Doug Conarroe

@Lightloveguide That's the reason for the hole in the budget. Mismanagement argument can be made about where the existing dollars are spent, but the hole is caused by changes to the federal tax code.

A 29-year-old Cheyenne man was arrested Monday for taking a motorized golf cart off-roading inside the Buffalo Niagara International Airport. He was “visibly intoxicated,” drove the cart on a motorized walkway and faces a list of criminal charges. tinyurl.com/mscbytas

It doesn't look like much: a pole, a solar panel array, and a digital camera. But it's part of a vast, creepy surveillance program -- and an @IJ lawsuit challenging that program has survived a motion to dismiss. The program is called "Flock," and it places cameras all over a jurisdiction to capture license plate data from passing cars. In Norfolk, VA, where @IJ sued, there are over 170 Flock cameras. And that's just one city. Flock's cameras are in over 5,000 cities nationwide. The point of that network of cameras is to create a database of citizens' movements across the country. Police can query the database to see where a vehicle has been in any city within the Flock network. And police can access that data without a warrant or probable cause. Flock describes itself as a "tech company eliminating crime." But its network has been subject to abuse. A police chief in Kansas, for instance, used the Flock network to stalk his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. When data is accessible without a warrant, that kind of abuse should be expected. My colleagues @IJ sued in Norfolk, challenging this surveillance program as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. The city moved to dismiss, and, late last week, the court allowed the lawsuit to proceed. The court cited Carpenter, a case where the Supreme Court held that police need a warrant to access cellphone location data, and reasoned that the data captured by the Flock network is basically indistinguishable from the data in Carpenter. And that data allows for a level of surveillance that would have been totally alien at the nation's founding: "Historically it would have been nearly impossible for law enforcement to collect the same information as the Flock cameras and to the same magnitude without expending significant time, money, and labor." That decision isn't the end of the case. The case now goes to discovery--and my colleagues will be demanding information from the city about how the Flock program operates. That information will inform the court's ultimate decision. For now, though, this is a victory. The case proceeds, and this massive surveillance program is now in the crosshairs of a constitutional challenge.

Remembering Wyoming's Willie LeClair Eastern Shoshone tribe member Willie LeClair walked dual worlds as a cowboy and an American Indian in Wyoming. His legacy is as a spiritual leader, storyteller and teacher who also had a “wicked sense of humor.” cowboystatedaily.com/2024/12/15/wil…

This is still just so shocking and sad... "Erika was a fighter": Former @dailycamera editorial page editor Erika Stutzman Deakin dies at 51 dailycamera.com/2024/12/13/for… // obituary by @boundsa

Santa Fe's high-profile Sundance Film Festival bid came to an end Thursday as the Sundance Institute announced it has narrowed its search to three finalist cities in the running to host the influential festival starting in 2027. sfnm.co/4d2RmcK