2026-02-28
OpenAI claims it's joining Anthropic to say the DOD can't use their AI for surveillance/autonomous weapons. As DOD starts an embargo of any military contractor using their products, will they do the same to OpenAI? Wild this happens on a day a report is out about how Grok for government is awful....
@sama
Sam Altman says OpenAI reached an agreement with the DOD to deploy its models in DOD's classified network and asks DOD to extend those terms to all AI companies
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safet...
OpenAI claims it's joining Anthropic to say the DOD can't use their AI for surveillance/autonomous weapons. As DOD starts an embargo of any military contractor using their products, will they do the same to OpenAI? Wild this happens on a day a report is out about how Grok for government is awful....
Axios
Sam Altman says OpenAI shares Anthropic's red lines with respect to AI use by the military, which are “an issue for the whole industry”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a memo to staff that he will draw the same red lines that sparked a high-stakes fight between rival Anthropic …
2026-02-20
“...There will be fewer maps in any future ads, he said.” — He knows the maps make people realize how much this connected surveillance network blankets neighborhoods. People want to think of it as THEIR camera on THEIR door and connected to nothing, but it's not.
New York Times
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is on an apology tour to quell an outcry over privacy concerns after Ring's Super Bowl Search Party ad, calling it a “perfect storm”
2026-02-19
“...There will be fewer maps in any future ads, he said.” — He knows the maps make people realize how much this connected surveillance network blankets neighborhoods. People want to think of it as THEIR camera on THEIR door and connected to nothing, but it's not.
New York Times
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is on an apology tour to quell an outcry over privacy concerns after Ring's Super Bowl Search Party ad, calling it a “perfect storm”
Since the commercial aired, Jamie Siminoff has been trying to quell an outcry over privacy concerns with his doorbell cameras.
2025-07-19
Among the awful new things Amazon Ring is announcing is a third-party system built by AXON, of all companies, that will allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, and give users the option to share a *live stream* of their personal cameras with police.
Business Insider
Ring reinstated its mission to “make neighborhoods safer” and reintroduced video sharing with police in April, as its founder led an overhaul since his return
- Ring founder Jamie Siminoff has led a broad overhaul of the company since his return in April.
My response to Ring's decision to roll back reforms and go back to surveillance on behalf of police as a business model. — This is part of a trend of companies bending over backwards to get in on the techno-authoritarian money/power grab that comes with being a lapdog of the carceral state.
Business Insider
Ring reinstated its mission to “make neighborhoods safer” and reintroduced video sharing with police in April, as its founder led an overhaul since his return
- Ring founder Jamie Siminoff has led a broad overhaul of the company since his return in April.
2025-06-26
New reporting says that Flock is now prohibiting police from other states to access ALPR data in Illinois, California, and Virginia. Now it's time to do the rest of the states—especially if they care about due process in immigration proceedings and protecting abortion-seekers.
404 Media
License plate reader company Flock has stopped US agencies from accessing cameras in CA, IL, and VA after reports of lookups related to ICE and an abortion case
www.404media.co/flock-remove... S. E. Smith / @sesmith.lol : Love it when reporting like this from @404media.co forces sleazy companies to change their practices now that they've b...
2025-05-16
In 49 states and at the federal level, police can (unconstitutionally) buy your geolocation data (often harvested from smartphone apps) from advertising data brokers and bypass getting a warrant from a judge for it. — Montana has become the first state to close this loophole.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Montana becomes the first US state to close a data broker loophole that lets police buy users' geolocation data and other digital info without a judge's warrant
Montana has become the first state to close this loophole. Mastodon: @SuffolkLITLab@esq.social : TL;DR: Montana has become the first state to close the law enforcement data broker ...
2025-02-05
Will the world's most popular search engine be using AI to build autonomous weapons systems? And other questions from a world in which tech companies have no ethics and no convictions other than profit.
Washington Post
Google drops language from its AI Principles that said it would not pursue AI applications “likely to cause overall harm”, such as for weapons and surveillance
In 2018 the company updated its policies to explicitly exclude applying AI to weapons. Now that promise is gone.
