Robert DuChemin, Sr,
When crack cocaine hit the scene I was President of the local Federal Bar Association. There were so many cases coming into the system that the federal judges approached me because they needed more attorneys to volunteer to be appointed counsel under the Criminal Justice Act. Judge Ken Sharp informed me that I was one of their first “volunteers.”
In one of my first cases the government produced more than 200 hours of redacted videotape of my client committing felonies. Being a good lawyer, I asked for all of the videotape in case there was any exculpatory evidence in the other recordings. They then produced almost 2,000 hours of recorded video. I remember being stunned by the amount of surveillance. It reminded me why the Constitution gives us protections: because of the awesome power of the government.
I felt the same way when I read the affidavit used to obtain the arrest warrant for the stabber in the Idaho murders. In one of the most rural areas of the United States the police were able to obtain video and track his cell phone to compile a timeline of him going to and from the murders. They even knew where and which way he was traveling when he turned his phone off and where and which which way he was going when he turned it back on. They were also able to find out how many times he had approached the crime scene that night from neighborhood video cameras.
Unlike the massive amount of surveillance against my very guilty client mentioned above, this surveillance was passive, did not require a warrant to be compiled, and was far more detailed and often times with better quality video than the video tapes from 30 years ago.
Here is the scary part: that kind of surveillance is being done on every one of us every day. As soon as you leave your house the government will be able to track you everywhere. I mean everywhere. If you turn your phone off going one direction and turn it back on going another direction they can calculate your endpoint by your speed and where and when you turned the phone off and on. If they don’t have your phone, one of your neighbors has a camera and the guy on the next street has a camera and there are traffic cameras as soon as you cross a traffic intersection.
The government always knows where you are and what you are doing.
Now the very scary part. With all of that technology and passive surveillance available in a rural area, you know for damn sure that the FBI knows who placed the pipe bombs in Washington DC, the city with the most video surveillance in the world, on January 6, 2021, when they were placed, and with whom in the government the criminal or criminals were communicating around the time of the bomb placement.
So how come there have been no arrests,