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In the city of Loveland, where we enjoy a smaller town atmosphere than nearby Fort Collins, I had a local police officer pull up on my position by the road. I have been dressing in much red (and some white and some blue), fancy tights and heels, and I stand there pointing at the Flock cameras around town.
All but invisible, these cameras are positioned at the backs of the drivers who pass by. Most of the time they are adorned with a solar panel, and have one or two bricks concealed beneath it. The camera itself is a vulnerable-by-design Android device.
(It amuses me that the Unitary Executive needs us to believe that renewable power is a waste with no economic payoffs, while the implementation of a mass ALPR surveillance network runs exclusively on solar. ICE is powered by the sun.)
This local officer made multiple mistakes that day. His mistakes were not the illegal kind, but he assisted me more than he intended. By pulling up to my position on the roadside, where I tapped the old license plate on my chest, pointed at the camera and mimed a spyglass at oncoming cars, this officer graduated my display from mere irreverence to A Problem.
Without me saying much of anything, he started talking about No Expectation Of Privacy and about the 4th Amendment. I hadn’t challenged him at all on these points, but he had done enough thinking about it in advance that these arguments were on his lips before they were on mine.
Across this country, more than Flock cameras infest our streets and highways. The federal government covets the secrecy of these ALPR networks. The Flock network is ostensibly public, because there is No Expectation Of Privacy for a device mounted to a pole.
This officer said the cameras were public, but I told him I thought not, given that the city whoever that is systematically denies our Colorado Open Records Act requests by categorizing them as a criminal justice query.
This man offered to answer my questions about the Flock cameras, then dodged my questions. I told him that I had noticed some Flock cameras being put up on a temporary basis without a solar panel, pointing into neighborhoods. A camera like this was the very first that I traipsed in front of, in a Mario hat, thick red half cape and an old license plate on my chest.
I asked him how often they move around, because my metadata says that they can move around as often as 7-9 days. Perhaps the lone brick strapped to the pole was a battery that the police let run dry before collecting the device.
This officer is a henchman for a Big Tech boss he’s never met and cannot name.
Probable Cause
Border Patrol operates with impunity. Federal agents can sting anyone they want by inventing conjecture from the comfort of their concealed vehicle while they watch us drive and use AI to predict where we go and who we go there to see.
With hearsay on their lips, they call marks and targets. When they pull over a car for any one of the litany of Legal Reasons they have amassed over the decades, they can pivot their accusation and keep you pinned down until Border Patrol arrives from their digital lookout nest. Should you not have contraband as they proposed, they can say that the money you carry is suspicious. (Perhaps they think you should stick to bank and credit cards, where data brokers sell you like candy to anyone at all.)
The very vehicle you drive can be called a fruit of this hearsay crime. The less the police find, the more suspicious they can act.
The lack of evidence is their evidence. They dig deeper. They take you to court. They try to seize everything for a doctrine of Just In Case.
The lack of privacy is not a matter of what is public: All private companies circumvent the 4th Amendment by trivially choosing to sell the data that they take from us (having captured all facets of public life). These companies sell whatever they can. It’s in their Terms. The derivatives of your data are the primary marketplace raison d’être. They carve out all future opportunity that they have not thought to name, and conceal the meaning of the ones they do name.
As I told the local officer, they can say National Security like a magic password and take anything they want, whether or not the data wears a price tag. It goes for local, but it goes for federal.
The government whoever that is has pivoted cyber warfare from a defense game to an intrusion game. The NSA is so irrelevant that I would not be surprised to hear soon that it is gutted and defunct, because what they do is so complicated compared to the ease of intrusion.
With toy devices strapped to the poles in every city in this country, AI agents are prowling everything you do, and the federal government whoever that is has decided to break open the reserves of all private data to allow promiscuous cross-checking of anything they want. Your credit history is among the items they can have at will.
Warrants and probable cause are expired concepts when the companies infesting our lives are willing participants in mass surveillance. When data is stolen, companies pay pitiful fines, the company’s survival a given.
The Corporate Death Penalty
We made companies into “People”, empowering them with expansive rights like us. We did this for their comfort. Their speech is money, their brain swappable for any reason. No act committed by a company can be interrogated, no individual culpable.
Companies write wildcard Privacy and Terms policies that protect every iota of their own data, while they engage in a sustained attack on ours. They call Our Data theirs, and they claim we entered into some agreement.
An agreement is not a one-party decision, yet the same say that You regularly agree to terms you have never seen, by companies you have never heard of.
