*NYPD Emergency Services Unit contains their equivalent of SWAT, but not all ESU officers are SWAT dudes.

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