Matthew Guariglia
@mguariglia
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Historian. Surveillance & Tech Policy @EFF . Incoming fellow @KlugeCtr . Visiting scholar @ Emory. Book: Police and the Empire City @DukePress . Views=own.
Joined February 2010
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Hello new followers! I wrote a book--Police and the Empire City--which explores how the New York City police department's encounters with race, immigration, and empire shaped how modern police use technology, recruit, do violence, and operate generally.
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Surveillance doesn't prevent or deter crime.
A groundhog named Chunk has been stealing a farmer's crop from Delaware for 4 years, and eats it right in front of a surveillance camera.
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If you spent 50% of your yearly budget on an insurance policy in case of a very specific disaster--and then that disaster did happen and the insurance policy didn't cover you at all....would you still pay for it? Would you double down on it? Or would you find alternatives?
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It was obvious this is what Chad Wolf was up to and activists have been warning that this is how the DHS was being used for years…but to see that it’s documented is still so startling.
Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump
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"It appears that the police form a separate and highly privileged class, armed with the authority and machinery for oppression and punishment, but practically free themselves from the operation of criminal law."
The Lexow Commission said this about U.S. policing in 1895.
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I still believe the average American does not know what police actually spend all day doing. It's not making major drug busts or catching serial killers.
Arrested for not showing ID after being stopped for smoking in park
@NYCPBA
@NBCNewYork
@ABC7NY
@Gothamist
@NYCMayor
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In 1918, the NYPD commissioner, then the longest serving in history, said after years of studying and observing “We learned that most crimes are not hindered by the conventional methods of police protection, and we tried.”
And yet here we are still trying the same stuff.
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It’s a basic fact that this point: Technologies justified as being only for the most extreme circumstances end up getting deployment to student protests.
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Repeat after me: Anything that collects data in public will eventually become an extension of the police evidence locker. The more data-collecting and retaining devices on the street, sidewalk, and buildings, the more *police* surveillance will be totalizing.
Serve Robotics, which delivers food for Uber Eats, provided footage filmed by at least one of its robots to the LAPD as evidence in a criminal case. Emails show that the robots, which are a constant sight in the city, can be used for surveillance.
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Was never charged with a crime.
The US 🇺🇸 has released the oldest prisoner from the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Pakistan's 🇵🇰 foreign ministry said
Saifullah Paracha, 75, was accused of being a Qaeda sympathizer and was held for 2 decades. But he was never charged with a crime
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Remember, if policing is purely about safety and preventing loss of life, than why are we not spending a proportionate amount on public health? The US continues to spend well over $100 billion on policing each year while a contagion kills a lot more people than murder.
More Americans have died of COVID in the past 12 days than have died of homicide in any calendar year ever.
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I'm going to say this louder for the people who are not listening. If ANY device collects footage of the public whether it's a robot, self-driving car, doorbell, or a damn smart microwave oven that is adjacent to the window POLICE WILL COME FOR THE VIDEO.
SCOOP: Footage from a food delivery robot in Los Angeles was given to the LAPD as evidence and used to secure a criminal conviction, according to internal emails I got using a public records request
cc
@FilmThePoliceLA
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@jasonintrator
@mattyglesias
Responding to tweets like this could be a full time job.
Modern policing emerged simultaneously around the Imperial world and its colonies, often in communication and conjunction with one another. Slavery played a vital role in the development of policing in the north and south.
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This is the logical conclusion of 120 years of police militarization. This is always what it was for.
An NYPD MRAP carrying an armored ESU team just pulled up blocks from Columbia University. Among the men on the roof is head of DCPI Tarik Sheppard
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We knew that in Amazon Ring employees were fired for accessing footage but, via the FTC: "one employee over several months viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras..in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms"
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Police departments are organized and act they way they do because they were deliberately designed from the 1840s on as tool used to subordinate Black urbanites and immigrants. Race, ethnicity, and empire created modern policing.
If you are working on a nonfiction book right now, can you state the core argument in one tweet?
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We’re ready to unveil an investigation many have been working on for almost a year: A company that buys geolocation data from “250 million devices” and maps it for police to access without a warrant. 🚨 This gives local police (for a fee) the type of powers we fear the NSA has.
