URGENT: Court Challenge to Warrantless, China-Style, 24/7 Surveillance Moves Forward, Judge Says 4th Amendment Includes “Expectation of Privacy"

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Cop: "A nice curtain of technology." Nuff said. Exactly why you need the Fourth Amendment.



URGENT: Court Challenge to Warrantless, China-Style, 24/7 Surveillance System Moves Forward, Judge Says 4th Amendment Includes “Expectation of Privacy”

#StopRealID

All the foundational Constitutional principles which prohibit a China-style surveillance system in America are in this lawsuit. Please follow it closely.

Schmidt v. City of Norfolk

Institute for Justice: Judge Rules Lawsuit Challenging Norfolk’s Use of Flock Cameras Can Proceed


“NORFOLK, Va.—On Wednesday, Chief Judge Mark Davis of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that a constitutional lawsuit challenging the city of Norfolk’s use of more than 170 automatic license plate reader cameras can move forward. The lawsuit was filed last October by Norfolk resident Lee Schmidt, Portsmouth resident Crystal Arrin Wegton, and their attorneys from the Institute for Justice (IJ)…..

Norfolk partnered with a company called Flock Safety in 2023 to install 172 automatic license plate reader cameras throughout the city. The goal, as Police Chief Mark Talbot put it, was to create “a nice curtain of technology,” which would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”

Unlike red light or speed cameras, which are triggered by specific violations, Flock cameras record every vehicle that drives by. The cameras then upload the data to a server and create a “vehicle fingerprint,” which allows anyone with access to the Flock database to track everywhere that vehicle goes, all without a warrant. Flock claims its cameras are in more than 5,000 communities throughout the country.”


Instead of license plate numbers it could be human numbers in the future, based on REAL ID and facial recognition data. The core issues are exactly the same: The continuous tracking and monitoring of private citizens on public properties or on their own property, without Constitutional warrants or probable cause.

It is a given that enormous, unconstitutional powers will be abused by some police and corrupt interests. It is simply human nature, as the Founders understood. This is what prompted them to write the Bill of Rights. They saw government as a necessary evil, to be straitjacketed, watched closely, and put in a cage. They gave no credence whatsoever to the idea that governments care about anyone’s “safety.”

The Institute for Justice writes:


“Chief Judge Davis rejected the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing the United States Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, which held that using cell phone location data to track someone’s movements is a search that requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Chief Judge Davis wrote, “a reasonable person could believe that society’s expectations, as laid out by the Court in Carpenter, are being violated by the Norfolk Flock system.”

Chief Judge Davis went on to say, “the complaint alleges facts notably similar to those in Carpenter that the Supreme Court found to clearly violate society’s expectation of privacy: law enforcement secretly monitoring and cataloguing the whole of tens of thousands of individual’s movements over an extended period.””


Unforgivably and ominously, in 2023 the US Supreme Court declined to hear a case in which police, without a warrant, installed a surveillance camera on a utility pole near a prominent citizen’s home, and spied on her for eight months.

The ACLU writes:

“In this case, police secretly attached a small camera to a utility pole, using it to surveil a Massachusetts home 24/7 for eight months — all without a warrant. Law enforcement could watch the camera’s feed in real time, and remotely pan, tilt, and zoom close enough to read license plates and see faces. They could also review a searchable, digitized record of this footage at their convenience. The camera captured every coming and going of the home’s residents and their guests over eight months. As a result, the government targeted the home of a community pillar — a lawyer, respected judicial clerk, devoted church member, and a grandmother raising her grandkids — to cherry-pick images from months of unceasing surveillance in an effort to support unwarranted criminal charges against an innocent person.”

One need not be a Supreme Court Justice to see this was a warrantless stake-out, by electronic means, in clear violation of well-established Fourth Amendment law

REAL ID already includes compatibility with facial recognition software, the next step in mass, unconstitutional surveillance. Massive data centers are being built under Trump’s Stargate project, so if the government says this is not where this is going, they are lying.

In 2017, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab wrote in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution:

“Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on….In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people.” — Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in his 2017 book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution

When a billionaires’ club like the WEF tells you they want to “tag,” “track,” and “monitor” you, you should believe them.

You can help by not getting REAL ID, which is part of the system being attempted, or changing your REAL ID back to regular state ID, see: Refuse REAL ID

File under You can’t make this up: the company name in the case in question is Flock Safety. Flock as in flock of sheep.

This is the crossroads America is at now. The Constitution is clear, as the Founders in their brilliance had already envisioned a place like communist China. And they said no, not here.


Institute for Justice: Judge Rules Lawsuit Challenging Norfolk’s Use of Flock Cameras Can Proceed

“NORFOLK, Va.—On Wednesday, Chief Judge Mark Davis of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that a constitutional lawsuit challenging the city of Norfolk’s use of more than 170 automatic license plate reader cameras can move forward. The lawsuit was filed last October by Norfolk resident Lee Schmidt, Portsmouth resident Crystal Arrin Wegton, and their attorneys from the Institute for Justice (IJ).

