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Publication Date: September 2, 2026
By Benjamin Irving
Satire about the hypocrisy and unique legal trade-offs of public safety technologies, digital municipal tools, and social media. Image remixed creatively from The Economist Magazine.
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Half the protesters did not own cars, having moved to Hudson because it is one of the few American towns where driving is optional. Some cited the European lifestyle. Others cited their DWIs. The rest could not afford one but were researching EV scooters, which carry no license plates. All 3 groups opposed the plate readers on principle, the principle being different in each case.
The mayor's position on privacy is evolving, paid aides confirmed, and currently tracks whoever spoke to him last. He opposes the Eagle Falcon cameras, which delete their footage after 7 days, and is considering the rival Panic-Sonic system, which polled well in the 5th Ward and retains its footage forever, on servers abroad, in a jurisdiction with no privacy law and no extradition treaty. The mayor called the 7-day deletion "frankly suspicious." The mayor has extended his objection to the city's parking kiosks, which, like the cameras, run on license plate numbers. The city's new parking app, which collects the same numbers, retains his full support: it polled well. One complication went unmentioned: parking records are public records, and any resident can FOIL them, including whoever keeps posting the parody stickers framing the mayor as “Bar-tab Johannes”. The request would show who parks on Warren Street, and when, and whether certain government employees were parked anywhere near their jobs.
The mayor has, allegedly, requested Eagle Falcon footage exactly once: to identify whoever keeps posting stickers alleging he spends his evenings in bars and his afternoons extending city contracts in secret without authorization. Through a taxpayer paid spokesman, he called both accusations entirely false, categorically, at every establishment and in every filing cabinet, except that one time with Hill Buston at Stripey Cat. With the federal sidewalk lawsuit still unresolved and weekly sidewalk related injuries, and housing projects on hold, he nevertheless took the time to draft an emergency Press Release to endorse NY Senator Hershey’s legislation that is not yet out of committee and, by most readings, unconstitutional. "80% of this job is advocating on issues I heard about on Pod Save America," he said. "20% is how the city works." Aides confirmed he was drafting another press release as the protest ended, this time about immigration issues in Canada. He has now issued more press releases than City Hall has ever published municipal newsletters, a campaign promise forgotten, and the document that tells residents what their government did with their money. The newsletter's last edition could not be located at press time.
Every protester carried a smart phone, a $1,200 device they bought themselves and carry voluntarily, which reports their location to a dozen companies and, on request, the government, at all times, including now. Surveillance they pay for is freedom, attendees explained; regulated surveillance the County pays for to catch criminals is tyranny. A visiting psychologist called this "moral licensing." The protesters called it something else.
One attendee went further:
The line drew the afternoon's longest applause. His Alexa, at home, logged the empty room.
Several attendees prepared for the rally by pulling an Eagle Falcon supporter's property taxes, assessment history, and 1987 porch variance from the city's public records portal, a free service that maps everything a person owns, owes, and once tried to build, no warrant required. They called this "due diligence." The 4 cameras, which record a license plate and forget it in a week, they called Orwellian. The city itself, for the record, retains every email, every meeting note, every parking ticket, and every household's water consumption for 7 years. The cameras, which it has no jurisdiction over and was asked to remove, forget everything in 7 days. Nobody proposed a petition about the water records.
5 owners of private plate readers, mounted on their own property, a constitutionally protected use they said they would defend in court for fun and to annoy Liberty Smith, asked the crowd a clarifying question: would the protesters prefer they install ordinary security cameras instead, the swivel-headed kind that zooms in on faces and pickpockets, rather than the fixed lens aimed at cars and road? Either kind reads plates, they noted; the App Store sells apps that do it from a phone. The crowd did not have a preference ready. Voting on a preference was tabled.
One former council member worried aloud that the county would mount Eagle Falcon cameras on its own property at 11 Warren Street, the building she once campaigned to convert into 60 housing units, now the parole and County election office. The conversion failed. The building stands, for now, unwatched.
One woman livestreamed the event to Facebook, the platform that in 2018 handed 87 million profiles to Cambridge Analytica and triggered a national privacy fever, back when half the country concluded Facebook had elected their opponent. The fever broke within the year. The harvesting did not. She panned across the crowd, capturing 15 faces; Facebook AI recognized 12, and will remember them longer than the cameras, or the videographer, would have. Several attendees dismissed as paranoid the idea that their phones listen to them, then lowered their voices anyway. A younger contingent coordinated on TikTok, an application under the effective control of the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing declined to comment but updated its ad targeting towards Albany-Botswana-Catskill-Hudson members, in Catskill.
Organizers of the Hudson Mile, run the same day, distanced the race from the protest and reaffirmed their support for runners wearing Whoop, Fitbit, and Strava, devices that log location, heart rate, sleep, and by inference sexual activity. This tracking, they explained, is completely different: it is opt-in, at least by the person wearing it. Whether the other participant in the logged activity also opted in is a question for the district attorney.