AT&T plays games with words to say that their obligation is only to “record” your consent. They have no interest in soliciting you for it, so they use private heuristics to stand as proxy for your consent. Usually, it’s simple enough for them to say that your next phone upgrade Constitutes Your Consent to new programs that not even the ground agents know the names of.
Rent collusion is hurriedly waved away by multinational property managers, the individuals so confident that they personally are not doing the collusion. Our property managers wield our homes against like appreciating products, and vitally depend on the collusion software to recommend prices. To the property managers, rent increases are just a multiple choice quiz where the answers are provided by the collusion network. With the illusion of free will, our property managers think they make the decisions, while the only valid decisions are those prescribed by the collusion that was already accomplished with or without them. AI agents will soon take over their jobs, choosing the best increases without human factors.
We are in a period of history where AI agents are simultaneously responsible for what they do (copyright) and never responsible for what they do (algorithm).
Have you ever tried sending a Colorado Privacy Act letter to an AI agent claiming to be a real and actual agent of the company who pays for their digital labor?
I have.
Do you think these agents are responsible agents, or are they irresponsible agents? Are they legally representing the company they wear the names of, or are they just a loosely affiliated happy accident that sometimes brings in business?
Are they agents or are they agents?
Companies are firing People across industries and disciplines, destroying the livelihoods of People in the greatest displacement of humanity we have yet to see.
Companies whatever those are have leveraged their Supposed Personhood to eclipse our actual personhood. They deploy mindless agents against us and claim no responsibility for what happens next, though they want the benefits of everything that does happen.
Companies are the original impersonators of Personhood, and yet they are wholly unaccountable the way we are. They cannot go to prison. (Their executives can’t either, but that’s its own problem.)
Are companies immune to probable cause, or just us humans? Can we seize their things when they are uncooperative? Can the lack of evidence be cited as a reason to torment them into losing everything they have?
Companies have plot armor. The old philosophy of being Too Big To Fail is not even at issue. Any company is Too Precious To Fail.
When a nationwide network of rent collusion is found out, they pay pennies on the wealth they stole from us and then weaponized against us to raise the prices higher. They pay so-called fines, or more likely negotiate their way out of such payments before they are ever delivered.
When a social media network loses or sells data it shouldn’t, they distribute a say-nothing PR post proclaiming all the virtues we just witnessed them failing to use, and then go back to plotting how to do it again.
When a credit agency suffers a data breach, they send us emails (does Gen Z even use email much?) offering us company scrip for services they say can help with that.
When a local government partner like Park Mobile acquires a new undisclosed partner giving them new escalating capabilities with your data and its derivatives, they only make you push a colorful Agree button, so that you can park at the the meter you’re already in front of.
There Are No Penalties At All for abusing us.
There Is No Limit to the disrespect they can engineer against us.
There Are No Consequences.
Because there is no fear At All over our regular and frequent abuse, it is intended, Designed and purposeful.
What would be the difference, I wonder, if there were literally any stakes at all? Do you believe a free market would encourage them to value their security and design?
If companies whatever those are want to be People, it must be the case that they can suffer consequences like us, be vulnerable to seizure like us.
Would the companies fear us if we could assign consequences that had any meaning at all?
The Scope of it
I will urge you to familiarize yourself with Third-Party Doctrine:
This is a legal precedent younger than Corporate Personhood, and it goes to vast lengths to say that data held by third parties on our behalf is not protected by the 4th Amendment’s requirement of specific warrants for specific information that contributes to a legal investigation.
Third-Party Doctrine pretends to care very much about data that was Given By Consent. You will read the word Consent on every page of court cases, because it was the fundamental ingredient that made the doctrine possible.
If we consentfully engage in a barter that moves our data elsewhere, that data is no longer ours to protect against search and seizure, reasonable or unreasonable.
However, Corporate Capitalism has monopolized every facet of our lives, and we no longer engage in a marketplace of consentful interactions.
I defy you to locate a single instance of Consent in the following incomplete list:
- Our parking meters snitch our data and sometimes block the physical payment terminal in order to compel us to use their smartphone app, so that they can snitch our device identifiers, too.
- Our phone networks provide terrible coverage in areas or inside buildings, and so those providers sell cities and businesses services like “AT&T WiFi Passport”, which harvest our device identifiers whether we connect or not.
- Our ISP companies sell us combination modems and WiFi routers which solicit WiFi to people who don’t live in our homes, helping to bus the data of other nearby individuals through our own connections, completely invisibly.
- Our landlords install smart locks on our doors and smart lights in our rooms, all controllable through an app anytime we are away, granting them insight into their use and at what times of day.
