00:00As concerns grow over the rise of AI-powered civilians, a debate is unfolding in the United States over how
00:07file monitoring technologies are expanding.
00:10From license plate readers to predictive analytics, critics warn that a vast network of data collection is already taking shape
00:18across the country.
00:19Our colleague Dan Albright has more details.
00:24U.S. media points to China as the warning sign for authoritarian AI surveillance.
00:30But the United States is building its own version, town by town, police contract by police contract.
00:37I'm standing right in front of a Flock safety license plate reader.
00:41Every passing car becomes searchable data, plate, vehicle, make, model, color, time and location.
00:47And with nearly 90,000 cameras nationwide, Flock is not just selling cameras.
00:54Flock itself owns the hardware, right?
00:57And they're a cloud-based service.
00:59Eventually, you have this national lookup network.
01:01All of that data became searchable because Flock created a network that was searchable.
01:06Flock says communities control their data and says ICE has no direct access unless local agencies allow it.
01:13But critics say data can still move through local police, share databases, informal searches, accidental sharing, or other agencies.
01:23And Flock is only one layer.
01:25AI can be added to ordinary footage, traffic cameras, police, and private security cameras to search for people, clothing, patterns,
01:34and behaviors, even making predictions about risk.
01:37The system can't be wrong.
01:39The major concern is, are we creating kind of a super surveillance apparatus through the combination of the camera technology,
01:50the database technology, and the ways that AI is able to analyze that information and draw inferences from that information.
02:00Police say these tools solve crimes, but searchable location data can also be weaponized against undocumented immigrants, protesters, and dissidents.
02:10Here in Massachusetts, public money is flowing into AI, robotics, quantum, and defense tech.
02:17And while not every project is surveillance, the same capacities, machine vision, pattern recognition, autonomous systems, and data fusion, are
02:26being built across policing, borders, and war.
02:29That overlap is already global.
02:32Palantir working with Israeli occupation forces.
02:35Peter Thiel's ties to Argentina's new AI social-digital twin.
02:39And AI systems increasingly used to identify, track, and target people in war.
02:44We hold up China as a bogeyman.
02:46But it allows us to kind of do that exact move where we just then brush away the accountability for
02:54what's happening in the United States.
02:55Because what we are exporting is, in effect, turnkey surveillance authoritarianism.
03:02The question is whether the public is being asked to accept a warrantless tracking network before it understands what has
03:09already been built.
03:11From Lynn, Massachusetts, Dan Albright, Telesor.
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