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I worry that most cynical among us, hopped up on 30 years of law and order rhetoric, will say "this is the system working: he didn't do anything wrong and now he's free." As if the terror and wide-scale publicity of an arrest and federal prosecution is not a horrible punishment in and of itself.

An absolute hero when it comes to fighting government secrecy and bringing to public one of the most important archives in the history of policing.

Old New York Police Surveillance Is Found, Forcing Big Brother Out of Hiding (Published 2016)Boxes found in a Queens warehouse contain files about the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and the Young Lords.www.nytimes.com

I'm declaring a moratorium on AI companies putting out, or the tech press reporting on, any new press releases containing the words "sentient, containment, unintentional, unexpected, autonomous, singularity" ...etc.

Consequences are coming. The question is: will democrats signal that it will extend beyond billionaires that act as Republican operatives to companies, like Palantir, which have been given bipartisan contracts in the past but have aided in the current anti- (little d) democratic push.

Less than a year ago, I attended a police convention quasi-incognito to learn about what the police tech industry is selling to departments, how cops are using this tech, and what the future of policing looks like. These insights get more relevant every day:

I'm begging people to realize that since Irish & Germans immigrants in 1840s, there has always been attempts to say the current wave of recent immigrants are unassimilable and prone to crime--and fighting petty crime necessitates deportations and immigration restrictions. I wrote a book about it:

Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New Yorkwww.dukeupress.edu

The power of paperwork.

Holy cow, congratulations @roopikarisam.bsky.social

We’re losing our chance to prevent armed drones on our streets and in our schools.

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police DronesThis is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to rein in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little tim...www.eff.org

Finally able to go through this visualization of how AI is used in military kill chains. It's an invaluable resource to demonstrate all the points AI pushes the military toward killing civilians, justified under the banner of "impartial" tech. Bravo, @airwars.bsky.social @ainowinstitute.bsky.social

Interactive: Anatomy Of An AI Kill ChainBreaking down how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologiesai-killchain.airwars.org

This is great.

"As we started producing the information...we found out, holy cow, we’re sharing with these people and actually when it was set up we shouldn’t have been sharing outside of California or with the federal agencies" Police don't even know who sees their surveillance--sometimes in violation of the law

Chico PD granted ICE, Border Patrol, access to its ALPR data - ChicoSol NewsThe Chico Police Department says it has shut off license plate reader data sharing that, until July 8, appears to have been in violation of California state law. Two weeks after ChicoSol requested pub...chicosol.org

A supervisor at a real-time crime center, the regional surveillance hubs that are centralizing all information in an area---was spying on her partner using Flock license plate readers. This makes well over a dozen cases in Georgia alone. Let's call this system what it is: a stalking machine.

Police supervisor accused of using Flock License Plate Reader system to track domestic partner in GeorgiaAfter auditing its Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader system, the Conyers Police Department says it discovered one of its supervisors was misusing the technology.www.cbsnews.com

From cops pushing AI written police reports with obvious mistakes in them, to DOJ lawyers making stuff up, I hope there’s a judge’s revolt against some of this tomfoolery.

AI is like serial viewers taking racist & classist lessons away from watching Judge Judy--It has a view of the world that is based on sterile and highly-curated data that allows flawed pattern recognition devoid of any understanding of social forces, structural inequality, systematic racism, etc.

That’s the thing about surveillance—we all commit minor statuatory infractions every single day. More surveillance equals more enforcement and that enforcement is almost always done in ways the penalize already marginalized neighborhoods.

Some good news!

Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp is now a UNESCO World Heritage siteThe Okefenokee is the first natural site in the U.S. to be added to the World Heritage List in more than 30 years.www.ajc.com

Hello! Are you going to Dragoncon, the giant fandom convention? I'll be there all weekend speaking on the technology policy track on 1. The Business Model of Police Surveillance, 2. Killer Robots: Myth and Reality, and 3. Understanding the DOD/Anthropic Dustup.

Given the general state of the country the last 10 years, I'd say the gift to fascism is going back to electing the ineffective moderates Democrats which lead to their rise but hey, what do I know...

“I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit” There goes Axon's #1 selling point about why police should use AI to write police reports for them.

Axon Says AI Police Reports Save Time. Public Records Show They Get Facts WrongMore than 600,000 police reports have been written with help from Axon’s AI tools. Public records obtained by Forbes show that they can introduce errors that cops have to spend time editing out.www.forbes.com