Articles
Amnesty International and more than 170 organisations call for a ban on biometric surveillance
The above article finally gets it right. Regulation is wholly inadequate. Nothing short of an outright biometric surveillance ban, in all parts of society, by public and private entities, will suffice. Thank you to the above organizations for taking a meaningful stand on this issue unlike our elected officials.
How Police and Friends Stalk Me
Europe makes the case to ban biometric surveillance
By the time legislation is in place, Breyer worries that the technology may have become commonplace. “Once they have been developed, there's nothing to stop the companies from selling them to the private market, or even outside the EU, to authoritarian governments, to dictatorships like China,” he adds. “All these technologies will have the potential to create a ubiquitous system of surveillance for following us wherever we go, whatever we do, even for reporting us for our behaviour, which may be different from that of others.”
Ban Facial Recognition
Facial recognition is on the rise, but artificial intelligence is already being trained to recognize humans in new ways — including gait detection and heartbeat sensors
Governments Are Using Spyware on Citizens. Can They Be Stopped?
THE RISE OF THE VIDEO SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
As described in the above, I am typically a “person of interest” within these unregulated systems simply for being in public anywhere on Earth. Fixed cameras transmit an alert based on my face or device or car, which then alert a dispersed network of — for all intents and purposes snitches and spies (sometimes real cops), bigots and busybodies, bad actors and goons, who lean overwhelmingly in the directions of: uneducated, unethical, and undesirable. No matter what municipality I am in on the planet they are formed around the exact same industries and associations and follow eerily uniformed hunting protocol upon detection of my presence. The amplitude of this status and subsequent response seems to be significantly elevated when I’ve freshly arrived in a new place - as when traveling, and then again in my own community upon my return; as well as when there are changes to my medical record, vehicle, transfers of money, scanning of passports, ID logged at a hotel, etc.
The results of this should not be surprising. Just as we can no longer be surprised when acts of hate are committed against members of groups whom a popular populist calls enemies and thugs and terrorists, so it comes to be that I’m not surprised by the fact that really bad things constantly happen to me, only in the realm of malicious reporting more than actual violence, done by the “good guys” to Joe the bad guy. And the preponderance of demographic representation among malicious reporters includes conspicuously close ties (if not direct employment, few if any degrees of separation) to:
-military
-healthcare unions
-first responder unions
-transportation unions
-parks (all kinds - municipal, federal, etc)
-tourism & hospitality
The incredibly vast network-wide nature of these surveillance systems (often bundled with license plate detection) allows for huge numbers of people to track me in real-time as I move from one biometrically enhanced camera to the next (an inevitability of taking a walk or drive in the year 2024), and it continues to amaze me the level of comfort and normalization there is with this brazen stalking. The impression is that I am a “threat” before I am a human in these peoples’ AI-system-influenced eyes, and that my Horrible Person status renders me undeserving of anonymity and respect, that whatever I’ve done to get on this list (of which they have no idea, by design) validates malicious treatment, suspicion and degradation. In other words - “this IS reasonable suspicion,” goes their reasoning, because it says right here in our system you’re a “person of interest.” In other words, “because Brawndo’s got electrolytes.”
The problem with that analogy, however, is that it lets what I see the real issue, intentional malice, off the hook by attributing abuses to ignorance, the end users as the unwitting pawns which they are not. What I have experienced is not ineptitude, it’s not a mistaken feedback loop. Not at all. It is a strategic hunt. These systems are abused against me with malicious intent, and that the motivation to tag and stalk me may be personally, politically, or socially motivated. There is great effort on the part of the worst offenders to portray me as drug-addicted or unstable or aggressive. I’ve heard “Antifa” uttered (in the tone of a slur) by some of the worst offenders, an indicator that there may be a political underpinning at least in my local area where all this started. While I can only guess at the actual origins, either way I can readily expect “attack” behaviors more similar to Scab List tactics or whistleblower retaliation campaigns than ill-guided neighborhood safety work. And in other countries apparently it gets much worse than that.
I fail to understand the lack of oversight and crackdown on the entire video surveillance industry, lack of consequences to the suppliers and the end users, who as I’m experiencing it spend significantly more time setting me up for crimes or committing crimes against me than stopping them, despite what the products claim to be used for or the people claim is their objective.
Uncovering the Iceberg: THE DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE CRISIS WROUGHT BY STATES AND THE PRIVATE SECTOR
Facial recognition can and will be used against each of us by governments and corporations
Dangers of “EXIF” Data From Your Photos & Videos
I’m surprised EXIF data (including exact time and exact location and exact device type) is not under more scrutiny, and specifically why it’s even the default on all our photos in the first place when, given the extreme dangers (where you live, where you work, where you are now, where you’ve been, patterns of movements, tendencies, on top of biometric data mined from the images themselves) of having this info always telegraphed to the world. I cannot prove, but I know 100%, my EXIF data, always in the wrong hands, has done irreparable damage to my life, places me in constant danger, and gets no serious attention from privacy watchdogs. You know who does pay attention to this, however? The US Federal Government. Always presented as “the threat from outside” to constituents, they are exploiting this like a mug to track, target, surveil, and sometimes destroy their chosen targets such as myself.
