State of Friday: THE UPSHOT OF NANCY GUTHRIE
Hire more police. Build more prisons. Otherwise, let the rest of America be free.
Greetings, Dear Reader,
Can we get dark for a minute today?
THE UPSHOT OF NANCY GUTHRIE
I know what you’re thinking because I’ve been thinking about it too: How, in the current year, can a semi-high profile human being simply disappear without a trace?
We have doorcam imagery of the suspect in Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. We have access to phone records. Most of us have RFID chips of one sort or another constantly pinging silently in our pockets. We have thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth. Heck, Nancy Guthrie’s hearing aides were probably connected to wifi somehow.
How on God’s green Earth, with the utter ubiquity of technology, can a man simply walk into her home, out with her and into the night, and the most powerful, technologically advanced civilization in the history of mankind cannot locate her?
She’s simply gone?
Almost 2,000 miles away from where Nancy Guthrie disappeared, the small Virginia town of Emporia, population 6,000, just spent a king’s ransom on a surveillance system known as “Flock.” The town now has over 400 surveillance cameras and a flying drone that automatically deploys to 911 calls.
Flock Safety provides license plate and domestic surveillance cameras to local police jurisdictions.
Local ordinances around the country have been paying Flock millions of dollars for license plate and surveillance camera technology. Based on previous spends, which vary widely, Emporia’s contract with Flock could have cost anywhere from tens of thousands to a few million dollars.
The technology is so accurate, police in Emporia say they managed to capture a car thief within 30 minutes.
If you’re thinking this sounds a bit Orwellian, that’s because it is, Dear Reader.
These cameras are on 24/7. They capture everything and everybody in the township. Technically, the government owns the footage and, usually, must save and then delete it after 30 days. That’s standard policy even with most police bodycams.
As you can probably guess, there have already been cases of misuse. One police officer was charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly using the technology to track his ex-girlfriend and her new guy-friend more than 170 times.
Some concerned citizens have managed to nuke their township’s partnership with Flock by simply filing public records requests. If the government owns the footage, and police use it, that means citizens also own the footage and can request it.
It appears that while some local municipalities have the money to pay a surveillance company like Flock, they don’t have the manpower to actually administer over the data. These public records requests have caused certain townships to scuttle the surveillance tech altogether.
And how do we feel about all this?
It’s almost a certainty that if Flock Safety were employed in Guthrie’s neighborhood, she’d have likely been found by now.
Does humanity truly want that level of “safety?” Do we lose something special by gaining such a security blanket?
The Nancy Guthrie disappearance might actually be the darkest of clouds with the tiniest sliver of a silver lining. It makes you think, wait a second, despite all the craziest advances — AI-powered refrigerators that talk to you about your shopping list and then talk to your grocery store to let it know you’ve arrived — we’re still free in some places. Aside from the Almighty, we aren’t always being watched.
At some level, for better or worse, good or evil, we still have liberty.
I’m not a full-blown libertarian, nor am I a Luddite, and I’m certainly not naive. I do think to some extent we will probably get to a place eventually where there is no “off the grid.” But we’re not there yet, and Guthrie is evidence of that.
Is there actually an upshot to the tragedy of an elderly woman disappearing?
My general belief is, unfortunately, yes. I do not think we need that kind of surveillance. I do not think we needed a Patriot Act on the off chance that I might end up on an airliner with Mahmoud the radical terrorist. I don’t think the secret FISA court that was misused to spy on Trump was worth the squeeze. And I certainly don’t think small towns should be installing Sauron’s Eye on telephone polls.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think the best form of crime prevention is plain old law and order. The hammer of justice and the wrath of God.
It’s not perfect, but it’s better than a grotesque (highly expensive) marriage between defense tech and local governments.
Hire more police. Build more prisons. Otherwise, let the rest of America be free.
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Just look at what the CCP is doing with the surveillance they have. Sadly I must confirm that "if it can be done someone will do it; when someone does it someone will abuse it". So more police and prisons are the best we have.