 At a time when quality journalism is believed to be dead, PPSA is finding incisive local reporting on how city by city, county by county, state by state, the elements of a national surveillance state are being put into place. Journalists are reporting on the alarming growth of surveillance networks, the generous federal and state funds and grants that fuel this growth, the impacts of surveillance on the rights of everyone, and on the privacy of the vulnerable. *** One exemplar of local reporting is Cardinal News of Virginia, which is releasing an investigative series on the creeping emergence of comprehensive surveillance throughout the southern portion of that state. The Cardinal article begins by asking: “So if the question is, ‘Who's watching me?’ The answer is: practically everyone.” Its reporters and editors reached out to 100 law enforcement agencies in Southwest and Southside Virginia, from county sheriffs’ offices to big city police departments.
Who is paying for this? “A funny thing happened on the way to defunding the police,” is how the newspaper archly puts it. Cardinal reports the federal American Rescue Plan of 2021, meant to provide a large array of technology and body armor for police, is a major funder of the rollout of local surveillance technology. In addition to state funds, other journalists trace money for surveillance systems to HUD grants and federal funds provided to states meant for covid relief. This federal and state largesse is funding the regional network of automated license-plate readers. With this technology, AI creates “vehicle fingerprints,” unique characteristics that include characteristics such as vehicle color, roof racks, and bumper stickers. This technology can be used to track robbers, abductions, confused elderly drivers, but also everyone else as they come and go from churches, mosques, gun stores, political rallies, and mental health clinics. *** Todd Feathers of Gizmodo walked the streets of Toledo, Ohio, to survey the results of comprehensive surveillance – in this instance, streaming live images of residents of public housing complexes straight to police headquarters. “This kind of surveillance has become the norm in Toledo, where living in subsidized housing now means being watched outside your home day and night by an officer you can’t see or speak to,” Feathers reports. He adds that this is the result of the city’s contract with Fusus, “a company whose controversial technology enables cops to access live streams from private camera networks that opt in to the system.”
“This data really illustrates the risks associated with this type of surveillance,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, interviewed by Feathers. “The idea that people who are already in a vulnerable space in their housing development are subject to increased levels of surveillance simply because that is where they live really highlights how inequitable and unjust these applications of surveillance can be.”
Feathers concludes that “an important public safety decision – where police should focus their attention – is increasingly determined not by where crime happens, but by which private entities have chosen to pay thousands of dollars to join Fusus’s surveillance network.” Worse, the local ACLU reports that the Toledo police lack a detailed policy of what officers can and can’t use these Fusus-enabled cameras for, set limits on how long footage collected through Fusus can be stored, and state whether anyone outside the Toledo Police Department is allowed to access the camera systems or recorded footage, and under what circumstances. *** Gizmodo reported that when the Fusus contract came up for a vote before the Toledo city council, not a single council member asked police a question about how that technology might be used. There are signs, however, that many local and state leaders are beginning to ask deeper questions and show a willingness to halt the expansion of surveillance. We reported earlier that in Virginia, state House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, a Democrat, advanced a bill that would also have enabled a dramatic expansion of cameras on state highway rights-of-way. She argued that her bill would put “guardrails” on the use of surveillance. The bill failed in committee, 9 to 6 against the bill, with both Democrats and Republicans siding for and against Leader Herring’s bill. Leader Herring’s bill did, in fact, include many useful guardrails, such as a 30-day limit on retaining license plate images, requiring reasonable suspicions of a major crime or incident before accessing the data, an audit trail for use, and making misuse of the system a Class I misdemeanor. Yet her bill still failed. Perhaps this vote points to a new skepticism, a willingness by policy makers to slow down and think through the implications of this massive surveillance rollout. As policymakers deliberate, we hope they will continue to be informed by more good reporting like that of Cardinal News and Gizmodo. Comments are closed.
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