“A tree doesn’t post its blossoms. A river doesn’t explain its course. Nature teaches us that presence is enough.” ― Lawrence Nault
Classified Record is a searchable index of declassified U.S. government documents
“The Classified Record is a searchable index of declassified U.S. government documents, with primary sources linked and FOIA status documented for each entry. It exists because the existing infrastructure for accessing declassified records was built for researchers, not for the general public.
The CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room contains millions of pages of declassified material. The National Archives holds billions more. The National Security Archive at George Washington University maintains one of the most important collections of government records in the world. None of these resources were designed for a person who simply wants to know what a document says and why it matters.
They require familiarity with FOIA exemption categories, document numbering systems, and archival search interfaces that have not been meaningfully updated in years. This site is not a replacement for those resources. It is a translation layer between them and anyone who wants to understand what the government has confirmed without spending weeks learning how to navigate federal archives…When a document is added to this site, its full text is transcribed, redacted passages are marked as REDACTED so the structure of the original document is preserved, and the transcription is published as indexed HTML.
For the first time, the actual language of these documents is searchable. Each entry also includes a plain English summary of what the document confirms, a section on what the document does not establish, and a documented FOIA status that distinguishes between records withheld under a classification exemption and records for which the government claims no documents exist. That distinction is meaningful. Most resources that discuss these documents do not address it…”
90,000 Flock cameras have quietly gone up in the US
ZDNET – What they track and how to check your city: “Flock Falcon cameras don’t detect speed. Instead, the cameras take roughly six to 12 still images each time a vehicle passes. Flock then uses automated license plate recognition software and machine learning to analyze those images. The cameras can capture a vehicle’s plate, make, model, color, body type, direction of travel, damage, aftermarket wheels, bumper stickers, and other details.
“The software analyzes images of vehicles and extracts characteristics such as license plates . . . and other distinguishing features,” Trevor Horwitz, co-founder and chief information security officer of the cybersecurity firm TrustNet, told ZDNET in an interview. “Those become searchable, allowing investigators to look for a vehicle even if they don’t have a complete license plate number.”
Those records aren’t stored inside the roadside cameras. According to Flock’s site, all images and related data are sent over a cellular network to its cloud system, where authorized users can search them through the Flock Safety dashboard. Police can also receive alerts when a camera detects a plate tied to a stolen vehicle, a missing person, an arrest warrant, or another database entry.
So one Flock camera might help police identify a vehicle connected to a crime, but when many Flock cameras across different towns and states feed records into the same searchable network, they can be used to trace the movements of just about anyone.
A single plate hit reveals nothing more than what an ordinary person could see unaided, that a car is at a particular place at a particular time,” Catherine Crump, a clinical professor of technology law and director of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, told ZDNET in an interview. “A network is different, particularly when it involves lots of cameras, because over time it will become a comprehensive record of someone’s movements…”
