Birds of a feather flock together. They coordinate against their predators. So when an Orwellian AI camera system is rapidly being deployed across the United States, it makes me wonder: what predator are they protecting themselves from? Maybe they fear the American freedom of thought and action endowed to citizens by the soil they were born upon — then again, maybe not.
One must be concerned with the mass surveillance currently underway, developing under the guise of "license plate readers" — as if government didn't already have enough money flowing in to waste. The company behind much of this rollout is called Flock Safety, and their cameras are spreading quietly into communities with little public debate. One unpleasant side effect of this people-monitoring technology is people being illegally detained and arrested for crimes they never committed. Considering that humans misidentify people enough as it is, it doesn't seem like a wise move to supercharge that problem with technology.
Consider what happened to Hugo Parra in San Diego. A Flock license plate reader placed him at the scene of a violent crime — but he was five miles away at the time. Police arrested him anyway, and he spent nearly a month in jail, missing Thanksgiving and other family events, before the assault and evasion charges were dropped. He and another person are now preparing to sue the city of San Diego for civil rights violations and negligence.
The Institute for Justice (https://ij.org/dozens-of-innocent-motorists-have-been-pulled-over-detained-at-gunpoint-or-jailed-due-to-ai-license-plate-camera-errors/) has documented numerous constitutional rights violations stemming from this technology. You may be tempted to argue on the side of the police — and so am I, actually. I have family members who have served in the police and military, and I have nothing negative to say about the profession. But when we know that some officers do choose to lie (which is, remarkably, legal in many interrogation contexts) and that basic logic sometimes fails — as when a Florida officer cited a woman for holding a phone with her right hand, a hand she doesn't have (https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/national-international/florida-woman-cited-holding-phone-missing-hand-driving/3814728/) — then perhaps this is one direction we shouldn't be pushing AI.
It is worth noting that pushback is happening. In Macon County, North Carolina, commissioners voted unanimously to defund the county's Flock license plate reader program and remove all 12 county-owned cameras immediately — even though their contract with Flock didn't expire until October. The county had budgeted about $47,000 for the system. That money will now be redirected. Not every community is rolling over for this technology.
Meanwhile, in Franklin, a neighboring town, officials were forced to publicly clarify that the town had no contract with Flock and no plans to purchase the technology — after residents began making threats against public officials based on misinformation circulating on social media. That's the powder keg this technology is creating: communities so alarmed by the prospect of mass surveillance that rumors alone are producing threats. The anger is understandable even if the response is not.
Now, I am not against the development of the general technology behind object recognition and detection software. In the future, being able to better diagnose illnesses from camera images will be state of the art. What I am against is deploying it in situations that carry the power to strip people of their rights, particularly when the technology has a demonstrated track record of error and the officers interpreting its output aren't required to exercise skepticism.
Cameras being used to find people isn't a new concept. Sci-fi and action movies have been entertaining people with protecting people from a geeks software stole by the 'bad' guys and given to the 'good' ones. There's one movie that came out in the early 2000s that took it a step further called, 'Minority Report'. In the film, people were being arrested for crimes the were predicted to commit in the future. To get there, you'd have to start with getting it to build from tracking crimes that were already committed like we are doing now.
If we keep working on deploying this technology in this way, one day we'll get somewhere close to this reality. The question I want us to ask ourselves as a society is do we want it to? The potential effectiveness of a tool isn't a reason to develop it. The creators of the atomic bomb regretted their creation after millions were killed. Now, we sit in a unique position to stop destructive development before it causes more constitutional violations and future human rights violations.
This has a been A Geeky Production
