One of the most compelling aspects of American governance is the latitude local law enforcement has. They can be both an ally and enemy to freedom.
And the comments in that post were a Rorschach test of where the commenter fell on how "necessary" the abuses of the FBI were.
J Edna Hoover could assign a team to gather kompromat on a person and to surveil them or harass them.
A Congressperson has no equivalent ability to threaten the Director of the FBI. At best, they could spread a rumor, but a rumor doesn't catch fire when journalists / editors had too high of ethics to repeat unverified rumors.
Also, American society in the 1960s was not nearly as supportive of MLK Jr when he was alive as much as they are now that he was martyred. You and I are looking back and projecting our modern values on people who were still largely racist in a time when racism was both a de facto and de jure truth.
That is to say that lots of America would likely have supported the effect of the blackmail letter, if not the method itself. It was a different time. The frequent threat of the USSR, encroaching Communism, and the specter of nuclear war was suffocating and the "Law and Order" marketing of Nixon and J Edgar Hoover were appealing to many people, even if they suppressed the freedoms of many.
We did change the laws and provide more de jure rights since the 1960s.
I think there's lots of conflation of the more traditional definition of "racism" with the contemporary definition, which is not a direct correlation to the older one. The older one was a descriptor of the attributes of an individual's beliefs whereas the contemporary is a descriptor of the societal system / incentives.
Companies with deep pockets aren't throwing advertising dollars at Nick Fuentes or Kanye West when they are deep in their racist mania arc. It is no longer socially acceptable to be associated with what used to be common, the societal norm, and legally enforced.
We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
Im enjoying watching HBO's The WhiteHouse Plumbers and CNN's Ticky Dick. There are soooo many references thick rhyme with Trump's rhetoric, actions, and policies.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/politics/jd-vance-richard-nix...
Of course this is in addition to state-level political action against flocks and other types of surveillance to preserve our freedom uniformly. The point is that we want the police lobby to be neutral or even on our side, rather than having to fight against them.
They themselves generally don't mind the invasion of privacy, at least not until it catches them specifically. In general they are much, much more afraid of the "crime wave" than of the police. (A crime wave which never seems to diminish, despite more and more policing and punishment. And which is contradicted by crime statistics.)
Do people feel the same way about speeding cameras?
I find the backlash against ALPRs wildly disproportionate. It earnestly saddens me that our political focus has flowed to these issues, datacenters, college sports rules, etc. while we remain incapable of confronting far more consequential structural problems, like an inability to tax and redistribute wealth.
Ultimately this is due to the fact that the systems are used to generate revenue from citizens trying to live from day to day. Speed cameras don't really impact the wealthy the way they do the working class. Same goes for video surveillance.
So why should we the people give up our right to privacy for some fake sense of safety and huge bill
And it's not a question of one or the other. It's a imposition of both upon the citizenry.
Speed cameras typically give you leeway over the limit. And yes, I support interventions that measurable reduced serious injury and death while still allowing you to drive to your destination.
And a repeated response from a certain kind of person was "Well, if we're spending 45% on policing, we must need it right..."