NYSee Radar

Category: Link Blog

  • MANFREDAS: All Night Long at Cobalt Studios 30.01.26

  • Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

    Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown

    Mark Keierleber of the 74 · The Guardian

    Flock of Vultures – Flock of Terror

    Police departments nationwide also routinely tapped into the eight Flock cameras installed at the 30,000-student Alvin independent school district south of Houston. Over a one-month period from December 2025 through early January, more than 3,100 police agencies conducted more than 733,000 searches on the district’s cameras, the 74’s analysis of public records revealed. Of those, immigration-related reasons were cited 620 times by 30 law enforcement agencies including ones in Florida, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee.
    . . .
    Federal agents “were working directly” with a Carrollton police officer who had access to the Flock cameras “and they asked him to run it and they did”, Hitchcock said. If federal agents ask his office to help them with an immigration case, Hitchcock said, “we will assist them – no questions asked.”

  • The pessimist who became a prophet

    The pessimist who became a prophet

    Martin Sandbu · FT Magazine

    Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming

    “One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”

    FT Gift Link

  • 404 Media’s ICE Surveillance Zine

    404 Media’s ICE Surveillance Zine

    Jason Koebler · 404 Media

  • Cypurr Cinema Super Secret Matinee Presents: Seeking Mavis Beacon

    Cypurr @ Wonderville

    Flyer for Cypurr Cinema event. Movie poster for "Seeking Mavis Beacon". Poster depicts a woman's hand breaking through a computer monitor with glass shattering outward. At the bottom of the flyer is the copy, "The most recognizable woman in technology lives in our collective imagination..and on the Wonderville big screen!". Below that is the venue info for Wonderville including its address.

    Sunday, February 1, 2026
    2:30 PM 5:30 PM

    Wonderville
    1186 Broadway
    Brooklyn, NY, 11221

  • I Made It (A Justin Strauss Production)

    Justin Strauss, Annie & the Caldwells · Bandcamp

  • How US Intelligence and an American Company Feed Israel’s Killing Machine in Gaza

    James Bamford · The Nation.

    The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”

  • Ring reintroduces video sharing with police

    The Verge

    While I’m already familiar, that Bruce Schneier share got me to take another look at the Ring doorbell relationship with law enforcement.

    This time I caught the heartwarming mention, “Ring is ‘exploring a new integration with Axon that would enable livestreaming from Ring devices.’”

    good lookin’ out

  • Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

    Schneier on Security

    The mighty Bruce Schneier breaking down the existing data about us, how it’s collected, how it’s used and what you personally might want to consider given your situation.

    Compute technology is constantly spying on its users—and that data is being used to influence us. Companies like Google and Meta are vast surveillance machines, and they use that data to fuel advertising. A smartphone is a portable surveillance device, constantly recording things like location and communication.

    …

    What’s different in a techno-authoritarian regime is that this data is also shared with the government, either as a paid service or as demanded by local law. Amazon shares Ring doorbell data with the police. Flock, a company that collects license plate data from cars around the country, shares data with the police as well.

    …

    Imagine there is a government official assigned to your neighborhood, or your block, or your apartment building. It’s worth that person’s time to scrutinize everybody’s social media posts, email, and chat logs.

  • Retailers Secretively Using Face Recognition to Spot “Persons of Interest” — Including For the Government

    Jay Stanley · ACLU

    the incorporation of “BOLO” (“Be On the Look Out for”) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become — and may already be becoming — a powerful nationwide government surveillance dr­agnet.

    Cute move Rite Aid:

    In 2023 the FTC investigation found that “Rite Aid specifically instructed employees not to reveal Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition technology to consumers or the media.”

    We know the technology makes false positives all the time, and that there’s typically no human in the loop.

    If such sharing networks emerge — much as blacklists of “troublemakers” (i.e., labor organizers) were shared among companies in the 20th century — someone who is falsely accused might find themselves unjustly banned from a significant number of retail stores.

    This article collects a lot of scattered details concerning the issue, so would be a decent jumping off point for your exploration.