https://www.thelocal.se/20180807/support-for-democracy-weak-among-swedens-yo... https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/95c3tq/support_for_democracy_wea... https://theintercept.com/2018/07/23/project-veritas-lawsuit-american-federat... https://theintercept.com/2018/07/29/firstnet-att-surveillance/ "it’s more important that that network shut down every citizen" FirstNet has its own “app store.” These applications will incorporate facial recognition, real-time video For decades, local newsrooms and citizen watchdogs have relied on police scanners to monitor first responders and track natural disasters, protests, and emergencies. The migration to data-based communications cuts down on what is communicated over these public frequencies. As FirstNet and its competitors transition voice communications to their encrypted broadband networks in the coming years, even more will be kept from public oversight. FirstNet is already the subject of a transparency lawsuit by two Vermont men who claim that the U.S. government is legally required to perform a Privacy Impact Assessment on the program, since the FirstNet network will presumably be used to transmit personal information about American citizens. The government has argued that this requirement does not apply since the network itself is owned by AT&T, rather than the government. The program’s status as a public-private partnership has created other transparency roadblocks as well: The federal government’s contract with AT&T has not been made public. FirstNet’s most lasting achievement may be the infrastructure it provides for state-of-the-art surveillance technologies to be deployed by law enforcement at every level.