Good job vetting your vendors Uncle Sam! Somehow, we'll end up paying (taxpayers) to clean this up - just like we paid to deploy it. Sure would be nice if we had any voice/vote in these things...
Tracking people is like 90% of what every organization does. It's why we have names, phone numbers, addresses, id numbers, license plates, etc. "Tracking people = bad" is an untenable assumption.
Perhaps I'm not being clear. "Tracking people involuntarily" might be bad. "Tracking people unnecessarily" might be bad. But they will be bad because they are involuntary and unnecessary, not because they are tracking people.
The overwhelming majority of people are probably ok with recording plates at the border. If it's confined to the border it's not really any different than the customs agent jotting down your license plate. It's also not really "tracking", it's just a record created at that single point. It's the whole network that makes it "tracking"
It's the record keeping everywhere else and tracking that that enables that's not ok.
I honestly support license plate readers on most roads, if they were used for average speed measurements and in conjunction with automated ticketing of people speeding.
If you are a citizen and have not been disenfranchised, and I grant you that many fall outside of these buckets, you absolutely have a say. That say is that you can elect whomever you want to decide these things for you. It is the central mechanism in a representative democracy.
Re representative democracies, why are opinions on disparate issues like the economy, abortion, climate change, etc. all packaged into one party? At least 99% of people won't find a party that agrees with them on every single issue, so it feels like there should be a better system.
Because the US has first past the post. Sure you could vote for someone who matches every single one of your ideologies, but the chance that they win is zero.
I'm not sure you are attacking representative democracy, but instead are attacking the US two party system. I'm def not going to argue against you on that. Just wanted to say that in a representative democracy, one does have a say in policy. I do very much agree that the US tries to give us all as little of a say as possible, as the "adults" (read: billionaires) decide things for us
Unfortunately, in the US, we've allowed our representatives to enact a hard cap on the number of representatives. So the representative you elect decides these thing for an increasingly larger number of citizens as population increases. So while you have a say, the weight of that say on choosing a representative is ever decreasing.
Gerrymander strategy dictates that you want as few urban districts as possible to maintain rural power. Raising the caps would weaken the benefit of packing opposition voters into fewer districts.
Yes removing the limit put on in the early 20th century would have broad ranging consequences, most of them would be to the detrement of the existing representatives.
...and then the person we voted for doesn't win the election and the person who does win the election doesn't listen to the citizens they're supposed to represent.
This is a flawed viewpoint. The idea that any single company can stand up to a nation state is absurd. The level of resources that Russia or China brings to bear for a single hack is far beyond what any company or even groups of companies could defend against.
This is the unfortunate weakness of the Western style democracies in the face of totalitarian states. We have a much more obvious divide between private and public entities. In China and Russia, the lines are blurred and often they get much better support from the government to defend and hack the opposition. Even to the point where China will hack US companies and just give the IP to Chinese companies.
Not to the level that China is doing it, that's for sure. Just by the very nature of how closely companies in China operate with the government, you'd be fooling yourself if you think that's equivalent.