360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans
Urgent Red Lines Must Be Drawn. Regulation essential to curb AI for surveillance, disinformation: rights experts
Trump's Secret New Watchlist Lets His Administration Track Americans Without Needing a Warrant
"An individual's placement into the [terrorist watchlist] does not require any evidence that the person engaged in criminal activity, committed a crime, or will commit a crime in the future."
“In layman's terms, watchlisting sets off a series of alarms when a person travels, banks, or posts on social media.”
“While the TOC watchlist tracks members of transnational gangs and people affiliated with international crime syndicates, it also keeps tabs on Americans who, in an increasingly globalized world, are deemed transnational criminals merely because they talk to people in other countries.”
"There's an incredible amount of information the government holds and if it's not bound by these kinds of principles, it can be misused," Pope says. "I think that they're applying standards that, to me, are entirely discriminatory. And because it is the Executive Branch, they could do a lot of damage before they're stopped."
These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI
UN Cybercrime Treaty: A Menace in the Making
EU Parliament contemplates limited use of real-time biometric tech under AI Act
The Algorithmic Apocalypse
In many cases, these algorithms have proven useful for society. They've helped eliminate mundane tasks or level the playing field. But increasingly, the algorithms that undergird our digital lives are making questionable decisions that enrich the powerful and wreck the lives of average people. There's no reason to be scared of AI making decisions for you in the future — computers have already been doing so for quite some time.
Inside Israel’s lucrative — and secretive —cybersurveillance industry
The Complete BS Promise of “Safety” That the DOT Pushes to Sell “V2X” Tech
I’ve already lived it. I’ve been the guinea pig. I will be tomorrow as well. It’s not about safety, obviously. It’s about surveillance, control, espionage, obstruction, stalking, and the ability to target anybody at any time in real-time, for whatever reason. To obstruct, to interfere, to kill, to disappear, to neutralize. As I’ve restated many times on the page, this specialized knowledge appeals more to bad actors than to good ones. But go ahead, buy the pitch. I couldn’t find a single article of watchdog rebuttal yet against this propaganda. Yet another tool to quietly disappear or otherwise neutralize activists, opposition, dissidents, etc - the usual “suspects,” the usual targets of the established order in any society. Everything bad that’s happened to me this past decade is only possible via real-time tracking of (a) devices, (b) biometrics, and (c) VEHICLES. Safety schmafety, utterly disingenuous like “recycling” before it (many of you fools are still offended that I point that out … easier to fool people than tell them they’re being fooled, this applies to pretty much the entire message and theme of this site).
Israeli Companies Sold Surveillance Tech and Knowledge Used for Persecuting Dissidents, Journalists, LGBT People
LEXISNEXIS IS SELLING YOUR PERSONAL DATA TO ICE SO IT CAN TRY TO PREDICT CRIMES
Governments Should Halt Trade in Surveillance Technology
How License Plate Readers Are Being Used To Record Americans’ Movements
Don’t Fall for the Intelligence Community’s Monster of the Week Justifications
Business Owners: Take the Pledge to Ban Facial Recognition
***The below technology does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Not only is voice rec used to ID people, it’s used in real-time to cross-reference their voice-print with their real-time location. As I no longer can safely carry a cell phone, I have observed over the past two years the rapid rise in voiceprint ID to locate me. Consider that - I can’t even speak in public without consequences coming from a community (law enforcement and their snitch network) descending upon me who have a serious bias against me already.
Forget About Siri and Alexa — When It Comes to Voice Identification, the “NSA Reigns Supreme”
News such as at the link below are met with mixed emotions from me, similar to recent news of Google data privacy settlements. Rite Aid recently filed for bankruptcy and is a relative non-factor in the bigger picture of retail premise video surveillance abuse. Also, the emphasis on misidentifying certain protected groups still fails to protect me. I’m not a woman, a person of color, etc, and yet I’m utterly and completely abused by the same “probable criminal” BS, yet the settlement and the message fail to acknowledge my experience or safeguard against future abuses against me, and ignores the reality we live in America today, where I would argue that politically motivated targeting will increasingly see white people targeting other white people who they find disagreeable for ideological reasons, but where the outcomes are just as bad and deserving of a crackdown as racial, religious, or orientation-based abuse. But the biggest issue I take is that it feels disingenuous, like misdirection. Put the screws to already-screwed Rite Aid and put out press releases to create the appearance of a serious crackdown - when what it’s really saying is: Kroger, Target, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, every REIT-owned-parking lot, all of the real players in this game —— you’re in the clear! The public has been satiated with a superficial civil rights blow to a powerless already-defeated scapegoat brand so that your past shady dealings in the surveillance economy may go unpunished and future transgressions continue unchallenged.
FTC Bans Facial Recognition at Rite Aid
All said, please do not get it twisted - I totally, absolutely stand with all people who can relate to this passage for any reason. Do not conflate my “what about me?” appeal as an “All Lives Matter” dogswhistle - it is not haha. I’m simply saying that “All Lives Matter” people go after me too and we need to open our minds up to the idea that the age-old practice of shitting on the vulnerable isn’t necessarily restricted to race, religion, sexuality, or other government-approved categories exclusively.
