I hope no one is pretending that these revelations are shocking.
This is the system we sat back and watched as it was slowly woven into our daily lives in the name of safety. It was called the Patriot Act.
Simultaneously mass data gathering through surveillance became a key component of our entire economy as Big Tech adopted a “surveil & manipulate” profit model.
Maybe when the pain of our addiction to tech becomes greater than our fear of dismantling its ubiquitous presence in our lives, we will finally put the brakes on.
I’m not holding my breath, though.
This is horrifying and every American needs to hear this
California resident exposes what’s really going on with Flock Cameras in America
“I want to be clear what these cameras actually are, and I say that with somebody with 20 years of experience in IT. I've served as the chief network architect for Fortune 500 companies, I've designed data centers, and today I work on cloud infrastructure for one of the largest loan origination companies in the country. I'm not speculating on how this technology works. I've read their patents and I know how it works.
Flock advertises these cameras as simple license plate readers. But their own patents tell a different story.
They're AI-powered surveillance machines that capture every passing vehicle and person and transmit that data to a private corporate cloud, making it queryable by a multitude of state and federal agencies. The city of Corona does not control that database, and Corona residents have no public record rights against a private company's servers. Our daily movements are being harvested by a $7.5 billion corporation, that only answers to venture capital investors, not to us. Flock did not reach that valuation on their per-camera subscription fees. That math doesn't add up
The city council should also understand who they're doing business with. Flock CEO was asked whether the company had any federal contracts. He said no. That was a lie.
Public records revealed that Flock had been secretly running a pilot program giving the US Border Patrol access to local police camera data without the knowledge of the cities that paid for the cameras.
Now consider who's behind the company and where your data flows. Flock integrates directly with Palantir, a data fusion platform, with a $30 million contract with ICE. Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantir, is also one of Flock's primary investors. These are not separate companies with separate agendas. They are connected actors that are building a connected infrastructure.
Palantir's own CEO stated publicly just this month that his technology is being used as a political instrument, designed to reduce the political power of certain voters. And that's the ecosystem that our Corona cameras are feeding into.
We're not anti-police at all. We're against mass surveillance of innocent residents by a company with a documented record of deception, built by investors with a stated political agenda. We're asking the City Council to start auditing the queries made against Flock's database, to disclose any data sharing agreements, and to take a vote to cancel the Flock safety contract”
I looked more into this and he is 100% right
Patents describe broader object detection, including tracking people and pedestrians, patents like US11416545B1. The system uses a centralized cloud database for nationwide queries
Data goes to Flock’s private cloud, AWS-based, encrypted. Nationwide lookup is common, 75%+ of customers are enrolled enabling cross-jurisdictional searches. Residents have no direct public records access to the corporate servers.
This creates a mass surveillance network feeding a private company’s infrastructure
If you ask me this is laying the infrastructure for a mass surveillance network in America. We are being lied to. Cancel all contracts nationwide
It’s possible, and I saw this with my wife’s company, that people were making the mistake, (and words matter in making legal/constitutional claim) of asking to be granted a religious “exemption” instead of an accommodation for an existing religious exemption. The religious exemption for a sincerely held religious belief is a given. There is a mountain of case law that says explicitly brother the courts, the government, or private businesses are in the position of determining what is and what isn’t a sincerely held religious belief. The question is one of undue burden on an employer to accommodate the exemption not whether the exemption is granted. When that is spelled out with all abundantly available case law, it puts the employer on different footing in granting your accommodation as opposed to granting you an exemption.
When it comes to Romabs 11, most people skip the most important part.
They either do what Pearl did and misread the “grafted in” part in verse 17 or jump to verse 26 and completely bypass what Paul is actually saying to the Roman Church.
Let's start where the apostle Paul starts.
Romans 11:1-5 "I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not! For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not cast away His people whom He foreknew... Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace."
Stop right there.
A REMNANT. Through the election of GRACE.
Paul is NOT talking about ethnic Israel as a collective being preserved outside of Christ.
He is talking about a remnant of Jewish believers who came into the faith.
That's the election.
That's the grace.
They accepted Christ.
While the others rejected him…
Stay with me…
But before we go any further…
The foundation of Romans 11 is Jewish believers who are IN Christ.
That is the context of this passage…
That's the remnant.
That's where Paul is standing when he writes this letter.
As one of them.