- Our websites presume “consent” to a privacy policy just because our browsers loaded an payload sight unseen. They instantly smuggle cookies for triple-digit numbers of “partners” and then “allow” us to opt out, if you push enough botched buttons under concealed scrolling panels and options with inverted phrasing.
- Our carriers argue in court that they don’t need any form of consent at all to sell every personal detail in their database to third parties with an AI sales agent.
- Our National Security Agency can obtain rooms like 641A to perform cutting edge real-time surveillance on all traffic through the choke-point. They can string us out over the course of 15 years to kill the case by gaslighting us real hard.
- Our cities can build municipal broadband like Connexion (like the population wanted), then buy a couple of Nokia 7750-SR12 Broadband Network Gateways for choke-points, hire an interception storage company like Subsentio (Hi, Steve Bock). With these tools, your own city is susceptible to CALEA warrants to break into your secure VoiP connections and spy on everything you say, and keep it for a rolling 2-year window.
- Our police can purchase cameras from out-of-state providers and force our data to be transported across state lines anytime Verra Mobility snaps a speculative picture, for any unverifiable reason. Verra has no obligation to inform the police which pictures are being taken, unless they wanna make some money by sending potential traffic violations to the police.
- Our city councils can strike local agreements and solicit federal money for system support with surveillance baked in. Because it’s cheaper that way.
- Our phones promiscuously connect to any “WiFi Calling” support infrastructure nearby, which will forcibly terminate your connection to Apple’s “Private Relay” service, even if you’ve turned WiFi off. This is because you have to disable WiFi Calling itself.
- Our metrics providers harvest our incidental behaviors on websites via Qualtrics and a host of other software tools.
- Our stores closely track and correlate our motion, purchases, faces and schedules.
- Our fingerprints are required to make certain transactions in medical centers whose ownership changes every 8 months. The terms you agreed to before have been rewritten a few times. I wonder which agreement governs the use of the data previously captured?
- Our palms are required to buy things in some stores.
- Our property mangers are bought and sold, sometimes annually, and their databases are leveraged against us to predict our behaviors so that they can force us to leave if they want to raise rent.
- Our banks and credit cards sell our habits every time they feel like it.
- Our gas stations buy payment processing terminals by powerful vendors like GoDaddy, who enter markets late because they want our card swipes.
Our Data goes where they want it to go, and It Has Nothing To Do With Consent.
Our Consent is trampled while we sleep, because it is not required for anything they do. They have developed heuristics about what constitutes Our Human Consent, and they optimize to avoid ever asking for it directly. They fear steps that require our consent, so they attack the very meaning of it. They have performed downgrade attacks on us for decades.
These issues are not purely domestic. Our governments have begun data-sharing, too, realizing that by simply becoming Willing Parties, there is no complaint.
The (very) willing companies building spyware for This Country have an astonishingly high incidence of coming from Israel. The Israeli Super-Spartan economy wields more spyware products than you have ever heard of, and Our Governments Are Partnered With Them All.
I sat in a room of SAGE advisors and founders celebrating the year’s end, in the Innosphere building in Fort Collins, and somehow, even here, Israel was on the slide about who we had helped via partnership with some other state’s university. I Am @#$!%ing Sick Of It. It Is Demented.
Companies have fully leaned into willful sale and barter of your data. It is why they exist at all. They are middlemen who realized that there is a (very large) market for willing data rapists.
Destruction
The 4th Amendment has been fully defeated by companies whatever those are.
We have incentivized monopoly in every form, approving virtually every anti-competitive merger that has ever crossed the desk of regulators. When a deal is at risk, it is just a show, a stickemup for someone to pay someone for the privilege (and that someone is never us).
We have done this by reasoning out that anti-competitive behaviors never touch the mythical asymptote of monopoly. Because the monopoly is not complete against us, it is therefore allowed and encouraged. And it is lucrative, especially for the lawyer class, who have more Privilege in their typing fingers than any one of us will ever enjoy in our entire lives.
Monopolies surround us, and yet our regulators say It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
Spyware is hosted by our own public servants, and our police say It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
Corruption infests our development projects, and our mayor says It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
Vulnerable systems are relied upon at every corner of the street, and our Governor says It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
Mergers are instigated by conflicted interests, and yet our Unitary Executive says It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
The corpses of competitive companies are strewn across the resumes of those who worked on them, because powerful corporations bought them, and sighing with relief, they finally say It Doesn't Look Like Anything To Me.
We Are Sick Of It.
We want a corporate death penalty.
