The good should not be an excuse to introduce a bunch of bad, even if the good still outweighs it. The bad should be rigorously minimized. I am not against such cameras, under certain conditions:
1) Strict limitations on what they can be used for. That also sets limits on data retention and on who has access to it (absolutely no 3rd parties)
2) Audits and oversight of how the system is being used, with real consequences for violations. The benefits of each use case to be evaluated from time to time, insufficient benefit or too much opportunity for abuse means the system will no longer be used for that particular use case.
3) Ironclad security to ensure none of this data ever gets out.
And 0) Those limitations on use should be tested against a more fundamental set of (ethical) rules, to ensure that the use is not expanded from "protect the children" to "auto-fine jaywalkers".

Only problem is that I wouldn't trust most governments to get any of these points right.

The notion that these tools can be both useful and censored is absurd.

It's even more ridiculous to think that the djinn can be put back in the bottle. I'm running a more powerful model than GPT-5 right here on my laptop, and it doesn't take much imagination to foresee people running Fable class LLMs on their phones in the not-distant future--black market or otherwise.

Training will likewise be democratized, and not a moment too soon. I'm sick of these elitist shits telling us what we can and can't be trusted with.

"Needs more Excel training" should not be the answer to any problem.

Would he have handed over the phone unasked and volunteered the password? Unlikely.
As far as I know, the phone behaves in a certain way when you enter the duress password. So it seems established that that is the password he provided. And at that point, it doesn’t matter if he wiped the phone earlier or not, that fact can no longer be established, and that alone would count under the (expanded interpretation of) that law.
Yes, we make assumptions. We’re not in court, we’re on the internet. Speculating on whether the state does or does not have a solid case. That is all.

If they never got into the phone, how do they know there was evidence on there?
They demanded the phone, and he caused the contents on it to be unrecoverable. At that point it does not matter whether the phone did or did not contain anything incriminating, according to the article 18 U.S.C. 2232 he was charged with.

It also sounds like at the time, he wasn't under arrest? He had asked for a lawyer and had been refused?
This was at a border checkpoint, and the rules are a little different. Customs officers can search your stuff (including your phone) without a warrant, probable cause or even suspicion.

He's not under any compulsion to give a password is he?
He is not, even at the border. Refusal can lead to refused entry, though. But once he gave the duress password, he effectively caused the phone's decryption keys to be wiped, and the aforementioned article kicks in.

The real question is whether or not wiping a phone constitutes "destruction of property" as mentioned in that article of law. By the letter, it does not. But data seems to be "property" in the spirit of this law. Similar to eating a physical letter before the cops get a chance to read it. Guess this is what is about to be tested in court.

Some things about his movies are very good: the cinematography, use of practical effects over CGI, scale, and good scoring. Sometimes he does drop the ball; while the score on Interstellar was epic, the one in Odyssey was bland and did not really mesh with what was going on on-screen. And he's a bit of a one-trick pony, with a rather dark and depressing tone in most of his movies. Works in Interstellar, didn't really help the Odyssey, ruined the Dark Knight. And his convoluted way of telling a story. Tenet was a mess as a result (and the time stuff just didn't work), but it worked fine in Interstellar and the Odyssey.

Loved: Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer
Liked: the Odyssey, Tenet
Didn't care for: his Batman movies, Inception, Memento.
Enough for me to go see a movie on the strength of him directing it.

Well, if you're just a partisan hack denialist there's no point to this discussion. You're not entitled to your own facts.

Funkedelac

Dyslexic p-funk, straight from the mothership!

Start with Russiagate, and you can limit yourself to left-wing sources if you like. Feel free to look up Eric Holder's AP eavesdropping and you can branch out to Treasury for the IRS weaponization. This is all quite well-documented by now and as factual as it gets. The murkier shit has plausible deniability but there is so much smoke that it's insane to suggest there was never a fire.

The Jack Smith deal was pure idiocy from a political and legal standpoint. For the record, I believe neither he nor Robert Hur should have been rooting around in either of these guys' garages or closets.

I'm not justifying what Trump is doing now, I'm explaining how we got here--much like the long-term and extremely bad consequences of Robert Bork's nomination process. Biden was front and center for that one, too, and he was explicitly warned that if he followed through then the gloves would forever be off.

The blame is that much greater when the sanctimonious fucker lecturing us about fairness is the one largely responsible for the mess in the first place--and who presents himself as having been above it all. At least Trump has no such pretensions: he never misled anyone about what he was going to do and indeed the voting public is getting exactly what they asked for.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. Nothing required anyone to do anything, but the overt politicization of the DoJ during the Obama years normalized this sort of thing and paved the way for what came after.

Biden was all too happy to do the same thing, of course, and he idiotically helped indict Trump back into office, which I publicly predicted a year and a half before the election. I and others were shouting about this from the rooftops during the 2010s: "Y'all might like this newfound presidential cudgel now, but you won't like what the next asshole does with it." I voted for Obama in 2008, so this isn't a partisan deal.

Obama didn't invent all of this, of course: Darth Cheney's "unitary executive" theory, which Dubya and his supporters endorsed, was embraced wholehearted by Obama--who should have known better since he was a constitutional law professor.

So yeah: "Thanks Obama" is appropriate in the case of the DoJ, and he was warned what would happen. If you were pissed off at the time, good on ya. If not, especially if you cheered because the end seemed to justify the means, perhaps this is a teachable moment.

Yeah, claiming without evidence that people in a grand jury are too stupid to do their jobs properly because one doesn't like the outcome isn't going to win any debates.

Are you suggesting the grand jury is/was corrupt too? You'd better bring receipts on that one.

As for the politicization of the DoJ ... can I get a rousing "Thanks, Obama"? A bunch of us pointed out where this would lead, and it's not that fun being right.

In the restaurant and bar business we definitely used "86" in more hostile ways than your extremely-far-from-authoritative source suggests.

If public incitement isn't a thing, why did Joe Biden dedicate a whole nationwide speech to it?

I don't love it since Comey should be allowed to be an ass to his heart's content (not referring to the post in question, just that he's an ass), but the peculiar circumstances involving repeated actual assassination attempts that seem to be connected to public incitement might have been what the grand jury (not the DoJ) decided to issue the indictment for.

That's significant, and it's not just the engines. The heat shield tiles, tanks and plumbing, the ship itself, all are receiving changes that are more than small incremental improvements: new insights from test flights are rolled into the design of the next ship. That introduces additional risk on each flight as well. And the risk that the cycle continues like this... letting perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Another graybeard here who remembers.