Among the recipients of the money: Cicero Town President Larry Dominick and Lake County Sheriff John Idleburg, both of whose government agencies use the technology from the Atlanta company.
Bribes. Just call them bribes.
Probably some extortion here and there where they find it possible, too. It definitely will turn into that as the surveillance authoritarian state advances.
“Kompromat” is the term we use in Germany for such material. Derives from the practise of eastern block autocracies and their secret services to blackmail foreign politicians into compliance by presenting them with video evidence of their pedophilia and other disgusting crime.
“Extortion” sounds more dramatic in English. Probably partly because it’s a word everybody knows.
I mean, the ideal solution there would be electing fewer pedophiles, but Western civilization has always seemed to have an issue with ending up with the worst possible people in charge.
Word.
Right now Flock Safety is a pariah in the US like AIPAC. Outing these transactions would benefit both rival campaigns and corruption-watch nonprofits.
Mass surveillance should be regarded as a crime agains the public, and a violation of protections by the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Maybe such politicians should be pushed to publicly endorse making ALPR network database hits inadmissable in court. Get a public no.
Already we’re seeing police precincts warning officers to not admit they searched ALPR databases but to make another excuse. We’re already seeing the same shift to parallel reconstruction that we did with IMSI spoofer usage.
In a better world, ALPR database searches should only be allowed with a narrowly-constrained judicial warrant.
But IRL, law enforcement nationwide is notorious for abusing forensic tools to secure probable cause or even false convictions. So they shouldn’t be trusted with ALPRs at all.
“starts”
I’m pretty sure the article is written by AI…
The first contribution to the Cicero Voters Alliance (The Larry Dominick Team) was for $1,000, made in 2021, according to Illinois State Board of Elections records.
It’s started (in that specific place) five years ago.
What makes it seem like that bit is written by AI?
I do not even want to read any thing on the Internet anymore, it is all just AI now
They weren’t already doing that?
Local politicians being bought off for a couple thousand dollars. Fucking shameful. That’s not even a “oh you had to really persuade them” like a new car or something. It’s a good chunk of change but a thousand bucks will maybe get you a weekend vacation in Tuscon. But it was enough to sell our privacy down the well.
Politicians are notorious for being bought for very little: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
They are cheap whores.
Flock should be designated a terrorist organization.
flock does feed the data to palantir quite a bit, thiel is one of flocks investors. not surprising the sam altman-esque ceo going on.
Usually when researching my ballot I have a hard time getting enough info on the local politicians to feel like I’m making an informed decision. My sincere thanks to Flock for making it so much easier to identify who not to vote for.
they also word ballot measures in a way to make it confusing too.
