Chilling and important read.
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Chilling and important read. "American universities are rapidly becoming test beds for the kind of repressive technology we associate with authoritarian states abroad"
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Chilling and important read. "American universities are rapidly becoming test beds for the kind of repressive technology we associate with authoritarian states abroad"
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@inquiline out of interest, is this legal?
Yes, it's all legal. Leadership in both parties fully supports the surveillance-industrial complex.
Geofencing tools, license plate readers, real-time social media surveillance, predictive analytics are unrestricted. Undercover agents, in the real world and online, are completely legal. Only a handful of places in the US ban law enforcement use of facial recognition use in public places (King County, where I live, is one of them) and even those bans can be bypassed (for example universities hiring private security companies).
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Yes, it's all legal. Leadership in both parties fully supports the surveillance-industrial complex.
Geofencing tools, license plate readers, real-time social media surveillance, predictive analytics are unrestricted. Undercover agents, in the real world and online, are completely legal. Only a handful of places in the US ban law enforcement use of facial recognition use in public places (King County, where I live, is one of them) and even those bans can be bypassed (for example universities hiring private security companies).
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@thenexusofprivacy @UlrikeHahn @inquiline i need to go back to Seattle
I'm certainly proud of what we did with the King County facial recognition ban , and the #StopShotSpotter pushback was fierce enough that they eventually dropped their plans, but ...
"Despite giving acoustic gunfire surveillance a pass, Seattle has increased its other surveillance technologies. Automated license plate readers are deployed in all Seattle Police Department vehicles. The city also plans to install closed-circuit television cameras on Aurora Avenue North and in the downtown Third Avenue corridor and the Chinatown-International District, which are established Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA) and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP).
A new real-time crime center software is also in development. All of these technologies were signed into law in October by the mayor and City Council."
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Yes, it's all legal. Leadership in both parties fully supports the surveillance-industrial complex.
Geofencing tools, license plate readers, real-time social media surveillance, predictive analytics are unrestricted. Undercover agents, in the real world and online, are completely legal. Only a handful of places in the US ban law enforcement use of facial recognition use in public places (King County, where I live, is one of them) and even those bans can be bypassed (for example universities hiring private security companies).
@thenexusofprivacy @inquiline thanks for this! this exchange has been really interesting to me: I’m forever coming up against divergent levels of concern for privacy in exchanges between those from the US versus elsewhere, including on this platform, but I hadn’t fully related this to fundamental differences in the conception of “freedom”
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@thenexusofprivacy @inquiline thanks for this! this exchange has been really interesting to me: I’m forever coming up against divergent levels of concern for privacy in exchanges between those from the US versus elsewhere, including on this platform, but I hadn’t fully related this to fundamental differences in the conception of “freedom”
It's complex. All this surveillance is generally overwhelmingly unpopular here (except when it's sold as a way of keeping people safer -- which it doesn't of course, but tech companies and law enforcement are very good at spinning it that way). For that matter, strong privacy protections are overhwlemingly popular as well! But, historically this hasn't been a big enough issue that it determines how people vote, so it's not clear how to translate that popularity to legislation. There was a brief moment in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate and some of the revalations about COINTELPRO, where things were different ... but that was a long time ago.
Also there's a big difference from Germany where the role of surveillance under the Nazis, and then the Stasi, is so widely known and affected everybody. Here, the people who are primarily targeted by it have been Black and Indigenous people, and Japanese Americans who got put in concentration camps during WWII, so there's a lot less awareness and even people who know about it think of it as something that doesn't really affect them so not a huge priority.
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It's complex. All this surveillance is generally overwhelmingly unpopular here (except when it's sold as a way of keeping people safer -- which it doesn't of course, but tech companies and law enforcement are very good at spinning it that way). For that matter, strong privacy protections are overhwlemingly popular as well! But, historically this hasn't been a big enough issue that it determines how people vote, so it's not clear how to translate that popularity to legislation. There was a brief moment in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate and some of the revalations about COINTELPRO, where things were different ... but that was a long time ago.
Also there's a big difference from Germany where the role of surveillance under the Nazis, and then the Stasi, is so widely known and affected everybody. Here, the people who are primarily targeted by it have been Black and Indigenous people, and Japanese Americans who got put in concentration camps during WWII, so there's a lot less awareness and even people who know about it think of it as something that doesn't really affect them so not a huge priority.
Not sure if you've ever read Simone Browne's "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness" but it really highlights how surveillance here has been a tool to reinforce white supremacy.
https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/147/Dark-MattersOn-the-Surveillance-of-Blackness
