Operation Deflock
Member Monday endeavors to avoid the repeat of any session in the absence of something that makes it freshly relevant. The freshly relevant feature in this case is the extraordinary effort on the part of a Boulder citizen to thwart the proliferation of camera surveillance. Will Freeman, our lead participant, is a twenty-seven year old software engineer who, after discovering the silent rollout of Flock AI-driven ALPR (Automatic License Plate Reader) cameras, in Boulder and nationwide, created "DeFlock", a crowd-sourced mapping platform for locating these surveillance devices (click: YouTube).
Why one might care was the subject five years ago of a previous MM 8/23/21 Panopticon session in which the setup piece was what had been described as "a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity." The referenced "device" was an institutional building and system of control designed in the eighteenth century by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. The so-called panopticon, from the Greek word for "all seeing," was devilishly simple.
A prison consisted of individual cells arranged along the circumference of a multistory rotunda, each cell facing inward. An inspection house sat in the middle. The efficiency allowed a single unseen guard in the inspection house to watch over hundreds of inmates. The power lay in the fact no prisoner was ever aware at any particular time whether the prisoner was being watched. This asymmetric viewing system served as the model for fifty-four prisons in Victorian Britain.
And so it’s not a stretch to envision the application of such an asymmetric viewing system to ultimately control a citizenry. After all, we took a look at the way certain authoritarian regimes such as China have applied technology to triangulate countless input streams to control a population.
Such a surveillance state, after all, was at the heart of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which provided, “there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . you had to live . . on the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
The ability to track all vehicles all the time may seem pretty innocuous at first and defensible on the grounds of public safety but flip a switch and a darker view emerges e.g. its (documented) use to track subjects for all sorts of private ends including stalking (click: https://ij.org/the-ij-database-of-alpr-abuse/). Add then the technology’s rapid advance to include facial recognition called Condor to imagine the implications.
Let us examine and discuss the matter as follows:
Thesis: our society may be reaching the Bentham tipping point where this “monstrous efficiency” could enable the ordering of human complexities through docility, thereby paving the way to a totalitarian state;
Antithesis: Oh grow up, this is about crime protection; technology has been and will always be simply a tool to be used within the context of our constitutional Republic and is thereby subject to all the checks and balances therein.
Meanwhile, let us applaud citizen Will for the initiative and personal courage he’s demonstrated in surfacing the issue before it becomes more than an abstract concern (see https://deflock.org/). Perhaps we can render our support on a matter that’s the subject of some current litigation.
Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.