The passage is simply this:
From October 2012 to July 2020, the complaint said, Rite Aid employees acting on false alerts from the systems followed customers around stores, searched them, ordered some to leave and, if they refused, called the police to confront or remove them, at times in front of friends and family.
I’ve been through it more times than I can count or care to remember. There are certain incidents that have stuck with me, however, such that I would dare not even revisit the jurisdiction in which these stores are located without a trusted confidante (potential witness to the abuse) alongside me, as it seemed that these surveillance systems were weaponized maliciously, that there was more going on than a simple false positive - the idea that it’s always a mistake tends to be overstated and that the store level people aren’t heinous monstrous bigots who are aware of this is also underestimated.
360 Degree Surveillance: How Police Use Public-Private Partnerships to Spy on Americans
Amazon Denies “Facial Recognition Watchlists” Implementation, Which is an Outright Lie
Voiceprinting is the most under-reported technology (the abuse of sensors too I think) by digital rights muckrakers. The combo of voice and face rec-enabled geolocation, on top of device and vehicle tracking, can make the entire planet a virtual prison for those singled out by biased shady privately owned (and thus unaccountable to the standard of public agencies) “predictive” products developed for and sold to fascists, and leaked to Back-the-Blue bigots who serve as their proxies.
Why is Nobody Talking About the Even More Dangerous Technology of Voice Recognition?
For certain people in my community, it’s clear that this new techno-vigilantism trend is meeting psychological needs albeit not in a victimless way. It’s a mix between the casino and the tabloids. It’s a form of real-life angertainment for the Stupid Bigot Class (and proooooud of it!!), where they can actually get out there on the street once the “unwanted person” is detected on their block by their dumb little apps - and he a hero!! So they get to feel the dopamine hit of the casino plus the artificial status boost they get from tabloids and daytime talk shows - “I might be a terrible parent and partner and professional and person and strugglin’ myself, but at least I’m not as bad off as those people!” That kind of thing. I presume that if we climbed far enough up the family tree we would see their ancestors sitting in private box seats at lynchings, popcorn and peanuts in hand, just having the time of their friggin’ lives haha.
Border Patrol Surveillance Abuse is Out of Control
Why do I care about this one above? I go to Mexico periodically and I get this treatment! My checkpoint stops get real real, real fast. I fly a lot lately and customs is a bit of a different animal for me than most of you. ICE goes after me. There is no worse feeling for me than the moment I return to America after I pass through that customs gate. esp after a Mexico trip where it seems ICE has taken the liberty of describing my travels as potentially drug- or crime-related despite huge amounts of obvious evidence to the contrary. It all goes to shit from there, and typically kicks off a 3-week s***-on-Joe campaign that follows me back to my own home, a “monitoring period” of some sort that is anything but impartial and benevolent. And yet - when I’m in Mexico, their cops and soldiers and in-group vigilantes abuse this tech arguably even more than the U.S.! (traveling solo led to a string of targeted “arrests” which were pretexts for massive robberies by cops) So it’s been a huge eye-opener for me, where they don’t seem to really care about Mexican nationals getting deported and how these technologies affect their own people, for them it seems to be a thrill to have power to abuse and use it, much like America before only very very very recently scrambling to clean up its act. However I do add an asterisk to that - I still firmly believe American authorities are “sharing” total disinformation across borders to government and community leaders that feeds and encourages the discrimination I face, and sadly, what I keep learning is that the world, despite its superficial criticisms of American power, generally respects and believes anything these assholes tell them over my side of a story. In other words, it’s significantly harder to convince them I’m a refugee seeking respite than it is for America to convince them I’m a drug mule or terrorist despite the preponderance of easily accessible evidence showing I really am a nature-exploring distance runner. You just don’t see a great deal of overlap between the life I really live and the life America wants you to believe I live, and yet —— it just seems nothing I do is ever enough to change the tide. Utterly ridiculous.
Cops, Feds, and their Shady Private Friends (AAA for example) Steal Every Word I’ve Ever Said, Every Place I’ve Ever Been (and are at presently in real-time), and Contents of Every Device Ive Ever Used, From My Car, using this info as a basis for coordinated intimidation and disinformation campaigns.
Illinois - it’s a Start. But Soooo Many Loopholes Remain.
Portland claims it’s similarly enacted a face rec ban like Illinois. Haha. I know that’s BS. The workaround is that rather than relying on fixed cameras owned by corporate and public entities, they decentralize (a terrorist tactic if you ask me) by sending out little labor union, private security, Freemason, first responder, and military veteran goons (essentially the “real Americans” network of Establishmentarian bigots) with background apps that vacuum up the same biometric info, plus location data, using cell phone cameras and mics and sensors. This needs to be criminalized at an individual level. Literally individuals need to face criminal consequences if this trend is to stop and I see no sign of that coming down the pike anytime soon.
