Dear Citizens,
Americans have turned their attention to data centers of late, with less focus on mass surveillance. But citizens, suddenly this week, are becoming acquainted with “Flock”, the rapidly expanding network of AI-powered license plate cameras quietly watching roads across the country. Police departments love them. Civil liberties groups and anyone worried about their privacy… not so much.
Depending on who you ask, Flock is either the future of public safety or the beginning of a world where every trip to the grocery store, every visit to a protest, every late-night drive and every wrong turn lives forever in a searchable database. Maybe it’s both.
Either way, after years of scrolling past warnings about surveillance capitalism, it feels like Americans are once again paying close attention to the surveillance state.
We’ll keep watching too… just not too closely. Here’s what else to read, watch and do this week.
👁️ ONE READ: The Surveillance Machine 👁️
Speaking of surveillance… we’ve written plenty about facial recognition, spyware and data brokers. But this remarkable essay from Alex Skopic at Current Affairs argues that maybe we’ve been thinking too small. He writes:
In the first place, the idea that surveillance is a silver bullet for stopping crime is questionable at best… And even if surveillance did lower crime rates, it wouldn’t justify casting a dragnet of cameras, drones, databases, and AI over an entire city, because the potential for abuse is truly terrifying.
The piece goes deep on the surveillance state in New Orleans to lay out how separate technologies - cameras, AI, location data, predictive policing, commercial databases and more - are quietly being stitched together into something much bigger: an infrastructure of continuous surveillance that’s becoming harder to see precisely because it’s becoming normal.
It’s a chilling, deeply reported piece. Read it before someone reads you.
🧠 ANOTHER READ: Inside the Mind of Peter Thiel 🧠
If you’ve ever wondered what the hell is going on inside the mind of Peter Thiel (same), Amanda Ianthe has done some digging for you. As she says, “the faster we can name these techniques, call them out and pivot to real counter-strategies, the better”. Read it here.
👉 Bonus read: Apparently America’s national parks weren’t safe either. The terrific Heatmap News reports that a massive AI data centre has been proposed near Prince William Forest Park. Nothing says “leave only footprints” quite like a hyperscale server farm.
🍑 ONE WATCH: Sarah Wynn-Williams Speaks 🍑
We’ve spent months following Meta’s extraordinary efforts to silence former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams and suppress Careless People, her devastating insider account of life inside Facebook.
Fortunately for everyone except Meta’s lawyers, she’s still talking. In this wide-ranging interview, Wynn-Williams goes deeper into Facebook’s culture, leadership and decision-making, and why she ultimately decided the public needed to know what was happening behind the company’s carefully managed image.
It’s funny. It’s infuriating. And after everything we’ve watched Meta do over the past year, it feels less like revenge and more like essential historical documentation.
👉 Watch here.
✊ ONE ACTION: Time for Big Tech to Pay Up ✊
For years the biggest technology companies have built extraordinary wealth by extracting our data, exploiting our attention and externalising the costs onto everyone else. Maybe it’s time to send them the bill?
This week’s action is simple: add your name to this growing campaign calling on Big Tech to pay its fair share and help repair the damage caused by its platforms.
Bonus action: Speaking of Meta… if you're in the UK or EU, our friends have made it remarkably easy to object to Meta's use of your personal data. Make your objection impossible to ignore - and remind the company that consent isn't something it gets to invent after the fact.
That’s all for this week,
Team Citizens
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! 400+ people share practical advice on protecting your data, organising against Big Tech and staying ahead of what you need to know.
It's a little worse than that. Digitally stored surveillance footage can be used to train models or be directly edited through generative AI to produce false evidence.
Tampering and re-editing of digital video evidence has already happened, most notably in 2020, in the Bay Area during a wrongful death trial. We know that the motive is there. The question is whether this frightening possibility will be reported in the mainstream media.