AI Watches Millions of Cars and Tells Cops if You Might Be a Criminal (forbes.com) 155
Forbes' senior writer on cybersecurity writes on the "warrantless monitoring of citizens en masse" in the United States.
Here's how county police armed with a "powerful new AI tool" identified the suspicious driving pattern of a grey Chevy owned by David Zayas: Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas' car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Department of Justice prosecutor filing, it made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York between October 2020 and August 2021 following routes known to be used by narcotics pushers and for conspicuously short stays. So on March 10 last year, Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car, finding 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semiautomatic pistol and $34,000 in cash inside, according to court documents. A year later, Zayas pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking charge.
The previously unreported case is a window into the evolution of AI-powered policing, and a harbinger of the constitutional issues that will inevitably accompany it... Westchester PD's license plate surveillance system was built by Rekor, a $125 million market cap AI company trading on the NASDAQ. Local reporting and public government data reviewed by Forbes show Rekor has sold its ALPR tech to at least 23 police departments and local governments across America, from Lauderhill, Florida to San Diego, California. That's not including more than 40 police departments across New York state who can avail themselves of Westchester County PD's system, which runs out of its Real-Time Crime Center... It also runs the Rekor Public Safety Network, an opt-in project that has been aggregating vehicle location data from customers for the last three years, since it launched with information from 30 states that, at the time, were reading 150 million plates per month. That kind of centralized database with cross-state data sharing, has troubled civil rights activists, especially in light of recent revelations that Sacramento County Sheriff's Office was sharing license plate reader data with states that have banned abortion...
The ALPR market is growing thanks to a glut of Rekor rivals, including Flock, Motorola, Genetec, Jenoptik and many others who have contracts across federal and state governments. They're each trying to grab a slice of a market estimated to be worth at least $2.5 billion... In pursuit of that elusive profit, the market is looking beyond law enforcement to retail and fast food. Corporate giants have toyed with the idea of tying license plates to customer identities. McDonalds and White Castle have already begun using ALPR to tailor drive-through experiences, detecting returning customers and using past orders to guide them through the ordering process or offer individualized promotion offers. The latter restaurant chain uses Rekor tech to do that via a partnership with Mastercard.
A senior staff attorney at the ACLU tells Forbes that "The scale of this kind of surveillance is just incredibly massive."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geek_Cop for sharing the article.
Here's how county police armed with a "powerful new AI tool" identified the suspicious driving pattern of a grey Chevy owned by David Zayas: Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas' car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. According to a Department of Justice prosecutor filing, it made nine trips from Massachusetts to different parts of New York between October 2020 and August 2021 following routes known to be used by narcotics pushers and for conspicuously short stays. So on March 10 last year, Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car, finding 112 grams of crack cocaine, a semiautomatic pistol and $34,000 in cash inside, according to court documents. A year later, Zayas pleaded guilty to a drug trafficking charge.
The previously unreported case is a window into the evolution of AI-powered policing, and a harbinger of the constitutional issues that will inevitably accompany it... Westchester PD's license plate surveillance system was built by Rekor, a $125 million market cap AI company trading on the NASDAQ. Local reporting and public government data reviewed by Forbes show Rekor has sold its ALPR tech to at least 23 police departments and local governments across America, from Lauderhill, Florida to San Diego, California. That's not including more than 40 police departments across New York state who can avail themselves of Westchester County PD's system, which runs out of its Real-Time Crime Center... It also runs the Rekor Public Safety Network, an opt-in project that has been aggregating vehicle location data from customers for the last three years, since it launched with information from 30 states that, at the time, were reading 150 million plates per month. That kind of centralized database with cross-state data sharing, has troubled civil rights activists, especially in light of recent revelations that Sacramento County Sheriff's Office was sharing license plate reader data with states that have banned abortion...
The ALPR market is growing thanks to a glut of Rekor rivals, including Flock, Motorola, Genetec, Jenoptik and many others who have contracts across federal and state governments. They're each trying to grab a slice of a market estimated to be worth at least $2.5 billion... In pursuit of that elusive profit, the market is looking beyond law enforcement to retail and fast food. Corporate giants have toyed with the idea of tying license plates to customer identities. McDonalds and White Castle have already begun using ALPR to tailor drive-through experiences, detecting returning customers and using past orders to guide them through the ordering process or offer individualized promotion offers. The latter restaurant chain uses Rekor tech to do that via a partnership with Mastercard.