Predictive Policing Algorithms Are Racist.
And so are gun laws if we’re being honest. Legislators and cops know very well that gun violence kills people of color at an extremely high rate. My hope, and I do believe this will come to be my reality, is that America will stubbornly (and self-interestedly) refuse to crack down on its rogue criminal surveillance industry, as it’s done for the weapons industry, while I’m chillin’ out in a place where, as more info on how awful this stuff is comes to light, enacts meaningful legislation to kick AI surveillance (the real bad guy), rather than Joe Leineweber (the obvious scapegoat), out of society. So far that is but a pipe dream, the whole world is f***d if this isn’t checked sooner than later. It’s already enabled a quiet and targeted sort of holocaust in many countries.
Google Settles With California for $93 Million
This is a drop in the bucket for Google, a win that looks like a loss.
And let’s be real - most of these “data brokers” are fronts or shells made to create the appearance of an intermediary between cops / feds and the private sector, but they tend to all come from the same backgrounds, backing, etc. Why do you think it is that nobody can really name a data broker by brand name? That is by design.
Cops Tap Smart Streetlights Sparking Controversy and Legislation
San Diego’s sensor-laden streetlights were supposed to save money and inspire entrepreneurs. Then the police started using their cameras and the pushback began
I think the pattern is clear by now. Anything branded to you as “smart” is actually an insult to your intelligence. These items are developed by smart people and later harnessed by garden variety fascists to spy on idiots like us who willfully support them on the basis of simplistic feel-good appeals (public safety, energy savings, efficiency, etc), surrendering far more in the long-term than we were promised in the short-term.
The DEA and ICE are Hiding Cameras in Streetlights.
Apparently these are the people you guys trust LOL. I love how the worse these guys do, the more eagerly you morons up their funding. Like when a mass shooting happens the feds get more money to purportedly stop the next one but never have to answer to why they keep missing some of the most obviously “red flag” people ever. Similar to the “war on drugs,” which as far as I can tell is increasingly (like the war on terror) just a front for harassing Liberal critics and activists, the new COINTELPRO haha. I would know, I’m quite close to the top of all their lists! So anyway - yeah, they’re literally spying through tiny cameras and sensors embedded in streetlights that you cannot see, and pretending that they’re doing so to stop drugs. How creepy is that? Let’s just say that if I were caught hiding tiny nanocams in streetlights and tying people’s biometric features to real-time alerts so I could stalk them down the street, that I presume I would be doing R. Kelly time for the offense. I hate power imbalances, I really do.
The dumber the personnel, the more danger this puts me in, every time. And this company is just one of so many players in this industry. And - they don’t just harvest online images, they literally mobilize real personnel to “verify” and match real-time images to their database by aiming their cell phone cams at my face very conspicuously, which makes it extra creepy. I go through this in every single airport and commercial zone and transit district, and most retail settings. I even experienced this recently - no joke - at my local dog park LOL. I’m convinced this AI explosion is a sign of either (a) the apocalypse or (b) a major global world-order-altering neofascist revolution. I’m kind of secretly rooting for The Apocalypse if it’s between the two.
How Ad Tech Became Cop Spy Tech
Facial Recognition: A Solution in Search of a Problem?
Hundreds of Police Departments Have Secretly Created Public Safety Watchlists
I like that this one came out in 2018 which is about a century in Big Tech Time. I was called “crazy” and “delusional” for simply picking up on this earlier than most did, effectively I faced classic whistleblower retaliation and example-making and I still do. And, as far as I can tell, since none of y’all clearly give a flying f**k about me, will continue to forever. There have been ample opportunities by many people in positions of power, to make this right and set the record straight. And I hope they face justice someday proportional to the injustice their negligence has caused me. Not more, I’m not a vengeful person - just equal measure. I suspect they would not fare well under similar circumstances, it’s not designed to be survivable, these technologies were designed originally for digital warfare not civilian society.
Private dollars are seeding surveillance tech across the US
Senators Move To Stop US Postal Service From Mail-Spying On Request Of Law Enforcement
I like to think this somehow is a meaningful change. Yet, I still face the same intense and evil-spirited harassment every time my Alibaba orders that I source for my company hit customs. I’m leaning towards shutting down my business, it’s not worth any amount of money sometimes. Not only do I hate the pattern of events that follow ordering a shipment to my house, but thanks to above-referenced retail and airport and hotel tracking tech, I really can’t even literally enter the premises of the accounts I sell to / am sold at without triggering the dangerous bogeyman alerts that summon dickheads and assholes to my location to stalk and harass and shake me down and shit. Why do it if every “success” actually leaves me feeling like s**t? You win America, you win - apparently. As evidenced by all the super happy people who populate your boundaries LOL.
