There’s a specter haunting the United States. Americans may not have noticed it, but it’s sure noticed them: the emergent panopticon of AI facial-recognition cameras, automatic license plate readers, AI smart glasses, police fusion centers, surveillance drones, and biomarker databases infesting the landscape.
These might seem like separate systems, and therefore different from the kind of centralized panopticon imagined in the pulp sci-fi our parents might have read. Yet as The Nation notes, all levels of AI surveillance — from porch-bound Ring video cameras to Target’s AI loss prevention cameras — work to collect data, sending it in one direction.
When it comes to AI surveillance, regulations or privacy laws are next to nonexistent. Courts in over a dozen US states have moved to allow police to check Flock Safety’s sprawling network of AI license plate readers without a warrant. Federal authorities have long been able to tap your digital devices to obtain information without your consent. Local police departments are increasingly turning to surveillance drones to watch over peaceful protestors, occasionally even employing the same kind of hardware used by the US military.
Americans aren’t taking it lying down. As The Nation points out, groups of organizers, activists, and more are increasingly coming together to resist these tools in novel ways.
The license-plate reader company Flock, for example, has a number of accountability groups hot on its heels, tracking AI camera installations through DeFlock.org and informing the public of any searches performed via the surveillance platform on HaveIBeenFlocked.com. The Fulu Foundation, a non-profit advocating consumer rights, is offering a $24,000 bounty to any hacker who can find a simple way to cut Ring video doorbells’ persistent connection to Amazon, and therefore any law enforcement agency Amazon cooperates with.
The surveillance may seem ruthless, and the money behind it limitless. Yet if recent history has shown us anything, it’s that nothing is inevitable — data center developers have been beaten back, workers have forced AI to the bargaining table, and immigration agents have been drummed out of town. When the odds are stacked against us, people power will always be the best bet.
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