The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US. The point of these surveillance systems isn't to make us safer. Because we're actually pretty safe already. We're not going to be assassinated, kidnapped, or beaten because we pissed someone off.
It's to make people like Garrett Langley feel protected from us.
> The thing is the billionaires are terrified of US.
Are they though? The odds of any kind of coordinated response that could seriously threaten the billionaires seem next-to-none. Flock seems to be a lot more offensive than defensive - it enables the targeting and mass surveillance in order to find and punish the 'right people', as well as mass tracking to create yet another datapoint to understand the way people move, think and coordinate. The defensive side is already covered through internet services, like social media. They don't have much to fear. I reckon that a powerful/rich enough person could kill a stranger on the street in plain view of a huge crowd and have absolutely nothing happen to them.
Friend of mine used to work for a single digit billionaire. No one you know. His name barely comes up in a search. He said he found out after a few years that the guy had been kidnapped and held for ransom.
No he didn't. Luigi turned out to be an anomaly. He proved the public didn't have the stomach for revolution because none was forthcoming. He was reduced to a meme and thrown in prison.
He allegedly murdered a CEO — regardless whether it was him or not, a bloodthirsty CEO was murdered by a random member of the public. Other bloodthirsty CEOs no longer feel safe from the public.
Anyone can get shot by a random member of the public, that's the price we all pay for our American freedoms. The fear (and some might say hope) was that Luigi represented something bigger, an actual dawning of class consciousness in the US, but he didn't. He was just a guy with a gun and a grudge and there are literally millions of those.
"some" implies more than one. There was only one. There weren't any more, and there doesn't seem to be any sign of more. And this happened in a city where people get shot to death every day.
Life is literally no less safe for CEOs in the US post-Mangione then prior. The whole narrative that he represented some kind of social or cultural inflection point against CEOs was simply false, and the ones that are actually afraid already hire security because getting kidnapped for ransom is a much bigger threat than being shot in the street.
Pointing cameras at cameras? Terrorist organization