2025-01-23
A court deciding what is and is not allowed seems like such a hollow and easily-reversible victory these days—but nonetheless, today's decision that Section 702 data cannot be used to spy on US persons without a warrant was hard-fought and actually a pretty big deal. — www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
Cato Institute
A US district judge rules that the FBI's warrantless “backdoor” searches of FISA's Section 702 databases violate the Fourth Amendment
but nonetheless, today's decision that Section 702 data cannot be used to spy on US persons without a warrant was hard-fought and actually a pretty big deal. — www.eff.org/deepli...
2024-10-22
Hell yea, here we go. https://www.404media.co/...
404 Media
Lawsuit: a civil rights organization says a Virginia town installing Flock cameras violated the Fourth Amendment, making citizens moving untracked “impossible”
Jason Koebler / 404 Media :
2024-05-14
Come for the revelations about how ineffective this surveillance tech is—stay for the inside look at how surveillance technology gets marketed and how cities end up buying it.
Wired
Internal emails: how Evolv's gun-detection AI system made its way to NYC subway stations, despite Evolv saying the system is not designed for that environment
the scanners produced false positives 85 percent of the time during the seven-month pilot. https://www.wired.com/... @casaverde83 : “Cohen, former NYPD Dep Commissioner of intellig...
2023-05-14
Even if cities were to push back against blanket police surveillance, in comes a new company which gives police access to private security cameras on homes and businesses. It's mass surveillance, but on other people's dime! https://twitter.com/...
Context
A look at the rise of Fusus, controversial police tech that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing, used in 60+ US cities across 12+ states
The spread of Fusus, a police technology platform that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing and other surveillance tools … Mastodon: @thomasapowell@fosstodon....
2023-04-17
WHY WHY WHY after all these stories is the government still able to access this information? If Congress was functional at all a bill that would stop this would have been fast-tracked. https://twitter.com/...
The Intercept
Contract docs reveal the Georgia National Guard plans to use location-based phone surveillance to target ads using geofences around 67 local public high schools
The Georgia Army National Guard plans to combine two deeply controversial practices — military recruiting at schools … Mastodon: @metacurity@infosec.exchange . Tweets: @buddyhead ,...
2022-09-02
We're ready to unveil an investigation many have been working on for almost a year: A company that buys geolocation data from “250 million devices” and maps it for police to access without a warrant. 🚨 This gives local police (for a fee) the type of powers we fear the NSA has. https://twitter.com/...
Associated Press
An investigation details local US law enforcement using the “Fog Reveal” phone tracking tool, at times without warrants, to search records from 250M devices
Associated Press :
2022-09-01
We're ready to unveil an investigation many have been working on for almost a year: A company that buys geolocation data from “250 million devices” and maps it for police to access without a warrant. 🚨 This gives local police (for a fee) the type of powers we fear the NSA has. https://twitter.com/...
Associated Press
An investigation details local US law enforcement using the “Fog Reveal” phone tracking tool, at times without warrants, to search records from 250M+ devices
Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using …
2021-10-15
A fascinating artifact for people who study urban space. A dead-end street has become littered with self-driving training cars collecting data, which drive down the street and bunch up when it's time to turn around. https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/ ...
CBS San Francisco
Residents of a quiet San Francisco street say Waymo's self-driving cars are flocking to the neighborhood throughout the day, seemingly confused by a dead end
Wilson Walker / CBS San Francisco :
2021-06-18
We've been working with this massive slew of 2016 emails between the LAPD and Ring for months. They document a culture in which Ring gave free and discounted cameras to officers—and in return officers helped Ring spread as quickly as it did. https://www.eff.org/...
Los Angeles Times
Emails from 2016 show Ring provided ~100 LAPD officers with free devices or discount codes and encouraged them to promote its devices to fellow LAPD, the public
In a bid to bolster its claims as a crime-fighting tool, Ring deployed a tactic popular in the business world: influencer marketing.
2021-01-05
Public health and policing should. never. mix. It's the historic and contemporary associations and relationship between healthcare and punitive and racist governance that has already done so much damage to our COVID-19 response and eroded public health in the U.S. https://twitter.com/...
ZDNet
Singapore now says local law enforcement can access COVID-19 contact tracing data; 78% of its population has adopted the TraceTogether app and wearable token
Eileen Yu / ZDNet :
2020-12-09
This is 19th Century science being used to surveil and oppress a minority ethnicity by presuming criminality, using AI to “find Uighurs by facial structure”, and dispatch police. It's hard to overemphasize the extent to which the age of Eugenics/Proto-Eugenics never ended. https://twitter.com/...
Washington Post