US Authoritarianism

It's the Feds after all.

Broken link ⛓️‍💥

couldn’t find the Forbes link but here’s a summary from another site:

FedEx's Secretive Police Force Is Helping Cops Build An AI Car Surveillance Network from the surveillance-society dept.

Twenty years ago, FedEx established its own police force. Now it's working with local police to build out an AI car surveillance network. From a report:

Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock video surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least five multi-billion dollar private companies. But publicly available documents reveal that some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx -- a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus.

To civil rights activists, such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock's car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Lisa Femia, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said because private entities aren't subject to the same transparency laws as police, this sort of arrangement could "[leave] the public in the dark, while at the same time expanding a sort of mass surveillance network."

Honestly kind of a bad article in that it fails to really explicitly name the exact concern they have.

Is the issue that the police can tap into a network of privately owned security cameras to get around the cost / drama of setting up public ones like they're already doing with Ring? Because while, yes I agree that's a problem, it doesn't necessarily sound like the problem lies with companies trying to protect their stuff from being stolen and catch the people stealing it, but with police data access and privacy laws. I mean, are you going to ban people from sharing security footage of crimes? Sharing it with a news network? Sharing it with local neighbourhood groups? etc. etc.

Like I agree it would better to not setup as many security cameras, and address crime through other means, bur the reality is that if your house gets broken into, you're gonna set one up the next day.