“I’m very happy that our case can move forward, and hopefully this is the first step toward making sure that my family and friends don’t have to live in a world where our constitutional rights are so blatantly ignored,” said Lee.

Norfolk partnered with a company called Flock Safety in 2023 to install 172 automatic license plate reader cameras throughout the city. The goal, as Police Chief Mark Talbot put it, was to create “a nice curtain of technology,” which would make it “difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.”

Unlike red light or speed cameras, which are triggered by specific violations, Flock cameras record every vehicle that drives by. The cameras then upload the data to a server and create a “vehicle fingerprint,” which allows anyone with access to the Flock database to track everywhere that vehicle goes, all without a warrant. Flock claims its cameras are in more than 5,000 communities throughout the country.

“This is a massive first step toward protecting the Fourth Amendment rights of everyone who drives through Norfolk,” said IJ Attorney Michael Soyfer. “These cameras can track people’s every move over a prolonged time period. If the government wants to do that, it should have to get a warrant.”

In Wednesday’s ruling, Chief Judge Davis rejected the city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, citing the United States Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, which held that using cell phone location data to track someone’s movements is a search that requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Chief Judge Davis wrote, “a reasonable person could believe that society’s expectations, as laid out by the Court in Carpenter, are being violated by the Norfolk Flock system.”

Chief Judge Davis went on to say, “the complaint alleges facts notably similar to those in Carpenter that the Supreme Court found to clearly violate society’s expectation of privacy: law enforcement secretly monitoring and cataloguing the whole of tens of thousands of individual’s movements over an extended period.”

With the city’s motion to dismiss denied, the case will now go on to be heard on the merits.”



For a Deep Dive See: “Why is the Real ID National Database Different from Social Security Numbers? It’s an Unconstitutional Total Surveillance System Like China”


Constitutional Coup: Twila Brase of Citizens Council for Health Freedom Explains Total Surveillance Real ID in 2 Minutes


China “social credit score” system based on national ID ranks and punishes citizens without due process



Nightmare dystopia China…life in the surveillance state today
 
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I hate to say this, but this would have been an encouraging and relevant challenge in, say, 2010 or 2015 but they're 15-20 years late to the game. Mass facial-recognition isn't coming, it's been here for a decade or more. The number of Americans not already face-printed one way or another is a tiny, tiny minority... only absolute mountain-men who are 100% off-grid. Even running to town just once may be sufficient to put your face into the faceprint system through private surveillance cameras run by businesses cooperating with fusion centers and Palantir (CIA).

What that means is that the ordinary expectation that nobody is particularly aware of your daily activities is completely and utterly false. The present reality is better understood by imagining that you have 10 Stasi agents permanently assigned to you who not only know what you're doing at any given time, but are even able to predictively anticipate what you will be doing at least a day ahead, maybe a week or more depending on how regular your routines. That's what they built all of this surveillance grid to do. It wasn't built to chase Osama bin Laden, it was built to track your every, individual activity, all day, every day, with more rigor than you yourself do.

There is also a push-component to the grid, what is commonly called "mind-control", an unfortunate label that suggests ray-guns or mentalism. Rather, mind-control is simply changing your decisions in a structured and predictable way, nothing more or less. A car stopping in your path for a few extra seconds may cause you to turn right instead of left. Whether or not that was a mind-control event depends on whether that car stopping in your path was actually a random event, as it naively seemed to you to be. And for it to be non-random does not require "everybody to be in on it" since that driver's path may also have just been altered with a similar "nudge" event. The control-grid isn't "coming" ... IT'S BEEN DEPLOYED FOR YEARS. People need to start waking up... the lamb's neck is already in the lion's maw... all that remains is for the muzzle to be removed...
 
Defenders of liberty, we never stop.
Agreed. But the point is that this effort is not taking the true magnitude of the problem seriously. Pretending to "stop planned government invasion of privacy" as though it's not something that is already in effect, is just political theater designed to further propagandize the masses that they're not currently being watched but, one day, they might be "if we don't act". That kind of preventive action should have happened 20 years ago. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. They're proposing an ounce of prevention, but what is required now is the pound of cure. So, anybody who really cares about this issue and will "never stop", needs to recalibrate the scale and magnitude of the political difficulty that is involved in tearing down the Surveillance-Industrial Complex. It is dug in like an Alabama tick, you'll amputate your arm before you dig it out. What is the cure? I don't know, but filing a federal lawsuit is definitely not going to do it...
 
From 2022:


Kelly Conlon, 44, was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular last month when she was flagged by the event space’s facial recognition system and refused entry despite holding a ticket.

Conlon was caught up in a Big Brother-esque crackdown by Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan, who has banned anyone who works for any law firm that has a suit against any of his holdings, which includes the Knicks, Rangers, Radio City, MSG and various restaurants.
 
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