Privacy and freedom aren’t quite synonyms, but they are closely related.

he Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

Those who want to know everything about you want to control you. Whether that is to get you to buy things, or to make you work harder, or to form  your opinions, or to be able to arrest you whenever they want (and have the data available to always have something on you), doesn’t matter much.

We had freedom, such as it was, because we couldn’t be tracked easily. More and more we don’t, and this is qualitatively different from most older surveillance societies, which did not have minute by minute records going back years and years.

You will never be free in this new state. Don’t do anything that could be used against you, even 50 years later when mores and laws have changed.


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