Police Body Cams Weaponize Facial Recognition
Remember the big push in 2020 to mandate bodycams in wake of the George Floyd murder? One thing I can credit American Law Enforcement with (and I definitely cannot say the same for the American Psychiatric Complex) is adaptability. As a guy who has way more interactions with them that I would like (my goal is zero, I hate them), I’ve observed a sudden eagerness to activate the old Axon Bodycam no matter what, even if I just stop to ask them a question. What they’re actually doing is capturing high-res face and voice samples, which they then, as far as I can tell, “hot list” for a period of time (or indefinitely), effectively alerting cop-friendly bigot shop owners, DOT personnel, US veterans, anywhere an AI-enabled cam connected to the same cloud, to my presence in the connotation of my being a suspect or a threat or potentially dangerous or mentally ill. So yeah - hopefully the accountability aspect of body cams reduce the amount of people murdered for no reason obviously - but if there is no effort to ban biometric gathering, tracking, and “sharing” (basically doxxing), then they have turned that unwanted accountability into yet another tool of abuse that may even prove more exilirating than choking guys out and tasing them in the streets, as it opens up avenues to hunt people down more subtly and sneakily and over longer periods of time than in the past.
Voice Recognition and Risks to Our Privacy
I try to fight voice recognition by being even more vulgar and outlandish than I was when I had no awareness that I was being listened to and scored according to my speech content. 80% of the words that exit my mouth are cuss words. You should do the same! We all need to remind Big Brother of what a punk ass b*tch motherf***r he is and that he’s a pu***y who hides behind a mothaf***g badge and/or acronym because he hates seeing real mothaf***s doing real motherf***g sh*t while he’s playahating his mothaf****g corny whitebread bureaucrat b***ch ass off behind a desk playing pocket pinball while watching Trump drop “blood purity” rhetoric on an arena in the Rust Belt filled to capacity with inbred diabolical Jim Crow ass mothaf****g sheepf****rs and literal motherf***rs (blood purity extremists LOL).
Government Monitoring of Social Media: Legal and Policy Challenges
I kind of hate their call for a “framework for regulating police social media monitoring.” I’m in the camp of all-out bans myself. Nobody who works for Brennan Center has lived any of the abuses first-hand. But for all you namby pamby white Liberal Americans, this one is for you!
Cellphone Geolocation Tracking
Again I feel Brennan Center is somewhat detached, lawyers, academics, the sense of urgency is not there. Bottom line, private companies need to find a new revenue model. Refuse warrants. Push back. Just stop the abuse, especially with regard to geolocation tracking which is so unbelievably dangerous and I would argue, as the subject of a bogus “ongoing investigation,” used more often abusively and/or politically or personally than for legitimate criminal justice endeavors that push the cause of justice forward and protect the public. Big Data is basically a power consortium on equal footing with government. They don’t change their practices because it’s not profitable for them. Government is supposed to regulate this kind of thing, so what happens when government itself is their biggest customer? Who is ever going to step in and do something about this?
US Cell Phone Carriers Are Selling Access to Your Real-Time Location
The bigger issue is who they’re selling to. Every time I turn on a cell phone, it is with the keen awareness that I will be harassed and maliciously reported by the same network of bigots I’ve referenced many times on this page. It’s no accident. My retail peers find it peculiar that I don’t have a cell phone and lose so many would-be credit card sales. I don’t even bother explaining why. How do you articulate to someone whose never experienced it that the risk of simply pressing the “power on” button, let alone running a financial transaction through a locatable device, marks the beginninig of a days-long, sometimes weeks-long, hunting campaign which culminates in serious consequences to my life, and that nobody will believe me if and when the s*** goes down, as it always does. I’ve had to adjust to a new mindset that it’s better to live in a manner that is perhaps “less successful and less stressful” than to keep falling for the illusion that I get to do the same basic things, or have the same opportunities, everyone else does. And recklessness / negligence in the cell phone location tracking game is to blame. At this point what I have seen is a digital lynch mob operating with total impunity and that is inexcusable. My location data routinely winds up in the hands of extremely questionable individuals, the kinds of people I would never ever associate with voluntarily, let’s just say.
Software That Tracks People on Social Media Developed by Defense Firm Raytheon
I’m just going to say this: there’s nobody I trust with all of my location data more than Raytheon! I can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong, especially given the always-scrupulous FBI’s carefully defined target of “bad actors or groups” LOL.
US Government Targets Crypto to Expand Financial Surveillance
Ever heard of Operation Chokepoint? I’m treated similarly by the financial institutions of America. In fact all “chokepoints” - healthcare, finance, transportation, shipping - have been weaponized and made into obstacles, openings for opportunistic ‘investigations,’ and by far present the greatest risks to my freedom and civil rights.
Maine Increases Transparency for Fusion Center
Good job Maine! But - why do we still have Fusion Centers? I feel I come across as ungrateful for these little victories. I like to think I simply hold my country to a higher ethical standard.
He explained how those who are charged with keeping secrets become convinced that they are smarter and more capable than those who don’t have that information. He discussed how secrecy creates a feedback loop in which officials inside a secrecy bubble start to believe that they are invincible. They become subject to groupthink and so are increasingly unwilling to recognize legitimate criticism or concerns from those outside the bubble. He made clear the dangerous and corrosive power of governmental secrecy, something he had experienced, and then rejected, in himself.