A senior staff attorney at the ACLU tells Forbes that "The scale of this kind of surveillance is just incredibly massive."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geek_Cop for sharing the article.
also can be used to look out of state abortion (Score:4, Insightful)
also can be used to look out of state abortion
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Re:also can be used to look out of state abortion (Score:5, Insightful)
Abortion was just the tip of the iceberg, as we see here, AI is being used to compile peoples freedom of movement.
It will lead to more authoritarian abuses, as this story only highlights a success. How many failures were there? What arent they telling us?
Rights were likely violated here, as a "hunch" by AI is not RAS.
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Authoritarian states do this.
Just wait for a hundred years. '1984' will seem like a paradisaical dream. At least in '1984' it was humans monitoring your behavior. When it is AI, there will be no rest.
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That could be done by the destination State with a simple plate reader pointed at clinic parking lots; no need for data mining rebranded as "AI."
Some states used to do this with liquor stores just across a state line, looking for people crossing the state line to buy booze out of state to avoid state taxes.
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In that case I predict an increase in out-of-state people offering a transportation service. Or would that be considered "human trafficking"?
will McDonalds use it to show ice cream broken (Score:3)
will McDonalds use it to show ice cream broken on the screen as you drive up?
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I like Joe.
Reality Check (Score:2, Insightful)
And meanwhile I have to click "Yes I accept cookies" multiple times per day. Someone needs a reality check, but I'm not sure who it is.
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Insightful)
And meanwhile I have to click "Yes I accept cookies" multiple times per day. Someone needs a reality check, but I'm not sure who it is.
You don't know you can reject them with only a few clicks more?
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Funny)
But of course they never save a cookie for that setting, so they always ask if you want to accept cookies and which ones.
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Funny)
And meanwhile I have to click "Yes I accept cookies" multiple times per day. Someone needs a reality check, but I'm not sure who it is.
You don't know you can reject them with only a few clicks more?
Ah yes, the "no cookies" cookie. Very effective.
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And if you do, they have to use IndexDB or some other local storage instead? So what exactly was gained by clicking that button?
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Probably you.
The cookies part is a consequence of the EU privacy laws, TFA is about USA.
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Yup. And its a good example of virtue signalling beaurocracy and the law of unintended consequences at it finest. All its done is make life that more awkward online since how many people bother to examine the cookie settings on websites and pressing "accept" could be used for more than just accepting cookies. Its not absolutely nothing for privacy protection but has made some idiots in brussels feel better about themselves.
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Is it easy to tell a website to reject requests from the EU, and re-direct users to a page saying "No"
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It's even easier to not bother reading websites that make you jump through hoops instead of, for instance, honoring the DNT flag, or outright just... like... not using any cookies to begin with. It's not like it's a technological requirement to use any.
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It gives the users a way to reject unnecessary cookies outright which they previously couldn't.
I don't think this would be legal.
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"It gives the users a way to reject unnecessary cookies outright which they previously couldn't."
Like the brussels beaurotwats you also seem to be unaware that all browsers allow you to delete cookies.
"I don't think this would be legal."
No shit sherlock. The short of people who do it wouldn't care and it provide nice cover for whatever they want to do.
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This is so very american. Jump through all kinds of hoops making the life difficult instead of implementing a single mandated solution. Do you really want to go to the cookies setting and remove them manually after every site you visit? And no, generally disabling cookies is not the same, since it breaks many sites.
Re:Reality Check (Score:4, Informative)
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There's a plugin for that that auto-rejects tracking cookies, you know?
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Mine is named Ghostery. https://www.ghostery.com/ [ghostery.com]
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There are extensions that dismiss those banners for you, but the real solution is to complain to your regulator about non-compliant websites. GDPR is quite clear, they can't induce acceptance, can't disrupt your use of the site for non-essential cookies (which they don't need to ask permission for anyway).
Drug sniffing robots (Score:5, Insightful)
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...it just has to establish probable cause for a search.
Well, now, whether that's true (eg: legal) would be the crux of the first lawsuit testing this practice, now wouldn't it?