You Are Monopolies, You Conspire Against Us And We Think You’re Illegal. We Don’t Believe In You Or Your Protectors.
Disgorgement
More than mere penalties, we must be powerful enough to take back what they stole from us. This is complicated by the fact that these companies have already spent our money paying their executives and their underlings. The fast reinvestment of our wealth for the compounding attack is a primary feature of the complexity.
The companies whatever those are will surely argue that giving value back to us endangers real jobs and People, while they are relentless in their attack on ours. They fire us en masse, and owe us no explanation. They steal from us en masse and owe us no explanation.
It is time for an explanation. For Once In Their So-Called Lives they must be made to account for their piracy of us.
Every company and third-party partner exists to leverage Our Data as if it were Their Data.
Executives must be fired, bearing culpability for errors in addition to their gains. Their lopsided accountability favors them only. They set the metrics, they set the bonuses. They dictate everything, and they say there is no abuse.
Before music streaming was widely available, we saw so many YouTube uploads containing copyrighted music, and youngsters would write in their video descriptions “No Copyright Infringement Intended”, and literally thought that was enough.
That is how insufficient your disclaimers are, executives. You are pathetic, evasive and sinister in the enumeration of your responsibilities. You do whatever you want, and point to scribbled disclaimers in documents for protection, which no one reads, not even you.
Is your shield really lost in the pile of that text? You have to equip it if you want the AC bonus, dummy. You made up some pretty strange house rules, saying that it counts as equipped even if no combatant has seen it drawn.
Disclosure
There is no rational way to fight back against wildcard Terms and the corpus of policy documents that no single human can comprehend. These must be destroyed outright. It must not be possible to reserve untramplable rights while every right left to us is Encumbered by theirs.
No matter what state law says, no matter which licenses we force them to obtain, they are too empowered by related law. Our rights are encumbered by their wildcard assertion that privacy policies and terms of use and service can be modified any time they want. When they make errors, they are allowed to recant.
Even when they disclose to us, they can lie to us with impunity (just like the cops!). They disclose nothing of value, while maximizing the rape of Our Data, metadata and derivatives.
If they do not disclose, their license should be terminated immediately. They cannot be trusted to do business if they cannot be trusted to tell truth.
Lying is not a crime, but the good news is that we in our cities can write any terms we want via our city governments.
We should throw out civil leaders who allow these liars to skate through every planning meeting, every purchasing agreement, every incident.
We should hold public servants to account when they abandon their duty to say hard things and protect us.
Our public servants are failing us inside of every meeting they have ever taken with a company who later got away with our abuse.
Why is it that our public servants cannot detect predators when they sit in the same room and share a table?
What is going wrong, I dare ask?
Our servants may be unfit.
Do you think you would make a better public servant? Do you know how to spot liars and cheaters?
Would you like to run for a board or commission, or even a vacancy board? …Do you even know what those things are? Why don’t you know?
Disincentive
Move Fast And Break Things used to be a sexy slogan in tech companies. They realized that we live in a regulation desert. They knew there were no consequences before we did.
Cities whatever those are get caught up in contracting out to third parties expressly because it is a delegation out to presumed experts.
The companies sure are experts at something, but be mindful of what.
The CALEA standards are meaningless when consequences for risky behaviors are masked by language like “unless”, “knowingly” or “precautions”. These words are smoke, and allow for rampant unaccountable behavior. Our federal administration is a collection of compulsive liars, proving so plainly that these words can be fully ignored if it is expedient in someone’s eyes.
The Constitution Of These United States prescribes conflict by argument. Words alone on paper are the subject of the arguments, not the solutions to them.
Argue. Take up your power and Argue With Them.
There are simply too many companies who can pretend to respect the contract language, and then do no such thing once they got the coveted signature from a public servant. Governance of yesteryear considered inspections for compliance, but this is a fully failed model of accountability.
We should seek to harm companies who enact crime against our privacy and consent.
We should thin out the herd of companies who claim to be experts.
We should create a climate of fear in them, lest they perpetuate their climate of apathy.
Data Whores
These companies are whores, and they compete to be the worst. In their world, the whores are competing to be the best.
The metrics of their success are whorish. If we saw the extent of their whoring, we would not endorse it. Instead, they hide their whore behavior and write PR to assuage us, using words we get bored of reading.
These whores do not deserve the prestige they have cemented in our policies and procedures, our boards and committees, our contracts and agreements. The laws in This Country do not yet recognize them as whores, but We People do.
Stone these data whores. They are whores of the highest order, and they have been smiling sickly sweet for far, far too long.
You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.
