Categories
Fourth Amendment rights privacy

Billions Mis-Served

flock camera, surveillance, privacy, police, law enforcement

For decades, cameras have been installed on American roads to snap pics of speeding (or not-speeding) vehicles so that fines can be mailed to the guilty (or innocent) motorists.

These cameras are supposedly about ticketing for speeding. But they have also often been used as a means of revenue extraction.

Now there’s a new angle.

Super-smart, super-dumb artificial intelligence is being merged with street cameras. 

The main company behind them is Flock Safety. Its cameras record license plates and also a vehicle’s make, model, and color, but, says Flock, nothing about individuals. When the AI can relate the plate number to a criminal suspect, law enforcers get a hit when searching for the number.

Then officers act on this information, often without any double-checking, to stop cars and force drivers out of their cars. Sometimes at gunpoint.

Even aside from the issues of privacy invasion raised by the sweeping surveillance, there’s the fact that the automated license plate recognition (ALPR) makes mistakes. Supplemented by officers’ mistakes. Innocent drivers and other occupants may be terrorized, arrested, even jailed before the mistake is realized.

Flock says that its cameras accurately capture 93 percent of license plates. As the Institute for Justice points out, even this “low” error rate means “well over a billion inaccurate readings per month” when Flock is scanning over 20 billion license plates per month.

Many locales that try Flock cameras end up pulling them down. None should ever begin to use them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

James A. Garfield

All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.

James A. Garfield, 20th president of the United States, as quoted in Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896), edited by Louis Klopsch, p. 116.

Categories
Today

The Fourteenth

July 28, 1868, is the official date for the certification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Categories
election law

Your Fraudulent Vote Counts

voter ID, voting, elections, democracy, Virginia, fraud

Give it to ABC News host Jonathan Karl!

On This Week Without George Stephanopoulos, Karl asked U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia not about the entirety of the SAVE Act but “very narrowly” about photo ID to vote, which Americans of both parties strongly favor. 

“You know what?” the senator responded. “In Virginia, we have voter I.D. and photo I.D.” 

“That’s actually not the case,” Karl corrected. “I mean, I’m a Virginia voter. You don’t need to show a photo I.D. in Virginia. There are a wide range of things you can show for I.D., and if you don’t show one of those, you can sign an affidavit, saying —”

“You can sign an affidavit,” Warner repeated. “Those become ballots that, if you want to contest later, can be contested. But . . . we have voter I.D. of one form or another.”*

My senator is mistaken. Those ballots cannot later be contested; they count. Even if you prosecute folks for fraudulently signing the form, their ballots would still not be identifiable . . . and therefore, not contestable.

While it is a felony to falsely sign the ID Confirmation Statement, there is no one checking.

The same process exists in Michigan, where I’m involved in a ballot initiative to require voter ID. The question “Do I need an ID?” is posed for voters at the Michigan Secretary of State’s website. 

“You will be asked to show ID when you check in to vote,” explains the SOS, adding in bold type: “If you don’t have one, you can still vote.

“If this happens, expect a poll worker to ask you to sign a form before you vote that explains you didn’t have an ID. Your ballot will be included with all others and counted.”

How “political”: a Voter ID requirement that doesn’t require ID. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Fox News reports that per ID in Virginia “acceptable forms include voter confirmation documents, utility bills, bank statements, government checks and paychecks, which do not need to include a photograph. A voter without acceptable identification can sign an ID Confirmation Statement under felony penalties and cast a regular ballot.” The story helpfully provides a link to the Virginia statute in question.

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Categories
Thought

Voltaire

Rien n’est si ordinaire que d’imiter ses ennemis, et d’employer leurs armes.

Nothing is so common as to imitate one’s enemies, and to use their weapons.

Voltaire, “Oracles” in Questions sur l’Encyclopédie (1770).
Categories
Today

Dept. of State

The first U.S. federal government agency, the Department of Foreign Affairs, was established in 1789. Congress had voted for it on the 21st of July, and newly elected President George Washington signed it into law on July 27.

In September it was renamed Department of State. Thomas Jefferson was appointed its first Secretary, and under his leadership the department comprised only six personnel, two diplomatic posts (in London and Paris), and ten consular posts.

