Taser, a private company wants an army of the body-worn camera added to police bodyworn cameras to improve police intelligence gathering. More ubiquitous surveillance, this time encouraging "little brother" the people to join Big Brother (the state) in the fun.
Despite the initial concept of ubiquitous bodyworn cameras on officers as a means of improving accountability and transparency, results have been far from ideal. In reality, the bodyworn camera rarely leads to indictment even in cases of police brutality. <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/09/21/taser-wants-to-build-an-army-of-smartphone-informants/">Civilian access to body-worn cameras is also commonly restricted</a> in many municipalities. The solution now being offered by bodyworn camera manufacturers is a civilian populace who are also recording and uploading via worn cameras.
Some privacy and civil rights organizations have expressed valid concerns related to Axon and Evidence.com's growing database of bodyworn camera data fed to it's in-house AI team. Predictive technologies and constant surveillance are the stuff of fiction by George Orwell or Philip K. Dick, but have slowly been becoming the norm. The sophistication of surveillance tactics and intelligence gathering methods coupled with the ever improving capabilities of predictive AI make for a world to put <i>Minority Report</i> to shame.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Artificial Intelligence Aids in Predictive Policing<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AI?src=hash">#AI</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/2MA?src=hash">#2MA</a> <a href="https://t.co/Wa5p4pjZwh">https://t.co/Wa5p4pjZwh</a> <a href="https://t.co/GCcrvgCzdG">pic.twitter.com/GCcrvgCzdG</a></p>— Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) <a href="https://twitter.com/erikbryn/status/910657973357355008">September 21, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Axon is the new name of Taser, since rebrand Axon has announced plans for utilizing deep learning algorithms to extrapolate more from the thousands of hours of video data at Evidence.com. We are well into the age of behavioral advertising and have far passed the "uncanny valley" past which "the corporation" has access to an <i>uncomfortable</i> amount of personal information. Now or soon after we will live in a world where our targeted ads know more about what we're going to do next week, next month, next year, than we do ourselves.
Big Data is no longer poised to overtake Big Oil and Big Tobacco, the decrepit giants of 20th century industry, it has overtaken it. We live in an information economy where data is one of the most primary commodities. Every free service you enjoy was paid for by some snippet of your privacy.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The $600 million from the CIA really comes in hand every once and a while. Perfect 5 star rating. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Alexa?src=hash">#Alexa</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DeepState?src=hash">#DeepState</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WhatHappened?src=hash">#WhatHappened</a> 🤔😳🙈🙊🙉🔥💥🐮💩💥 <a href="https://t.co/EaiedokvdI">pic.twitter.com/EaiedokvdI</a></p>— Glyphosate=Cancer💀 (@blysx) <a href="https://twitter.com/blysx/status/910191254125678592">September 19, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Taking into account the implications of voluntarily inputting all of your public and private information, your hopes, fears, desires, location and financial data into a box online that DARPA invented for military intelligence purposes just goes over some people's heads. What's to be expected in a world where people pay device cost and subscription fee to introduce an electronic surveillance utility built by a company with a cozy relationship to the CIA <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL7NcubcS7s">(I'm looking at you, Alexa…).</a>
(thumbnail image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Big_Brother#/media/File:1984-Big-Brother.jpg)
