{"id":17553,"date":"2026-06-13T08:34:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T15:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/?p=17553"},"modified":"2026-06-13T08:34:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T15:34:20","slug":"your-town-for-300m-surveillance-state-on-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/2026\/06\/13\/your-town-for-300m-surveillance-state-on-sale\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Town for $300M: Surveillance State, On Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

And lately we’ve had several cases of people falsely arrested or accused of crimes without the police doing due diligence using these systems. But this is interesting in that it’s the foundation for the 15 minute prison cities… And this has been a plan in the works for decades as expert imminent domain witness Rosa Koire pointed out<\/a>, who had the unique perspective to see it early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/reclaimthenet.org\/your-town-for-300m-surveillance-state-on-sale<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n

<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Buried beneath the law-and-order slogans is a procurement list that doubles as the blueprint for permanent surveillance.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

By Christina Maas<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every so often, a government program comes along that tells you exactly what it is, if you\u2019re willing to read past the slogan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Justice Department\u2019s new Model Cities Initiative<\/a>, with its $300 million for two to four lucky cities and applications due September 1, is wrapped in the law-and-order ribbon: \u201crestore law and order,\u201d \u201cMake America Safe Again,\u201d a quote from the Acting Attorney General about supercharging our law enforcement partners. Standard issue agreeable stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t glaze over though. Scroll down to the part where they list what the money buys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cReal-time crime centers; forensic and DNA tools; body-worn cameras; license plate readers; artificial intelligence systems; small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and counter-UAS; ballistic identification systems; and information technology upgrades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read that as a procurement list and it\u2019s boring. Read it as an architecture diagram and it\u2019s something else entirely. Because that\u2019s what it is: not a grab bag of gadgets but the parts list for a city that watches everyone, all the time, and figures out who the suspect is afterward. The federal government just opened an order for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you\u2019re actually buying<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u201creal-time crime center\u201d sounds like a place where serious people solve murders. Functionally, it\u2019s a fusion hub: a room with a video wall where feeds that used to live in separate silos get piped into one screen and pinned to one map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are well over a hundred of these running in the US now, and the rest of the shopping list is what flows into them. License plate readers photographing every car that rolls past, logging plate, time, location, make, model, color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Drone feeds, increasingly \u201cdrone as first responder\u201d programs where the aircraft beats the cops to the 911 call. Body cams. Gunshot mics. The neighbor\u2019s doorbell camera, if the neighbor registered it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the \u201cAI systems\u201d the grant names right out loud: face recognition, object detection, software that claims it can spot suspicious behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the part the vendors don\u2019t put on the slide. None of this is dangerous because any single camera is dangerous. A cop has always been allowed to watch you walk down the street.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing that changes the physics is query speed. The difference between a filing cabinet and Google isn\u2019t the information; it\u2019s that one of them answers in milliseconds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When an analyst can type your plate into a box and instantly retrieve everywhere your car has been seen across the city, or, through the magic of shared networks, across the country, \u201cin public\u201d stops meaning what you thought it meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every sighting was technically visible to a passerby. No passerby could ever assemble all of them into a map of where you sleep, pray, organize, and see your doctor. The machine can, before its coffee gets cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow the data, then follow the money<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dominant license-plate-reader vendor, Flock Safety<\/a>, doesn\u2019t sell a camera so much as a network: by mid-2025, tens of thousands of cameras across thousands of separate agency setups, scanning, per its own marketing, billions of plates a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pitch to a small-town department is wholesome: find the stolen Civic, locate the missing kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The reality is that data your town collects can, depending on a settings toggle, be searched by an agency five states away. Network effects are the whole reason the company is worth what it\u2019s worth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And we already know where that road goes because we drove down it last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To its credit, Flock says customers own their data, federal sharing is off by default, and it yanked some agencies off the national lookup after the stories broke. Fine. But notice what that admission concedes: the nationwide-access capability is real, the defaults are mutable, and \u201cpolicy\u201d turned out to be a switch somebody can flip back on a Tuesday. As one surveillance tracker put it, policies don\u2019t stop surveillance; they generate paperwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The part where I\u2019m fair to the other side<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because you should be suspicious of anyone selling you only the scary version. The case for this stuff isn\u2019t stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a teenager named Lesandro Guzman-Feliz was murdered<\/a> in the Bronx, investigators used networked cameras and facial-recognition leads to find and convict the people who did it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Real-time crime centers have, in some cities, measurably bumped clearance rates. A drone overhead can spot a tossed gun or kill a high-speed pursuit before it kills a bystander.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The government always waves FBI numbers showing violent crime falling and says: see, proactive tech-forward policing works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of that is true. And it\u2019s also the wrong argument because \u201cdoes this ever solve a crime?\u201d always answers yes and tells you nothing about the price.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Letting police search any house without a warrant would also solve crimes. We don\u2019t allow it. The Fourth Amendment is, when you strip the romance off it, a deliberate decision to eat some unsolved crime as the cost of not living in a society where the state can search anyone, anytime. This shopping list reopens that negotiation, one camera at a time, and conspicuously without a vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The law hasn\u2019t caught up and that\u2019s the point<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re waiting for the courts to sort this out, get comfortable. The governing precedent, Carpenter v. United States (2018)<\/a>, said police generally need a warrant for your historical phone-location data, because stitching together enough \u201cpublic\u201d location points, in that case about 101 a day for 127 days, builds an \u201call-encompassing record\u201d of a life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lower courts have spent the years since arguing about whether plate readers are Carpenter or just old-fashioned cameras you can\u2019t complain about. Massachusetts says it depends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fourth Circuit killed an aerial-surveillance program over Baltimore and fretted, out loud, about exactly this combination of tools. The EFF, the ACLU, and the Institute for Justice<\/a> are litigating ALPR dragnets right now. Nothing is settled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s really on the table<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the line that should stick with you: surveillance infrastructure is sticky. A camera network outlives the mayor who approved it, the crime wave that justified it, and the privacy policy that was supposed to fence it in. You build it for stolen cars and you bequeath it, settings and all, to whoever runs the place next. The feds aren\u2019t funding crime-fighting so much as funding standing capacity, the permanent ability to watch, and explicitly rewarding the cities most eager to wire themselves up and share the take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So if your city is tempted and $300 million is genuinely tempting, the question to put to the council isn\u2019t \u201cwill this catch criminals.\u201d It will. The question is: who can query this, about whom, and how would we ever find out if they abused it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because the $300 million isn\u2019t the actual offer. The actual offer is a template, designed to be \u201creplicated nationwide,\u201d a model for what an American city\u2019s relationship to the people in it should look like. The defaults, once set, drift toward more access, never less. And the right to walk through your own town unwatched is one of those things that\u2019s remarkably cheap to give away and almost impossible to buy back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And lately we’ve had several cases of people falsely arrested or accused of crimes without the police doing due diligence using these systems. But this is interesting in that it’s the foundation for the 15 minute prison cities… And this has been a plan in the works for decades as expert imminent domain witness Rosa […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","category-world"],"blocksy_meta":[],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jason","author_link":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/author\/jturning\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17555,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17553\/revisions\/17555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jasonsblog.ddns.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}