State Surveillance
In the aftermath of the Capitol insurrection, FBI was contacting people whose cellphones pinged cell towers near the Capitol during the riots. #state-surveillance
LAPD requested Ring footage of BLM protests. Ring has partnerships with law enforcement, e.g. enabling them to make bulk requests to Ring users. Despite the requests being optional, users may be coerced into cooperating. Propositions: LEO must have reasonable suspicion & the request must be specific to a time and place, LEO must publish stats about their consent searches of electronic devices, a person’s consent should be as narrowly construed as possible, and LEO must notify the person of their legal right to refuse.
Miscellaneous
The outgroup is better defined as proximity + differences. If you’re part of the Blue Tribe, your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or atheists - it’s the Red Tribe. Actual tolerance is hard, because it requires tolerating the out-group. Discrimination based on partyism was found stronger than that of race (but racism is still worse because of the imbalance in numbers and in resources).
Through everything we read and study, we see how the world might be otherwise than we expect. Befriend [the world] and ask the questions about race, opportunity, and citizenship relevant to understanding it… The danger of intellectual paralysis in face of chaos is finally that it undermines the first premise of democracy: namely, that ordinary citizens will always be ready to think… The power of education is that it catapulted our minds outside of this particular place and moment, and its horrors, and thank god for that, because the flight gave us back our minds. No longer did we have to use the words “mind-numbing” or “incomprehensible” to describe the effect of events on us, for we could comprehend.
References
- FBI tracking cell phones, Capitol riots. Bruce Leshan. www.wusa9.com . news.ycombinator.com . Jan 19, 2021.
- LAPD Requested Ring Footage of Black Lives Matter Protests. Guariglia, Matthew; Maass, Dave. www.eff.org . Feb 16, 2021.
- Mobile Phone Tracking. en.wikipedia.org . en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Jun 20, 2021.
- I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup. Scott Alexander. slatestarcodex.com . Sep 30, 2014. Accessed Sep 6, 2021.
- Aims of Education Address 2001. Danielle S. Allen. college.uchicago.edu . Sep 20, 2001. Accessed Sep 26, 2021.
A powered mobile phone always sends signals to one of the closest base stations. Given multiple base stations, the angle and time of arrival, and location signatures of each cell location can be used to locate a mobile device. The higher the density of cell towers, the more precise the calculated location.