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There's literally an example of the AI being the only cause for a search given in the summary. The case was not chucked out of court. The guy wound up pleading guilty.
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Re: Drug sniffing robots (Score:3)
He probably had to deal with living in the real world, where he couldn't afford to fight. Most of us are not independently wealthy, so we can't afford the lawyer OR the time.
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That sounds like he pleaded out rather than trying to get the search invalidated.
That is not a justification or acceptance of the strength of the principles which would count toward the validity of the search.
Your power is lost at the moment of the search. No amount of court activity afterward can un-violate you. Even if you don't immediately spend time in jail, the next loss of your power is an indictment, which is trivially easy for any fresh-out-of-law-school Assistant DA to obtain based on absolutely no "evidence" other than what the reporting officer wrote in their report. Once the
self driving cars (Score:4, Insightful)
When self driving cars become a thing (15 to 30 years from now .. it's inevitable), how are they going to stop drug trafficking? An self driving car will have code to avoid being flagged, will never drive erratically, and won't have a minority at the wheel. How are they going to pull them over? They will have to rely on snitching instead? Maybe they'll offer big rewards or something for turning in your own dealer?
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When self driving cars become a thing (15 to 30 years from now .. it's inevitable), how are they going to stop drug trafficking? An self driving car will have code to avoid being flagged, will never drive erratically, and won't have a minority at the wheel. How are they going to pull them over?
If you'd bothered to read the summary you'd know he was pulled over because of the routes he drove not because he was weaving all over the road due to consumption of the product.
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If you'd bothered to read their post, you could have avoided embarrassing yourself with that "If you'd bothered to read" assholery.
The OP was asking what was going to replace the pretextual traffic stop [wikipedia.org]. Do "routes driven" fall into the allowed reasons for a stop?
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I covered that, by saying "a self driving car will have code to avoid being flagged".
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It would be much easier to just drive the car yourself and take different routes.
That's probably even more suspicious.
Hire a different random car each time instead.
Re: self driving cars (Score:2)
What do you imagine that means? Because even if what you mean is that the car is smart and knowledgeable enough to avoid the checkpoints, you are wrong. They will simply keep adding them because they are cheap. If you meant anything else, you are probably even more lost than if you had meant that.
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I covered that, by saying "a self driving car will have code to avoid being flagged".
"Will have code"?
LOL!
Re:self driving cars (Score:5, Interesting)
Go a step further. Since you're no longer needing traffickers and just need a fleet of self-driving cars, and we're talking about a high-profit business, just send out a couple 100 cars with every delivery as decoys to overload the system.
Since we're also talking about self-driving cars that will of course belong to someone out of reach of this jurisdiction, just slam into the cop that tries to stop your car. Sooner or later cops will be smart enough to stop this suicidal behaviour.
Re: self driving cars (Score:2)
What's it cost to send out all of those cars? Given that all self driving cars phone home, how are you doing it without being detected?
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Outsourcing. There's always some poor idiots who want to make a quick buck. Just put them in areas the police doesn't exactly like to go and you're set.
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How are they going to pull them over? They will have to rely on snitching instead?
They already rely 100% on snitching. All of those stories of poor driving were merely cover-up for the practice. The police have been lucky a few times, but the vast majority of their busts are by snitches thinking they can get ahead.
Motivate planting evidence (Score:2, Insightful)
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Just as stopping and searching people for driving the paths a criminal might is wrong, assuming a cop will commit a crime is wrong. Less wrong, but wrong in the same way.
Well there's plenty of precedent
Re: Motivate planting evidence (Score:2)
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This was a pretextual stop anyway "minor traffic infractions, including changing lanes without signaling and going 15 mph over the speed limit". But identifying him in the first place was a warrantless search, and unless the guy allowed the vehicle search (which would have been dumb), then the car search was illegal too as a warrantless search.
https://www.wgmd.com/ny-police... [wgmd.com]
He pled a deal, so none of the legalities will get tested in court.
Calling that AI is just marketing (Score:2, Informative)
It's old school number plate recognition which long predates all the AI hype by decades.
Re:Calling that AI is just marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
Not reading articles, yet commenting anyway must be a pastime of yours...