You’ve never heard of Fog Data Science, but you should have. It’s the company turning your cell phone’s geolocation data into one of the most disturbing and wide-reaching surveillance systems ever used by police in the U.S. Read our investigation here. .
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When it comes to police drones, this exact scenario has always been the five-alarm fire we’ve been worried about. You pair this with face recognition and we’ve got an existential threat to first amendment-protected rights to protest.
NEW: The NYPD is using police drones to film hundreds of protesters and handing the footage over to prosecutors to "help enhance arrests."
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I don’t see many of these people concerned that already people are getting harassed by police based on “predictive” algorithms being fed a kid’s grades or whether they’ve been a victim of a crime. Or LGBTQ+ kids getting detention & outed at school based on digital surveillance.
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And people wonder why organizations like
@EFF
argue so adamantly that allowing unfettered use of extreme surveillance tools and policing powers only in “extreme” circumstances will *always* end up with these tools being used against activists in the name of “national security”
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As part of
@EFF
's investigation of mass surveillance along the U.S.-Mexico Border we've been driving the border to look for/confirm the location of surveillance towers. Now, we're releasing the most comprehensive public map of surveillance infrastructure.
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A company rents a car to an Uber driver. After late payment, they report it stolen--causing it to ping an automated license plate reader. Police stop him, order their dog to maul him.
Both historically precedented and uniquely 21st century inhumanity.
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Once more: In the age of face recognition, there is nothing unreasonable about wanting to mask at a protest. When one drone can fly over head and collect the names and faces of all participants—masking is an important tool for preserving constitutionally-protected rights.
BREAKING: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass says she is discussing a mask ban for protests with the City Attorney.
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@jasonintrator
@mattyglesias
Absolutely. There is such an impulse to say, "policing developed all over the world" and make it seem like a natural social phenomena, rather than what it was--a collaborative global effort of colonial, industrializing, and slave economies to develop a science of subordination.
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Hello! I've written a book about how race, immigration & empire shaped the modern police department in NYC, the U.S., and the world--from methods and personnel to the technology they use. It's now available FOR PRE-ORDER! 30% off with code E23PATEC.
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Very happy to announce that my book exploring how race, immigration, and imperialism built and shaped the modern police department in New York, the U.S., and the world, is now under contract with
@DukePress
! I owe a massive debt of gratitude to so many colleagues & editors.
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@jasonintrator
@mattyglesias
I, and many other historians, have written about how the claim that policing "emerged all over the world and therefore discredits the idea that slave patrols did not have a vital national and global role in the development of policing" is ill informed.
"Police were slave catchers" is not a metaphor. Slave patrols from the south did not move to northern cities, but early urban police departments apprehended self-emancipated people.
Here's NYC's failure to pass an exemption for police enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act in 1860:
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In the spirit of celebrating your small victories in rough times, I thought I would share the absolutely amazing and engaging cover of my upcoming book, courtesy of the amazing designers at
@DukePress
. The book is out in November and pre-order info arrives in the coming months.
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Absolutely gobsmacked (but not really surprised) to read this Op-ed from 1916 arguing against police colluding with the telephone company to listen in on people's phone calls. This could have been written yesterday. These exact debates are older than most people realize.
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By no means a socialist, he identified the three things that needed addressing at the societal level were poverty, mental and physical health, and drug addiction… “we must of course recognize that fact that police forces cannot be expected to abolish poverty.” He said in 1918.
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NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. These drones armed with tasers will be flying over every protest if we don't stop this.
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"We examined 23,631 predictions...In the end, the success rate was less than half a percentage point."
No matter what anyone tells you, math cannot predict crime.
A scathing investigation on predictive policing by
@ASankin
&
@suryamattu
.
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What's going on in San Francisco? Here's a mayor who oversaw the closing of a center that reversed hundreds of overdoses turning us back to failed War on Drugs tactics and openly advocating that we remove "compassion" from our policies.
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Buckle up, here come the FOIAs to all the public universities brutalizing and arresting students and professors!
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My book Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York is in
@DukePress
's fall/winter 2023 catalogue! It shows how race, empire, and immigration shaped policing in New York and how policing shaped race and citizenship.
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Weird how when cities say they need "every tool" somehow treatment, a strong social safety net, increased funding for public health and housing, aren't "tools" to them. Those are the things sapping money from the real tools: surveillance, tech/equipement, more officers, etc.
