In New York, the Appetite for Surveillance Hardware Is Growing  Robots employed for law enforcement is an area in which the need for transparency seems obvious. Yet the actual uses of robotic technologies are often withheld by local governments. In New York City, for example, disclosure of public safety tech was supposed to happen routinely following the 2020 passage of the City Council’s Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act. Yet public advocacy groups still have to rely primarily on freedom of information laws to bring surveillance capabilities to light. One such group recently won yet another hard-fought freedom-of-information confession. So what has the NYPD been up to lately, surveillance-wise? Robots and more robots. PPSA has written before about the surveillance implications of robotics, which now seems to be an increasingly popular choice among technocrats. On the surveillance manifest(o) this time:
If this were Gotham and these were Batman’s toys, that’s a movie we’d all want to see. But it’s not, so it behooves us to pay close attention. Let’s give particular notice to that robot dog for a moment. The previously disclosed “Digidog” robot apparently got $139,000 worth of surreptitious upgrades, including the ability to laser map any room it enters (and to grab things). That autonomous security robot (named K5 since it clearly is not a dog), was apparently only used to serenely “patrol,” bobby-like, a section of the Times Square subway station. Thank goodness it hasn’t yet intercepted transmissions from its Chinese cousin, RG-T, or it might learn how to scan faces, spray tear gas, and fire grenades. K5 is a mere toddler that needs human handlers. Xi’s Chinese subjects aren’t so lucky. RG-T’s algorithms dish out judgment and justice of their own volition. As we’ve cautioned before, a “military-civilian fusion” of policing hardware is straight out of the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Today’s K5 can easily become next year’s RG-T. All it takes is a few undisclosed upgrades. Want to know more about the use cases for the items listed above? So would everybody. You can start preparing your FOIA now. According to critics, NYPD’s reporting on such acquisitions is perennially fuzzy at best. Perhaps police-captain-turned-mayor Eric Adams feels he doesn’t need to formally document them since he sometimes touts such technologies at carefully choreographed events in venues like Times Square. Take those drones for instance; their proliferation is ongoing and as enshrouded in mystery as ever. All of which is why, according to some groups, the POST Act desperately needs reform given that it presently asks for little more than a basic accounting in the name of transparency. “It’s the floor and not the ceiling,” said City Council sponsor Vanessa Gibson. But as they did with the original, the NYPD is likely to oppose any changes based on some specious version of “compromising security.” But, we can’t help asking, exactly whose security is at risk of being compromised? To quote a line from the 1987 classic RoboCop: “A machine does not know what it feels like to be human. It can’t understand the value of human life.” Comments are closed.
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