Cop AI (Score:3)
userMightBeACriminal(plateNumber) // who isn't
{
return true;
}
See, AI is not just a lot of if-then-else statements. Like this [xkcd.com]:
getRandomNumber() // chosen by fair dice roll, guaranteed to be random
{
return 4;
}
Easily done (Score:2)
The AI was fed with lots of data and now it knows:
A nice car+a black driver= suspicious possible criminal
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Re: Easily done (Score:2)
A British Olympic gold medal winner and her less famous mate (got a Bronze medal) were stopped in her BMW _on her own driveway leaving her own home_. Very suspicious obviously.
A nicer story was a claim on some other site that someoneâ(TM)s mate is 6'4", black, drives an expensive Mercedes, and is a top lawyer. Every single time he gets stopped by police without any reason he will make sure he gets an apology from the officers, compensation for his distress and
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This is the test criteria (Score:2, Funny)
Here is what the algorithm is checking for to determine criminal intent [duckduckgo.com]. It's foolproof.
This is very bad (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not opposed to looking for and catching drug dealers. I am very opposed to watching everyone, all the time to do it.
Rather than pull that identified vehicle over for a search - which never should have happened in my opinion - the cops could instead have put in the effort to watch the car, track it to a deal, and catch the guy in the act. Because until that point, they might have been stalking any of us and harassing us at the behest of a computer algorithm.
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This is nothing new. Years ago DEA used to have agents in airports watching people get off planes looking for traffickers. They don't do that anymore. Why? Because when a judge compiled all the reasons given for detainment, it boiled down to one reason: they got off the plane. They got off the plane first, so that was suspicious. They got off the plane last, that was suspicious. They got off in the middle, that was suspicious.
The cost of our need to enforce laws is...at the core...everyone is a suspect. Whe
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If the police stopped me for no reason...forced a search...the resulting lawsuit would get thrown out because "the state does not recognize your rights in public."
That's just not true.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/197... [oyez.org]
https://www.oyez.org/cases/197... [oyez.org]
https://www.oyez.org/cases/200... [oyez.org]
AI: "Suspect is driving like a black male." (Score:2)
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"10-14, we are in pursuit, alert SWAT. And have drop-gun prepared in case of erroneous shooting."
The subject is a law enforcement officer. Prepare to frame this illegal activity as duty related to aid in the subject's qualified immunity defense."
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How about (Score:3)
Parking (Score:2)
Now McDonalds recognising me and trying to sell based on previous purchases is just stupid. I like _change_. And I b
It's really simple (Score:2)
Flag all Honda drivers in the fast lane.
You know they're going to tailgate and weave.
They are the worst!
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Pick any make of automobile, and somebody firmly believes its drivers are the worst.
disturbing but inevitable (Score:2)
Recently I built a device for about $100 in off-the-shelf parts that takes a snapshot of each car passing in front of my house and measures their speed. Over the course of a few days of monitoring I got a nice dataset of traffic behavior, and have photos of repeat offenders who travel at dangerously high speeds. Totally legal and anyone with sufficient technical expertise could do this.
Now I intend to incorporate license plate reading as well, and thereby could further identify the reckless vehicles. Some o
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Interesting project but what's the value to you other than scratching a technical itch? Afterall, you can't go and arrest the driver and the police can't trust your data because you might have made the whole thing up, or tampered with it to get someone you don't like in trouble. (chain of custody n' all that)
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The initial goal has been to simply gather information; how much daily traffic in each direction and the distribution of vehicle speeds. It turns out that under 2% of drivers were traveling >50% above the speed limit, truly dangerous to bikes and pedestrians. I agree that it isn't clear what to do with the info in terms of solving the problem but I have several ideas.
My point here was to show that it is fairly easy to monitor traffic and capture license plates even as a hobbyist. If there were a national
Re: disturbing but inevitable (Score:2)
You have overlooked a tiny detail in your assertions that the so-called evidence you are gathering will have any measure of truth to it in the eyes of the law.
Tools used by law enforcement for the purposes of measuring speed require very specific calibration and testing procedures, as well as rigorous documentation of those procedures being performed at regularly scheduled intervals. That is how they become admissible as evidence. Your shade tree setup of cameras and calculations would need to pass the same
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It wouldn't hold up in court I agree, but nobody claimed that it would. Name and shame might be an effective solution.