Pentagon’s Secret Service Trawls Social Media for Mean Tweets About Generals
The gist is that they kind of conflate critics with assassination threats. Sometimes I get the sense that many of the people designing and using these tools have seldom if ever spent any portion of their life outside of an air conditioned office, HOA, vehicle, strip mall, golf course, cruise ship, or all-inclusive resort.
Atlanta Cop City Fake Terrorism Debacle
Is there anything that doesn’t constitute “terrorism” anymore in America? If you’re NOT on a terrorist watch list by now, I neither trust nor respect you LOL. Anarchy = socially Liberal + politically Libertarian. Who doesn’t love total human freedom (and by extension believe in human potential?) and hate total government BS?!?! I’ll tell you who - government and government-regulated workers. The majority of you! I am DEFINITELY an Anarchist by its true definition. Suck it Fascist American dorky loser squares.
LexisNexis is selling your personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes.
LexisNexis has predicted thousands of crimes that I was going to do in the future. None of these ever occurred. They will credit the rapid response of their subscribers to my location to stalk —- deter, I mean - me. Needless to say, I’ve been so highly impressed by the intellect and critical thinking capacity of the end users of these technologies. I don’t think they’re being used or manipulated or pandered to at all. These are real American Heroes.
Artificial Intelligence is Now Used to Predict Crime. But it is Biased.
“Just as you wouldn’t trust a judge to build a deep neural network, we should stop assuming that an engineering degree is sufficient to make complex decisions in domains like criminal justice.”
“The public never gets a chance to audit or debate the use of such systems.”
“Opaque decision-making, with little accountability, is a consequence of what’s become known as ‘black box’ algorithms.”
“There’s a real danger, with any kind of data-driven policing, to forget that there are human beings on both sides of the equation.”
AI profiling: the social and moral hazards of ‘predictive’ policing
You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements
What are Stingrays & Dirtboxes?
Controversy illuminates rise of facial recognition in private sector
Collection of Voice Data for Profit Raises Concerns
For my part, I cannot imagine a less desirable society to live in than that governed by the voice alerts (among other AI “contributions”) referenced above. Everything about it rubs me as evil.
Ethical concerns mount as AI takes bigger decision-making role in more industries
“If we’re not thoughtful and careful, we’re going to end up with redlining again.”
I am one of them! They’re called Inflection Risk Solutions. Absolutely no transparency and no process to appeal. If you read some marathon race diaries from my MarathonView page, however, you’ll see that it’s not uncommon for a hotel that initially accepts me to boot me without cause after I get there - no explanation given ever. And there’s never been a time ever when, after passing my ID / CC over a motel desk, a creepy person with US veteran / cop connections doesn’t spend the entire night sitting in a car in the motel parking lot in direct line of sight to my door. On a recent trip to Curacao in a 4-unit B&B, the unit next to me was moved into on Night #2 by apparently a group of several Dutch Federal agents who just randomly decided to book a vacation next door to me. There was a funny coincidence where each time I stepped out to use the pool, they did too. Each time I stepped out to go to town, they did too! When I went out at 2am to catch my cab to the marathon, they did too!!!! What. A. Coincidence. These industries are completely out of control. Safetyism is the next big paradigm of oppression and discrimination that will dominate the coming generation the way racism or homophobia or Islamophobia did the preceding one. It’s harder to catch because it’s not so obviously discriminating against clearly defined groups with conspicuously defined traits. It’s like a sneaky little mutant that’s one part chameleon, two parts Karen, and three parts Mark Fuhrman.
Dumbed Down AI Policy Rhetoric Harms Everyone
Honestly why are we even so focused on regulation? It’s obvious this is pure fascist garbage and I don’t understand why the starting point* in the negotiation from the regulatory side is anything short of “all-out ban” unless law enforcement can somehow prove what a peaceful utopian society they have managed to foster in the decades-long trial during which they’ve turned this on the public. And I agree with “WIRED,” good intentions paired with huge loopholes (case in point- I have literally been the subject of “missing person” investigations upon return from the San Francisco and Jamaica marathons, an indicator that they’re simply shifting the justifications to whatever crimes the new laws permit) mustn’t be accepted as the de facto standard moving forward.
The Private Security Industry: Where Ethics Have Absolutely No Place
George W Bush is Building a Memorial to the War on Terror. He Wants Your Feedback.
Over 4.5 million people will not be submitting comments because they are dead.
FLOCK AI Surveillance!