Now to the people who disagree with Galatians 3:26-29
It is not saying God rejected Israel.
It is not saying Israel was replaced.
Read that again slowly.
What it IS saying is that True Israel is not SEPARATE from the Church.
That's a completely different statement
People like Bruce Pearl raising the manufactured “replacement argument is called a straw man argument.
You build a fake version of someone's argument and then defeat that instead.
It's intellectually dishonest and it doesn't work on people who actually know the text.
Here's what Romans 11 is actually saying.
The branches that were broken off…
Meaning the portion of Israel that rejected Christ…
Were broken off through unbelief.
Paul is explicit about that.
And the Gentiles who were grafted in are warned. Directly. Sternly.
Do NOT be arrogant about your position because you stand by faith.
If you become proud God can remove you too.
That warning is in there for a reason and a lot of people preaching Romans 11 at me have completely skipped it.
And then, and this is the part that matters, Paul says the broken off branches CAN be grafted back in.
Will be grafted back in.
All Israel will be saved.
But HOW? And Through what or WHO Is a better question?
Not through the establishment of a Political Nation State…
But through the same thing everyone else goes through.
Faith In The Lord Jesus Christ.
The same door. The same way. The same truth.
Romans 11 is not a passage that puts Israel on a separate redemptive track outside of Jesus.
It is a passage about the mystery of how God is drawing ALL of His people…
Jew and Gentile…
Into ONE body through ONE Messiah.
The salvation of Israel is not happening around or outside of the Church.
It is happening THROUGH it.
That's not replacement theology.
That's not rejection.
That's the whole point of the epistle in proper exegetical context.
If you're going to throw a scripture at me, please read the whole thing first the way it was written.
Cherry picking verses out to create a narrative is unproductive and leads to misunderstandings.
~Archbishop Wayne E. Daniels, Jr.
Without context all you have is a pretext which can be used to deceive the gullible. This verse in Romans 15 is specifically addressed to a church of Jewish and grntile Christians who were experience conflict. The verse is instructing each group to accept the other. It has nothing to do with behavior or any general range of life choices.
Excellent. Thank you for offering such a well-reasoned and morally coherent argument for opposing the death penalty. The plight of humanity was fundamentally altered by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We who seek to follow after him should seek to understand what that means.
How did you ascend to such a height of spiritual insight that you can sit as judge over the private daily prayers of every Orthodox Christian and determine that they are not partaking in “individual communion and real relationship.” An Orthodox Christian would never agree that “Our daily prayers are why we’re saved.” Perhaps you should actually try to learn the Orthodox understanding of salvation before making a broad sweep of judgement declaring what they do or do not believe about salvation. It is precisely this kind of arrogance that evangelical Protestants (especially reformed Calvinists) display that is more in keeping with the heart posture of Pharisees than anything within Orthodox tradition.
Umm no…
For such a smart guy he is articulating an incredibly stupid and, quite frankly arrogant synopsis of Orthodox soteriology. For a guy with his linguistic acumen to suggest that Eastern Orthodoxy holds a view that they didn’t need Jesus to do what he did to save them and that they believe they can achieve it on their own is not only absurd but deceptive. If that is what the Orthodox believe then why do they pray this prayer every morning:
“O Saviour, save me by Thy grace, I pray Thee. For if Thou shouldst save me for my works, this would not be grace or a gift, but rather a duty; yea, Thou Who art great in compassion and ineffable in mercy. For he that believeth in Me, Thou hast said, O my Christ, shall live and never see death. If, then, faith in Thee saveth the desperate, behold, I believe, save me, for Thou art my God and Creator. Let faith instead of works be imputed to me, O my God, for Thou wilt find no works which could justify me. But may my faith suffice instead of all works, may it answer for, may it acquit me, may it make me a partaker of Thine eternal glory.”
And has he not actually read the history of the reformers? Does he not know that Luther, Melancthon, and their group of reformers actually believed the Greek Church practiced the true faith? They looked to the Greek Orthodox patriarch as their spiritual father and he called them his spiritual sons?
How does he explain that the mean who championed “sola scriptura” couldn’t even agree on what the scripture taught on the basic practices of the faith enough not to kill each other?
He simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he describes the Orthodox understanding of salvation. He is addicted to western enlightenment rationalism and the purely juridical and transactional schema through which it forces God’s economy of salvation.
And he’s a TULIP Calvinist. That is a false Christianity.