Arizona town puts hidden cameras in fake cactus plants
Paradise Valley, Arizona has installed a series of fake cactus plants featuring pretty obvious surveillance cameras. Residents' confusion and suspicion about the "cact-eye," as the local news dubbed the set-up, was compounded when city officials failed to announce the cameras' purpose and seemed unwilling to do so.
Finally, city officials revealed that the cameras are a license plate tracking system, and they decided to install everything before announcing their plan — sort of a "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" approach to monitoring drivers' every move.
License plate tracking has been controversial nationally among civil libertarians, but the Department of Homeland Security is currently moving forward with a modified version of a tracking plan it had to cancel last year in the face of citizen objections.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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