One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.
The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.
The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.
I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.
ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]
Absolutely. In my city, they implemented red light cameras in a (good) way that loses money.
Yet they still did it -- because it's really a surveillance network that happens to issue tickets. The map of cameras captures 95% of traffic entering or leaving the city and captures many transit chokepoints, with 30 day local video retention of all traffic.
I learned from jury service that this is important because surveillance video is a key investigative tool and being able to key events to a trusted reference point is important. If some event happens in a 10-minute window (due to cameras with bad time sync), you can use an independent event (say a bus passing by) to reduce the period of uncertainty.
> complex technology picked up by cities and counties... will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists
You don't know that. There are almost certainly nonpublic "partnerships" that you are not aware of.
“This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” [1]
"Because of partner relations and legal authorities, SSO Corporate sites are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA." [2]
Right, all laws require enforcement. A local ordinance, such as ours (which, by the way, includes enforcement teeth), is the beginning of community control, not the end.
What I'm going to watch closely is where wide-spread surveillance and hard law & order measures will be implemented and how people react. The typical scenario is lawlessness that then leads to people voting for a strongman that enacts authoritarian policies. But I can absolutely see people voting for more public surveillance and law & order from a position of wealth as a replacement of social control / delegation of control to the state. Basically: you no longer have the grandmother on the window sill keeping an eye on the street and informing the parents of misbehaving kids, you'll have a camera.
I can certainly see the allure. I wonder how a competition within the Western System between surveillance and anti-surveillance locations will fare. Techno-authoritarianism can be very efficient, and even more so when it's not used to keep a corrupt system from toppling over (this is where somebody might jump up and say that that's exactly what it's doing in Western countries, but that's besides the point for local surveillance), and the question becomes how much more efficient it would be and how willing people are to trade privacy for comfort.
Technological ineptitude is something that is utterly reckless to take for granted. First, the internet was free and for nerds. Then companies took notice and conquered it. Now governments are coming too. The only thing that governments know how to do, by definition, is to dominate territory and the internet is the new frontier
To me this is exactly what the FIRE movement is about (Financial Independence, Retire Early). I know some people just want to live on the beach or run a hobby farm or foster 10 rescue dogs at a time, but many will have the time, desire, and bandwidth to participate in activities like this which require the type of bandwidth that very much feels like a job. Good on you!
> One silver lining of living in these United States is that you can be assured that complex technology picked up by cities and counties (and often even states) will be implemented carelessly and wielded by only the hammiest fists.
This is absolutely not assuring. All this means is that the wrong people are going to be surveilled, arrested, and punished.
Sounds like something I’d like to get behind, but then in the first paragraph it makes it sound like it’s something only “people of color” need to worry about. That’s a miscalculation I think. Getting control from many police forces means needing republican support, and everyone should be concerned.
What I can tell you from experience is that people of color, and religious people, are the most likely to get activated on this idea at the early stages. They can be among the most impacted by the harms of mass surveillance technology, and are among those that stand to gain the most from controlling it.
They also are often already organized, and often already have the ear of elected representatives from their past activism.
All of these things combine to make it a very good idea to engage those communities at the outset of an effort. I am not a person of color, nor am I religious, but I have been able to play an important role in my city's effort.
Technologists need to help, not necessarily lead, these community efforts. Email me if you'd like more support on getting started!
Perhaps, but when courting support, dumping half to a local majority of the potential audience in the first paragraph is ill-advisesd. Locally, police surveillance is equal opportunity.
There is no such "dumping." The plight of those communities is real, and it is used as an example. There are many more examples not mentioned, but that doesn't mean they are excluded from the inventory of harms a coalition will represent and work to fix.
Perhaps you don't have any rural republican friends but as a centrist, I do. And I can assure you they wouldn't make it to the second paragraph. Diversity is important in more ways than one. Not including "white" voters is a recipe for failure.
This is the first bit of one of those ACLU articles. IMHO it doesn't sound like anyone is being "dumped", rather, the ACLU is choosing to focus on a particular audience. Which there are a lot of legitimate reasons to choose to do.
Also the statistical makeup each community is going to vary; so in some places you might be correct about "half to a local majority" of the community being white (not sure if that's what you meant), in other places, it'll be the other way around.
"The increasing use of surveillance technologies by local police across America, especially against communities of color and other unjustly targeted groups, has been creating oppressive and stigmatizing environments in which every community member is treated like a prospective criminal. Many communities of color and of low income have been turned into virtual prisons where residents’ public behavior is monitored and scrutinized 24 hours a day."
Many such decisions are made statewide. Even in one as blue as California there are significant voters in red counties. Exclude them at your peril, as was proven in 2000 and 2016.
The biggest failing with the democratic party is thinking that centrists or conservatives are not worth addressing, and it continues to earn them defeat.
They matter in swing States like Florida, where 57% of Cuban-Americans voted for Trump and 66% of all Latinos voted for the Republican Governor DeSantis.
That conservatives see no ownership of problems characterized as specific to their black and brown neighbors (family, selves...) is orthogonal to the issue of what to do about those issues.
Which Republicans? There are several flavors these days.
Also the question would be if reducing the area of government in question also reduced the ability of that part of the government to perform it's function; if so, than a reduction vs oversight agency is not an apples-to-apples comparison, imho.
The political winds shift and blow away any short term cover the operators ever enjoyed.
The ACLU's CCOPS efforts were launched in 2016 [0] and have since resulted in multiple cities across the country wresting oversight of local surveillance technology into the hands of deliberative bodies.
I joined a local effort to put this oversight model in place in my city, and we're on track to receive unanimous approval from my (large) city council this year. It takes work to do it. You will have to get hands on if you want to participate in this change.
ACLU NorCal has put together a nice guide on how to build the movement in your city if one has not already begun. [1]
[0] https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-...
[1] https://www.aclunc.org/publications/fighting-local-surveilla...