A secret TSA program has been assigning air marshals to spy on thousands of US citizens
Fun detail! You know the part in the program where the attendants roll that big metal cart down the aisle and we all get pretzels and Diet Rite? It’s a BIG DEAL in the counterterror community. On every flight that I’m on, that’s the precise point where the big dummies in white ear buds get up and awkwardly kill way too much time standing around the lavatory areas - not using the lavatories, just kind of stretching, milling around, scanning the premises, etc LOL. And it’s the same two guys each time - I really notice this on the Intl flights. Basically they won’t return to their seats until after the full cart procession has been completed. I believe this is due to a theory that the would-be terrorist would hijack the drink cart and use it as a sort of offensive lineman / shield to make his or her way to the cockpit. So with one big meaty goon on either bookend of the aisle, he can stop the movement of the Bad Guy (who is always me by the way apparently haha) and save everyone. I mean dude - that’s how stupid we are. Not me. We. You. You guys. This is safetyism at its finest. Just a bunch of dumb idiots doing dumb stupid government protocol BS, and never even attempting to act like they have any pride or honor. My thoughts on this and so many other “preventive” measures I’m subjected to throughout my travels are: “the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy so we could all be on this freaking vacation would be rolling over in their godforsaken graves if they knew this is what it’s amounted to.” I appreciate when I happen to get a Delta flight, as they always have the full box set of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” As Larry David’s schtick is all about mocking these absurd little annoyances and needless conventions of everyday life, it kind of serves as my therapy, just knowing at least that guy would find this as amusing as I do.
Spyware and surveillance: Threats to privacy and human rights growing, UN report warns
“While purportedly being deployed for combating terrorism and crime, such spyware tools have often been used for illegitimate reasons, including to clamp down on critical or dissenting views and on those who express them, including journalists, opposition political figures and human rights defenders.”
The FBI break-in that exposed J. Edgar Hoover’s misdeeds to be honored with historical marker
Under today’s surveillance state, the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI never would exist. They did what they did, successfully, for a purpose that I feel is being disrespected currently. I don’t feel the current luke-warm pushback on this surveillance state digital arms race reflects adequate appreciation for their heroic risk-taking, or frankly your future generations’ quality of life.
The Political Abuse of Psychiatry Against Dissenting Voices
Not a high enough percentage of the population sees this up close and personal as I have and do. The business of “forensic psychiatry” is considered an “ethical minefield.” I predict that as decriminalization of drugs gains more traction and this pro-mental health movement establishes itself as the status quo, the preferred way to confine people (I may not exist within the physical walls of an institution but I’m very much a prisoner to this day), that abuses within this system - specifically the confluence of police and psychiatry - will increasingly become a go-to for silencing, banishment, defamation, etc.
Scroll down the page after clicking the above link for the ACLU’s brief explanation of why you should care. From there, there are clickable links to archives of articles, court cases, etc. I feel the ACLU is at a disadvantage because of you / us. The missing element here is public pressure. Civil rights advocates know the stakes, they have sounded the alarms, and the Establishment, mainstream media, politicians, etc, have done an excellent job of simply …. not giving this obvious civil rights peril any air time! To be clear, most of the voices out there pumping biometric tech have a lot to gain personally by doing so. Most of us, on the other hand, don’t.
Malicious Summoning: a Deterrent to Prejudiced Cop Callers
A crackdown on “malicious summoning” would contribute to bolstering the integrity of “threat score” data. When I travel to foreign countries and they receive my sky-high “threat score,” I find myself frustrated that I have neither the time nor the words to articulate how I’m a victim of the culture I come from, that I come from an all-white provincial nativist suburb where I’m having cops called on me for dog-walking and marathon-training and grocery-shopping and car-driving constantly but that since Americans are only receptive and sympathetic to this plight when there’s a race-based theme underpinning it, I get no support or advocacy and the abuse continues to the tune of the whims of the most bigoted bigots on the block.
THE MICROSOFT POLICE STATE: MASS SURVEILLANCE, FACIAL RECOGNITION, AND THE AZURE CLOUD
Fun fact - I am forced to install Microsoft updates approximately once every 10 days. How does that align with your experience? I checked with others and it seems I’m installing about 20x more MS updates than anyone else I know. They tend to coincide with my booking travel, opening new financial accounts, ordering products from overseas for my company, driving my car out of my county and back, and the absolute worst atrocity I can possibly commit - attempting to buy Bitcoin (according to my discriminatory experience, America should adopt a new idiom: guns don’t kill people; cryptocurrency kills people - at least that’s how it feels). These “MS updates” are followed by excessive harassment by idiotic poorly educated union-belonging goons concentrated in law enforcement and transportation. Can anyone offer any insight here? Is that a known thing, the role of DOT people as kind of these fascist asshole counterterror conspiratorial types? All I know is that DOT / AAA / BOT etc are the worst of the worst (besides police and military) everywhere I go, at a loss as to why them versus other industries.
Social Media Surveillance is the Worst.
As evidenced by my own experience updating my Soundcloud page regularly, all hip hop music is terrorism, and all hip hop music criticizing cops signals imminent intent to commit violent terroristic acts against good old blue-blooded Americans on the part of the social media user.
The totalitarian government in Soviet Russia invented a mental illness to lock up resisters
Don’t think this isn’t happening in America. It just doesn’t happen to enough people, or people who matter enough to the establishment, to gain darling status and media attention. “Mental health” is an extremely soft, malleable, easily-abused pseudoscience, the kind oft-exploited by corrupt authorities seeking social control.
Not yet well documented is how “predictive analytics” will represent the next wave of psychiatric abuse, beyond the walls of institutions. The marriage of law enforcement and psych industries is growing more chummy and codependent, and cops understand the power of a “mental health referral” as a tool for discrediting and disparaging inconvenient critics and threats to their preferred ways of doing business.