Re: disturbing but inevitable (Score:2)
Legal to gather the data but in some states not admissible. In California for example, where there are the most vehicles, and miles driven.
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It obviously isn't admissible in a court, but the information might help motivate the police to perform a more rigorous investigation of the traffic. Or to put up more speed limit signs, etc.
But the point was that most anyone can do it. Difficult or impossible to regulate.
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I think a lot of people live in neighborhoods like that. From what I am seeing it is just a handful of people who don't care who they might harm with their driving.
It is a hobby project I've done with a cheap camera attached to a Raspberry Pi. It is based on this open source repository;
https://github.com/pageauc/spe... [github.com]
Something is missing here? (Score:2)
"Westchester PD pulled him over and searched his car"
What was the probable cause for the stop? Did the driver consent to the search?
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Great Job (Score:2)
The scale of surveillance is massive, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
At the same time, you are out in public. And as the courts have confirmed, you can film the cops but that means they can also film you.
Now if only we could get them to stay out of our private spaces, we'd be all good. Unfortunately, though, they want to surveil us there too - don't want you wearing the wrong clothes or getting intimate with the wrong person...
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Some courts have found that lengthy electronic surveillance of a subject, even in public, may require a warrant.
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Sure, but the tipping point is typically when the subject transitions from just a face in a crowd to an actual subject of interest or a target of an investigation.
Filming and following people when they walk through a mall is just fine. Filming and following a suspect for the purposes of gathering evidence, though, is a different case altogether.
AI attorney (Score:2)
Stupid games. (Score:2)
What Was the Probable Cause? (Score:3)
Rules for thee and not for me (Score:3)
Would law enforcement mind similar intrusions into the lives of their officers as citizens compile dossiers on LEAs every move on and off duty?
If any of the hundreds of thousands of officers find themselves "fitting the pattern" across all of the many dragnets would they be understanding and supportive when they find themselves searched and molested by the system due to predictable statistical flukes?
Somehow I doubt it.
Wrong criminals (Score:2)
The same tech could be used to trace billions of dollars in white collar embezzlement, insider trading and tax avoidance. It's not. Even when authorities are handed evidence on a platter (Panama Papers) nobody rich goes to jail. Are we surprised the targets of AI tracking are small time criminals and activists?
I propose the public use AI to expose the criminal behaviour of politicians and corporations. Then see how quickly authorities react to regulate. Not that I'm under any impression it would be applied
AI heurism (Score:2)
Re: old news (Score:1, Informative)
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Yes all those republicans in San Diego Ca and New York City Nyâ¦.
And those republican authoritarianâ(TM)s in the White House who established the Ministry of truth, and told social media what to censorâ¦. Clearly only an issue in some statesâ¦. And here I thought our government was globally over reaching in very bad ways
Imagine if while you "thought" you made any sense in your illiterate rant. Imagination is agood thing.
Also "in very bad ways" is not a thing. Try to stay on this planet. Earth for future reference.
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Republican states abusing information to abuse their constituents is also old news.
This is New York state, a democrat stronghold.
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This is New York state, a democrat stronghold.
Please explain why every county except 4 of them are red?
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And besides....Tom Cruise hasn't even made Minority Report II yet. The fat blue line isn't done fapping to the first one.
It was a Spielberg film & there was a short-lived TV series in 2015
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I'm Omega.
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Clearly an indication that you yourself are a MAGA moron. So which is it?
Suffering from the MAGA dominance over the general discourse without realizing the extent of it?
I.e. Being brainwashed to think in MAGA values and terms.
Cause he's clearly ANTI-MAGA, but can't properly elucidate his perception that, when it comes to law enforcement and the general support for abusive regimes - media in the US tends to land on the side of "law and order" and against the rights of the citizens.
So, brainwashed into thinking in MAGA terms, he expresses himself as a MAGAt would.
Comparing "MSM" t
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No. Ahi isn't from Alaska, it's from Hawai'i, and the name itself is Hawaiian. And salmon doesn't only come from New York, it also comes from Alaska. And while we're on the subject, don't forget stone crab from Florida, one of the most sustainable sea-foods in the world, because all that's harvested is one of the crab's claws, after which the crab is released and grows a replacement claw. Lather, rinse, repeat.