“‘No. Flock does not work with [ICE].’ But in practice, the public records show…thousands of agencies around the country were sharing their camera data with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, which was then regularly performing lookups for ICE.” www.404media.co/floridas-wil...

Another story on abuse of mass #surveillance data! 😩 "in 'one month‘s time,' the sheriff queried his wife’s license plate number approximately 152 times. His stated purpose was to assess the system’s reliability before a contract decision." Ban ALPRs! 🚫 #deflock #alpr

More evidence of Flock mission creep www.404media.co/police-used-...

This is something that has always bothered me about object-based surveillance. A car (or phone or license plate or whatever) is a proxy for a person, but assumptions are always made that object = person. Seems ripe for mistakes and false positives. oaklandside.org/2026/03/23/a...

Book launch day! “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self Surveillance” is out. Bluesky friends, I would be so grateful if you would buy a copy. And if you can’t afford it, could you at least share this announcement. Thank you. #BookSky politics-prose.com/search?q=You...

🎯 “The real question in Schmidt is not whether police can observe a car on a public street. It is whether the government can build a persistent, searchable database of everyone’s movements without judicial oversight.” secure-justice.org/blog/alprs-a...

Mass surveillance can be a threat to privacy, sure, but it can also be a threat to safety. Misreads are a common harm unleashed by surveillance tech. The "privacy vs safety" debate framing rarely discusses this danger to public safety caused BY surveillance. www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety...

The 100th episode of Peoples and Things?!? It was a blast talking to Lee Vinsel about my book Spy Plane on this very special episode of the 'ol P-n-T. athenaeum.vt.domains/peoplesandth... @ucpress.bsky.social

This episode was so great! I have so many students doing mini research projects and theses on social mobility at elite colleges. Looking forward to reading this [email protected] @mosbornesoc.bsky.social

Happy May Day to all who celebrate! Read this! time.com/collections/...

Worth a read. One thing I'd add is that the "imperial boomerang" often starts in the US, then goes abroad, then comes back. And that's what you see with companies like Palantir or Shotspotter. local US cops->IDF->federal US cops theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...

This is horrifying. How much do you want to bet some clueless Palantir consultant was behind the intel for this raid. #dumbdystopia kfor.com/news/local/w...

Enshitification…engaged

All of this just feels like the logical outcome of massive wealth inequality in which the rich go from merely segregated to literally living in a different version of reality. www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Had a student (astrophysics major) tell me all the jobs in her dream field (federal patent law) are gone bc of govt cuts. Then said only thing she is getting offers for are places like Anduril, General Atomics, etc. 🙃

Glad to see Williams showing up for this. www.presidentsalliance.org/wp-content/u...

True of literally every hyped thing right now

ICE may have deleted it, but you should NEVER forget that they posted it. This administration is mounting a full-scale assault on freedom of thought and expression (not to mention the rule of law), the likes and brazenness of which we have not seen before.

They’re not sending their best. www.jsonline.com/story/news/2...

CEO what now?

Not sure which is worse. Smart dystopia: Big Brother has all knowing sight and is able to ruin people’s lives by outmaneuvering us. Dumb dystopia: Big Brother engages in security theater, but actually knows little, ruining people’s lives bc of idiotic mistakes. We’re obviously in the latter.

🎯 “When the rejection of hype leads to a wholesale rejection of any related technology, it can also affirm, dangerously, the belief that public policy and deliberation have no role in shaping technology.” www.techpolicy.press/future-fatig...

"Dataminr’s threat notifications are known to turn up false positives; multiple tweets by angry Taylor Swift fans aimed at Ticketmaster were forwarded to the LAPD as 'L.A. Threats and Disruptions,' the records show." theintercept.com/2025/03/17/l...

Sign me up

I was honored to be a guest on Techtonic with @markhurst.bsky.social to talk about my book on Baltimore's spy plane program. The cool thing is that Mark is not only a great interviewer but he also compiles incredible lists of articles and new stories about technology. www.wfmu.org/playlists/sh...

If you want to know the answer to this question read people like Ana Muniz or @sarahbrayne.bsky.social. The answer is: bad data.

This is coming as a surprise to many, but if you read what scholars have been finding about our immigration surveillance and enforcement system you’ll see that it has long been this way. Under Dems and Republicans.

Why are minerals so central to geopolitics? How green are electric cars? Why is anti-mining protest increasing? Can the inequalities of the global economy be transformed? I tackle these topics in my book EXTRACTION: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism 👀 September 2025 @wwnorton.bsky.social

After a 3 month trial, the Anchorage Police Department is not moving forward w/ Axon's Draft One product which uses body camera audio and AI to generate narrative police reports because they found it was NOT a time saver--Axon's biggest marketing talking point.

This new private surveillance camera network in the Little Italy section of Baltimore continues a long tradition of using surveillance technology to protect racial borderlands in the city. www.wmar2news.com/local/in-lit...

By design, it's hard for people to know if police are using AI to write their narrative reports for them, but we *are* cruising toward mass use and the chaos it will likely cause. With mass adoption on the horizon, some cities, states, and counties, are trying to regulate or ban it proactively!

“The department also failed to report its internal documentation of false positives and duplicate alerts to SoundThinking. This artificially inflated the company’s accuracy rating in a monthly report card meant to track its performance.” #shotspotter lapublicpress.org/2025/02/pasa...

Cook County’s web of surveillance for electronic monitoring “An analysis prepared by RISC in November 2021 found that about eight of every ten alerts issued by GPS monitors were false positives.” chicagoreader.com/news/electro...

While people worry about some far off AGI dystopia, Microsoft and OpenAI have already created deeply harmful systems right now in the present. www.972mag.com/microsoft-az...

THE meme of 2025 for me.

I don’t hear enough talk about this: what if policing tech has made investigators worse at their jobs bc it gives them false confidence, offloads delicate work to dumb machines, they feel permission to skip basic steps.

I was deeply honored to speak with Sasha Lilley on the legendary KPFA radio show Against the Grain about my book Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore's Surveillance Experiment. If you missed it live, you can check it out here:

Interesting report by @securejustice.bsky.social. "The DOJ’s funding of predictive policing analytics violated the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits funding of programs that might discriminate. It’s yet another example of releasing a product into the wild without first considering its impact."

We are fighting every day to #BanTheScan in New Yorkers' homes. @keithpowersnyc.bsky.social, will you be doing your part to protect privacy rights by sponsoring Intro 425? Learn more about Intro 425: banthescan.org

It was such an honor to chat with @bsoderberg.bsky.social at one of my favorite places on planet earth: @redemmas.org If you missed it, you can watch a recording here