Rolling Back the Post-9/11 Surveillance State
Restoring key privacy protections will benefit both national security and civil liberties.
False Panacea: Abusive Surveillance in the Name of Public Health
The public health crisis is laying a dangerous foundation for the future surveillance state.
20 years later, it’s time to move on from mass surveillance
Routine surveillance is corrosive, chilling the kind of speech and association on which democracy depends. And the human toll of government surveillance is undeniable, with far-reaching consequences for people’s lives. It feeds into a national security apparatus that puts people on watchlists, subjects them to unwarranted scrutiny by law enforcement, and allows the government to upend their lives on the basis of vague, secret claims
The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers
I realize this article is dated but they do this every year. Constantly. They have an opportunity to not vote surveillance abuse back in every single year and they don’t. The vast chasm between what I presume to be my personal Liberal principles and the actions (or more often inaction) of Establishment Liberal power networks is a key reason I see Europe as a very attractive alternative to the US.
Eugenics Ideology Fuels Support for AI Industry
And on that note, I’m done posting for now.
Before you judge me a zealot for posting all of this, please understand I did not choose this. I otherwise don’t care about these issues if not for my personal connection to them, which I did not sign up for. I don’t want to have to make this page, I don’t want to spend my life advocating for digital privacy legislation, fighting for my own life in vain, and hoping in vain for accountability and justice. All of it has been forced upon me. My own story is so totally f***d that nobody outside of the circles participating in surveillance abuse even believes the details of it. So I’ve simply chosen the tactic of giving information about the technologies and practices, and the companies and agencies behind them. They should all face the same justice that Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones have met. They should be liquidated of their criminally attained fortunes, criminally investigated, and completely barred from their so-called professions. They should face justice proportional the amount of injustice done to me. Anyhow, these are the articles I feel do the best job of exposing what is possible, and already happening, in regard to AI / surveillance tech / “public safety” industries …. even if they often still don’t quite touch on the extent of what’s already been done to me under this paradigm. Needless to say, I feel the actions and lack thereof taken by American politicians, regulators, and private citizens to stop this are wholly inadequate and reflect a pattern of suppressing ethics in favor of self-interest. As long as the destroyed lives left in the wake of AI surveillance are out of sight - or discredited such that they do not garner deserved support - they remain out of mind and the casualties of surveillance tech seem shockingly guilt-free as far as I’ve detected from those not directly affected yet generally aware of what’s going on.
Amazon Ring to Stop Letting Police Request Video From Users
In the words of Keith Elam: give the credit where it’s due. And it’s not due to Amazon! The credit is due to public pressure and public pressure alone; members of the public who are seeing, and speaking up about, things that aren’t quite right, “Porch Pirate Extremism” among other things that are actually going on which are at odds with the stated purpose of these products and services. More importantly, the credit is due to government agencies that do their job - protecting the rights of all citizens. Such as France’s CNIL, and I would hope, the brave Amazon employees who made known what was going on in-house. All of these pieces, however disparate they may appear (what does employee surveillance in Europe have to do with domestic US residential street surveillance? It suggests a rogue culture and economy that’s never been taken to task as to its corrosive effect on real people, whom it exploits and manipulates for profit in both scenarios), create a sum of parts whose general trendline clearly reveals things have gone too far, for too long, in the realm of tracking tech abuses, that Joe Public does not benefit whatsoever by it, and that it’s past time that the pendulum begin to swing back toward the interests of real people, especially those who are subordinate to some form of authority (employees, random dudes like me who just want to go running) and have to sometimes swallow our concerns for a paycheck or our social standing.
My tremendous concern, as with all “privacy victories,” is the lack of attention to explicitly banning private third parties, whether individuals or entities, from getting access to these feeds. By singling out cops who are held to higher standards of accountability, scrutiny, FOIA requests, etc simply by being a publicly funded agency, and not sealing up Boban Marjanovic-sized loopholes that allow third parties such as companies or people to access feeds / alerts, we risk creating an even worse scenario where it’s all shared “underground” and it’s more difficult to discover. It’s the latter, and not the former, which has damaged my life more significantly than specific cop-centered tracking. How do I put this in tangible terms? I suppose … what if Gregory and Travis McMichael still have backdoor access to, and the ability to share, AI-enhanced video and associated alerts, but not the cops? The last thing we want is a perceived “win” that actually on the back end further empowers psycho private citizen vigilantism, the subculture that has really destroyed my life. Pardon my skepticism of this decision by Amazon, but in my defense I’ve lived in Harney County Oregon where I experienced extreme end user abuses of tracking tech most of you (I hope) never will, by public and private entities.
In short, I am glad mainly for the PR of having the issue put out by mainstream news. But do I really believe that the next time I attempt to train by running through residential neighborhoods that I won’t incur the wrath of the same little squads of “you’re not associated with this area” vigilantes? Absolutely positively not. There is a long way to go and it’s important that we who wish roll back the surveillance paradigm be hypervigilant about outing “accountability-washing” when it does crop up, as I strongly suspect is the case here.