Categories
Update

Fauci’s Furin Conspiracy

“Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, was the face and voice of the COVID pandemic response from 2020 to 2022 until his retirement from his position as the highest-paid federal official.” A good summation of the broad facts of the case by Jeffrey Tucker, to start out his recent op-ed in The Epoch Times.

“He was valorized as the science itself.” A good reminder . . . of Fauci’s cringiest claim.

Not the worst lie of Dr. Evil, but the most embarrassing.

You might be surprised to learn that he was never appointed the official spokesman or even the head of the COVID pandemic response. He was one of many members of the Coronavirus Task Force but it was he who nonetheless took the lead on public messaging for those critical two and a half years.

Though he had never been formally accused, much less convicted, of any crime, Fauci received a preemptive full and unconditional pardon from President Joe Biden on Jan. 19, 2025. It was one of Biden’s final acts before leaving office. The pardon covers “any offenses against the United States which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from Jan. 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon.”

This pardon sets Fauci free from the long arm of the law. But there’s a hitch in this arm-shortening move by lame duck Biden: perjury. Senator Rand Paul interrogated Fauci in congressional hearings, and one of those interrogations occurred after Biden’s pardon date. The Kentucky senator believes he has the goods on Fauci.

Fauci lied. To Congress. And Rand Paul thinks he can prove it.

Will he succeed?

Well, the title of Jeff Tucker’s op-ed is “What to Expect at the Anthony Fauci Senate Hearing,” so it is well worth a careful read. Tucker explains the key biological feature of the virus, and its mysterious (or not-so-mysterious) “furin cleavage site,” a functionality that allowed a virus transfered among bats to go big-time in human populations. 

Among the many revelations in Paul’s files are that Fauci’s aide David Morens used personal email for “damage control” with Daszak. We now have evidence that Fauci directed Andersen to report [furin cleavage site] concerns to FBI/MI5 while shaping public messaging. We have records of Fauci’s long ties to intelligence (back to 2003), including briefings, which Paul says influenced origins assessments.

Paul Jacob covered the Lab Leak Hypothesis in general, and Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci in particular, in these pages in multiple columns, and discussed the key gain-of-function feature of the virus in March and October of 2022. 

Discovering and publicly proving who inserted a “furin cleavage site” into a bat coronavirus to cause the late pandemic is a worthy endeavor. Fauci appears to be the main suspect; evidence shows him above the body with a smoking gun — or at least with receipts for buying the gun and hiring the gunman. Can Rand Paul convince the public, though?

Categories
Thought

Donald J. Trump

I always find that when you don’t speak to the press, you always get a bad story. When you do speak to the press, you have a shot at getting a good story.

President Donald John Trump, at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on July 24, 2026.
Categories
Today

Atahualpa

On July 26, 1533, Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors strangled to death Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, thereby ending 300 years of Inca civilization. The conquistadors were greedy and murderous, but the Inca civilization, arguably, was worse: totalitarian and radically inegalitarian.

But they made great high-mountain roads.

Arguments about infrastructure promoted by Big Government continue to this very day. And it is quite possible that an earlier civilization made the roadways, which the Inca merely renovated.

Categories
Update

Seriously Funny?

It was, the president said, “the largest group of Trump Derangement Syndrome people ever put together at one time.” 

Donald J. Trump dominated the night at 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. An event known for its roasts of politicians and media figures, this year was not an exception save for one thing: this time the chief comedian appeared to be the president himself.

“This year the association decided not to have a comedian, so they considered using Jimmy Kimmel,” Donald Trump quipped. Earlier, he had declared that this second attempt at the event — the April date having been scuttled by an assassination attempt — would be better than the first, just as his second administration was better than his first. “The second time is always better,” he said, and then pushed the wry statement into a joke: “And the third time will be better yet.”

The Wall Street Journal’s coverage attempted to give contrast: “‘I gave up on traditional press,’ he said, boasting about how popular he is on TikTok.”

His jokes about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have been funnier, if more awkward. Like in most of politics, opinions differ.

But can we all agree that the Babylon Bee’s story was far, far funnier?