Florida is a mountain of guano left by a flock of birds
It's been a poopy week, literally, in many ways.
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington DC in February of 1968.
Table of Contents
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Finite
Disappointment
Birds of a Feather...
A dear friend in California sent me a text expressing shock that Governor Ron DeSantis, of all people would kill Flock cameras in Florida specifically, while indicating he'd stop using Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) on the state's roads. He said that Florida should not become a surveillance state.
Of course, this was a political calculation, probably with his dim presidential aspirations in mind, rather than anything to do with public safety or freedom.
As the link on the image at the top of this section notes, the changes the governor ordered on state roads (and the Miami-Dade County Sheriff voluntarily implemented in this county), are all but meaningless.
As Devoun Cetoute and Milena Malaver note in their piece:
Despite the state’s action, the Herald has found it might not meaningfully decrease the massive volume of license plate readers that have boomed in the past few years to more than 2,000 cameras in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties. South Florida agencies began their fledgling surveillance networks with a few dozen cameras, but Flock Safety paved a path to hundreds more in recent years as it marketed its tech directly to cities, businesses and homeowner associations, the Herald found. All of these cameras can be interconnected for law enforcement use.
Let's take Miami-Dade County, where I live and work from, as an example, especially given the sheriff is playing along with this. Miami-Dade County is not only massive, and the sheriff actively operates only a handful of cameras, there are no fewer than 33 other public municipalities in the county that have not agreed to take down their cameras. The Miami-Dade Sheriff's Office and the State of Florida police forces can all access those cameras more or less at will.
Just to our north in Broward County, which is just one of three counties that make up the 6 million person South Florida Metropolitan Area (equivalent to the Chicago and San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Areas), the sheriff has not agreed to stop using ALPRs and has "catalogued over 174 million vehicles, roughly 1,000 times the city's population," according to Cetoute and Malaver. They add, "The agency shares the information it collects," not only with Miami-Dade County and the State of Florida, but with "252 agencies across the country."
Logically, in a state where there are more toll miles and more tolls collected than anywhere else in the country, most of them using ALPRs combined with RF readers (that thing that pays tolls is the RF chip, the thing that makes sure your car is authorized to use that chip is the ALPR), it is difficult to go anywhere in your car without being tracked, despite DeSantis' order.
Cetoute and Malaver's piece concludes with a quote from digital privacy expert Rindala Alajaji "The cameras are “pervasive, sprawling and just ungovernable. This mass surveillance should just not be allowed or should not exist.”
You can check to see if Flock has been used to search for your information at the website "Have I Been Flocked." Do note, if you live in, say, Sacramento County, California, that city does not use Flock. They use competitors.
Free State of Florida Hates Taxes and Basic Airport Safety Features
Associated Press
Yes, a plane crashed into a road, a road I've used, on Sunday in Miami. Read the AP report above and not the part where over 100 other airports have a feature built in to prevent planes from doing exactly what this one did* and then think about how the entire GOP message this election cycle is we need to cut taxes, not, you know, make sure people in cars don't get run over by a busted ass 30 year old Amazon Prime jet.
Then remember that a 767, which Boeing still makes, can be purchased used, on the high end for $80,000,000. Then add a dash of new Miami-Dade resident Jeff Bezos' history of trying to drop $100,000,000 to dismantle and reassemble a beloved bridge (he failed) so he could get his $500,000,000 yacht to sea (they finished it in another shipyard) and you can see why maybe, just maybe, we should be increasing taxes on the rich, not cutting taxes. If dude is too cheap to order his company to use planes too young to run for the US Senate putting public safety at risk, and if the government is too poor (or stupid?) to invest in public safety, maybe he has too much money and we need different elected officials.
*While it is likely that the 1000 feet of excess space between the end of the runway and the road puts the runway in FAA compliance, I will note, whereas many airports are built in the middle of nowhere, and while one of the roads the plane crossed is literally named after a dairy that used to be on it, the airport today is surrounded by thousands of buildings and humans.
On the Cover of the Rolling Stone
Valerio Castellini
Given that, as the article quotes a Key West resident as saying, "Cruelty seems to be the point," it's hard to imagine that the DeSantis Administration is anything other than thrilled to be featured in a long piece in the Rolling Stone. Key West, one of the most historically important cities in the American history until steam, well, ran out of steam, and a major tourist destination, has a built in flaw: There's only one road in and out. Guess who uses ALPRs to makes sure those arrest immigration arrest quotas are met, with no regard to past record, current papers, or impact to the economy.
I done told you
Monika Bauerlein
Generative Large Language Models aren't neat. They aren't part of an inevitable future. They are pure, outright theft. Remember chop shops in the 1980s where some late model GM car would be stolen, rolled into a body shop, have its VIN switched and some parts swapped and then sold as a new car? That's all ChatGPT is. Of the very many problems this presents, the piece above points out a very big one: when you've run the car manufactures out of business what's left to steal? Or, more on point, when you've stolen all of the copyrighted material from news agencies and run them out of business who will write the current news stories? The breaking news? When an airplane skids off a runway in Miami and there are zero reporters left to write about it how will ChatGPT be able to provide the user with accurate content?
Florida
Gonna Florida
As if the Key West story wasn't enough here are two more stories that make the horrific, awful, idiotic (yes, idiotic, it depicts a white cultural phenomena in the NORTH with no connection whatsoever to the lives of enslaved people, formerly enslaved people or their descendants–it purports to mock Southern Blacks and it doesn't even approach satire its so far disconnected from reality) image above Florida really is trying to get back to Jim Crow.
When you think, "oh, but if someone is undocumented why should they get to go to college?" please consider we are talking about 18 year olds who likely had no choice in immigrating here, some of them immigrated here legally with their parents and their parents' work or travel visas expired and others were here under Temporary Protected Status–legally–until last month.
Ana Goñi-Lessan | News Service of Florida
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I have nothing to say here today other than don't trust the FDA. I haven't been more than 50 feet from my toilet since Friday. If I lived in California I'd get my produce from a local farmer–but here? Even the local farmers markets sell international produce mixed with local. So, try to buy from a farmer you can at least track down in person.
Historic
Interlude
80 years ago this week Florida Attorney General Tom Watson refused to answer inquiry into whether or not he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, comparing asking about Klan membership to asking about one's religion. A brief search of Tom Watson's career did not reveal whether or not he was indeed a Klan member, but this article, for whatever it is worth, does not paint him as unsympathetic to the Klan and the related Jim Crow laws that dominated Florida at the time.
Infinite
Hope
I used to say this newsletter was "mostly positive." I dropped that sometime ago but I'm not crazy about it being as negative as it is this week. I continue to slog away on the documentary around the prayer vigils that were outside the former abomination called "Alligator Alcatraz" and it does fill me with hope. I shot this sunrise this week in Everglades National Park. I've sped it up 8x so the video is brief.
Bear
The History Hound Finds
Moira Donegan
Liza Gross
Carla Astudillo
Megan Rose and Andy Mannix
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