How artificial intelligence builds ultimate police state
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March 17, 2023
Twenty years ago, the United States government still reeling from
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, began scaling up its
surveillance capacity. There was "Total Information Awareness."
There was even a controversial plan to enlist letter carriers and
even librarians to keep an eye on the populace.
Back then, I found this to be somewhat laughable. Even if the U.S.
government was able to scoop up all sorts of information off the
Internet and telephones, it will represent a massive trove of data
that no humans could go through and analyze. Even if the
Intelligence Community enlisted the entire population of the United
States that would be humanly impossible. So my reaction to this
was, what could they do?
Surveillance cameras were still recording on magnetic tapes. Those
VHS tapes could be recorded for up to 24 hours per cassette using a
specially designed recorder, but the video was grainy and
black-and-white. Usually, those tapes were kept for a few days and
recorded over unless there was an incident.
Sure, there were some disturbing signs of massive surveillance even
in that decade and the following. TSA employed so-called
"Behavioral Detections Officers" (BDO) at major airports. 11 years
ago, a British tourist was detained by the U.S. Customs and Border
Protection because of an innocuous tweet.
But for the most part, the pervasiveness of surveillance was
limited by human labor and time. This required the government to
use discretion and carefully choose which cases to pursue.
20 years forward, we are in the era of generative artificial
intelligence. And so did the technological capacity for massive
real-time surveillance grow exponentially.
Your favorite social media platform is now capable of instantly
analyzing every photo you upload, and even identifying objects in
the pictures, and recognizing and even translating any words
appearing in the photos. YouTube automatically looks for
controversial or offensive words and even creates
automatically-generated closed captions.
Surveillance cameras are now miniaturized, cheaper, and ubiquitous.
Many homes already have Ring cameras on the front doors and their
videos are of high resolution and include audio. The recordings are
often shared with local police departments. When you go shopping,
many big retailers are now using not only closed-circuit cameras
but also facial recognition capacities. Reportedly Walmart deploys
facial recognition in its self-checkout machines and it is used for
purposes beyond loss prevention. Public transit systems use
surveillance cameras with audio recording capabilities in every
vehicle and every corner of their facilities. There is no telling
how long the recordings are retained, or whether the video and
audio are analyzed for some unknown purposes.
It is often said that every resident of the United States,
knowingly or unknowingly, commits at least three felonies each day,
due to the complexity of American criminal laws (they are not in a
singular criminal code, but in every section of the United States
Code, in the Code of Federal Regulations, as well as in the state
and territorial laws). The United States already incarcerates more
people than any other country on Earth. The only reason why
everyone isn't in prison is that there remains a limit to human
capacity.
In recent years, many police departments in America are
experiencing staffing shortages. It takes a year and a half to
train a recruit to become a full-fledged policeman. It is expensive
to hire more cops. Public safety expenditures are always one of the
top three spendings in the state and local government budgets along
with education and health. So it becomes very tempting for
politicians to consider AI-assisted, automated policing. Given the
capacity of GPT4, it may even be a real possibility for district
attorneys to enlist the help of AI to prosecute misdemeanors and
lesser felonies. The law enforcement community always loves having
a "force multiplier"; artificial intelligence could revolutionize
policing -- in a very bad, dystopian way.
With the combination of AI and ubiquitous mass surveillance, no one
will be safe from the full weight of police state violence. Even as
I write this, ACLU has uncovered the FBI's plan to purchase a
facial recognition system that can identify and track individuals
from a mile away. If you're skeptical about this just look at
Communist China. CCP and its Public Security Bureau are years ahead
of the Western world when it comes to technologies in policing.
Governments worldwide and the politicians who run them have always
tried to play God. Their inclination is to surveil anything that
moves and regulate anything that exists. Their hubris and thirst
for power know no end. While an increasing number of politicians
now call for regulating AI, they will likely not extend this to
governments.
The time to fight back is now. A free society can only exist when
the powers of the state are extremely limited and are constrained
by the constitutional order, the rule of law, and a high degree of
ethics. The American constitutional tradition and its English
predecessor understood this (although in recent decades, Great
Britain has developed such a penchant for intrusive surveillance).
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https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/police-departments-beginning-integrate-ai-tech-into-body-cameras/
Police departments beginning to integrate AI tech into body cameras
(CBS/KDKA, March 11, 2023)
=>
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/14/22576236/retail-stores-facial-recognition-civil-rights-organizations-ban
Retail stores are packed with unchecked facial recognition (The
Verge, July 14, 2021)
=>
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/a_nanny_state_idiocracy_when_the_government_thinks_it_knows_best
A nanny state idiocracy
