The Flock saga continues.
A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.
Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.
The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.
Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ
Enabling a surveillance state is not amoral.
Your phrasing seems to imply I said it was, but I never said that.
If you are in a discussion about the development and deployment of technology to facilitate a surveillance state, then saying “technology is neutral” is the least interesting thing you could possibly say on the subject.
In a completely abstract, disconnected-from-society-and-current-events sense it is correct to say technology is amoral. But we live in a world where surveillance technology is developed to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals. We live in a world where legal rights are being eroded by the use of this technology. We live in a world where this technology is profitable because it helps organizations violate individual rights. If you live in the US, as I do, then you live in a world where federal law enforcement agencies have become completely contemptuous of the law and are literally abducting innocent people off the street. They use the technology under discussion here to help them do that.
That a piece of tech might potentially be used for a not-immoral purpose is completely irrelevant to how it is actually being used in the real world.
And that is what we need to focus our messaging on. The evil people and institutions enabling this as those are permanent. Tech comes and goes (and should not be anthropomized). Focusing on the tech just means in institution looks for another path. Focusing on the institution is to block the at the source.
“Technology is neutral” is a bromide engineers use to avoid thinking about how their work impacts people. If you are an engineer working for flock or a similar company, you are harming people. You are doing harm through the technology you help to develop.
The massive surveillance systems that currently exist were built by engineers who advanced technology for that purpose. The scale and totality of the resulting surveillance states are simply not possible without the tech. The closest alternatives are stasi-like systems that are nowhere near as vast or continuous. In the actual world the actual tech is immoral. Because it was created for immoral purposes and because it is used for immoral purposes.
All technology has that potential. Some more than others. The issue is that institutions, like flock, exist solely for the evil applications.
As I said before: In a conversation about technology as it actually exists, talking about potentials is not interesting. Yes all technology has the potential to be good or bad. The massive surveillance tech is actually bad right now in the real world
This issue with asserting that technology is neutral is it lets the people who develop it ignore the impacts of their work. The engineers that make surveillance tech make it, ultimately, for immoral purposes. When they are confronted with the effects of their work on society they avoid according with the ethics of what it is that they are doing by deploying bromides like “technology is neutral.”
Example: Building an operant conditioning feedback system into a social media app or video game is not inherently bad, you could use it to reinforce good behaviors and deploy it ethically by obtaining the consent of the people you use on. But the operant conditioning tech in social media apps and video games that actually exists is very clearly and unambiguously bad. It exists to get people addicted to a game or media app, so that they can be more easily exploited. Engineers built that tech stack out for the purpose of exploiting people. The tech, as it exists in the real world, is bad. When these folks were confronted with what they had done, they responded by claiming that tech is not inherently good or bad. (This is a real thing social media engineers really said) They ignored the tech—as it actually exists—in favor of an abstract conversation about some potential alternative tech that does not exist. The effect of which is the people doing harm built a terrible system without ever confronting what it was they were doing.
I don’t see how that is the case. The tech is neutral, but the engineers know what the application they are hired for is. That is determined by people and subject to morality.
Would you say openCV or the people working on it are evil? I wouldn’t. I would say that once someone takes that project for flock is evil.
I think this framing is more important when talking with the general public as they are likely to walk away thinking that its the tech that creates problems and not the for profit corporations who will be free to continue doing the same, so long as they don’t use that tech.
It is literally the case. People who have literally made tools to do bad things justified it by claiming that tech is neutral in an abstract sense. Find an engineer who is building a tool to do something they think is bad, they will tell you that bromide.
OpenCV is not, in itself, immoral. But openCV is, once again, actual tech that exists in the actual world. In fact, that is how I know it is not bad, I use the context of reality—rather than hypotheticals or abstractions—to assess the morality of the tech. The tech stack that makes up Flock is bad, once again I make that determination by using the actual world as a reference point. It does not matter that some of the tech could be used to do good. In the case of Flock, it is not, so it’s bad.
The technology enables the surveillance state. Therefore the technology is not amoral.