Are you unaware of Flock pushing their cameras to all the small town sheriffs? It's definitely not just in New York City.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
There’s Flock, there’s police drones, there’s Ring cameras everywhere, etc. yes I’m aware
My point wasn’t to say there’s no monitoring in the US. It’s that there’s extreme variance in population densities which therefore means less opportunity and necessity for the same uniform surveillance in many places compared to countries with more even population densities. Whether the power of the federal government keeps expanding and eroding the federalist design the US was founded on to push uniform surveillance policies is another matter
> Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.
OP was comparing the US to Europe and the UK, which have much more even population densities than the US. Finding sparsely populated areas there is a much higher bar than in the US
Yeah, all the people who stand to lose from oppressive surveillance can just gtfo into the desert, that will solve their problems and definitely isn’t what the surveyors wanted then to do in the first place. Yeah, like, if you do not like being surveilled in the society, have you considered not participating in it? This marginally better than being exiled forcefully.
I live in an incorporated area whose population is less than 10,000. The police have mounted Flock license plate cameras pointing both directions at every road leading out. Every shopping center is adding them too.
Also: not being subject to pervasive surveillance when you're in the middle of nowhere hundreds of miles from another person or human settlement is a pretty low bar.