BREAKING: San Francisco city officials are developing a pilot program that could allow for the enforcement of public intoxication laws.
"We need every tool at our disposal," said the city's emergency department.
More info at the link. ⬇️
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Some graduate student just had to write a very painful email to their advisor about how their only means of collecting data was blown up in a UFO panic.
BIDEN: U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY ASSESSMENT IS THAT OBJECTS WERE LIKELY TIED TO PRIVATE COMPANIES OR RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS
BIDEN: THERE HAS NOT BEEN A SUDDEN INCREASE IN OBJECTS IN U.S. SKIES
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It took six months, but I finally got the documented proof of what many have suspected would happen:
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Over the next year,
@CharlotteERosen
and I will be building a resource to put teachable, accessible, & contextualized primary source documents from the history of policing and incarceration in the US in the hands of educators and learners.
@UrbanHistoryA
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This is so consistent with the long history of how police are able to evolve and weaponize the technologies they use.
Across the U.S., police departments large and small are retiring their Crown Victorias in favor of new, often gargantuan, SUVs.
@awalkerinLA
reports on these larger, heavier, and infinitely deadlier vehicles
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For
@NBCNews
I wrote about how altercations between commuters and unmasked police reveals deeper questions: How can we make changes to an institution whose individual members refuse to change--and are insulated from those changes? Who controls police?
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@jasonintrator
@mattyglesias
If you want to get informed, you can open a book, rather than doing shallow google. I also did a full thread on this months ago:
@jasonintrator
@ijbailey
@CathyYoung63
@DavidNeiwert
Policing "began" in a lot of different places, in the South slave patrols were subsumed by police departments, why many southern departments have later founding dates than in the north.
But after 1850 fugitive slave act meant northern police were deputized to return escapees.
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Absolutely do not let these companies launder their reputations via war profiteering.
EXCLUSIVE Ukraine has started using Clearview AI’s facial recognition during war
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Ghost Robotics dogs, the same ones given a trial to surveil the U.S.-Mexico border, are apparently on the ground in Gaza. The U.S.-based company was sold to a Korean defense company in 2023 and has NOT signed Boston Dynamics Pledge not to arm robots.
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It's been a long time coming, but our article "Police as Supercitizens" is published and out in the world. We examine the history & present of the rights and privileges of police as being a type of citizenship in a society of tiered levels of rights/citizenship. I can send PDFs.
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Remember that data doesn't just disappear. Long before computers or digital surveillance people have had to learn the hard way that surveillance & data retention may not seem scary if you "have nothing to hide" but nothing becomes something with the stroke of a legislator's pen.
I want to be as clear as I can be about something: At the same moment that Republicans introduce a national abortion ban, leading conservative Democrats are quietly going around Capitol Hill demanding the largest increase in police surveillance in 30 years.
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This is a pretty clear illustration of the "border" not being a specific geographical "problem" to be solved--but a crowbar with which ethno-nationalists can militarize the enter country.
The “wide open border” took down the bridge in Baltimore
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I wrote about how traffic stops are designed to enable the use of violence against Black motorists and why it’s time to remove police from traffic enforcement.
Opinion | Matthew Guariglia: Obeying police has become a dangerous Catch-22. This video proves why. -
@NBCNewsTHINK
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Friends! The advanced copy of Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York just landed in my hands. I hope people find it useful in understanding the central role of race in making modern police departments.
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Recently re-read Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" about an island prison in which guilt is presumed and the idea of justice is superseded by the officer's desire to use a complex but falling apart execution apparatus that carves the crime a person committed into their skin.
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@jasonintrator
@mattyglesias
There's no singular origin of policing. No Napoleonic bureaucrat's "Eureka!" Policing is an amalgam of tactics with many origins.
To use the fact that state-sponsored patrols existed elsewhere as evidence that slavery was not central to the origins of policing is ill informed.
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Sad to learn of the passing of Chandler Davis, a mathematician, academic, science fiction author, husband of Natalie Zemon Davis, and leftist who was blacklisted from his job at U. Michigan and served 6 months in prison in 1960 for standing up to HUAC.
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"WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS ARMY EQUIPMENT?" asked one New Yorkers about why the NYPD had machine guns and wore khaki during WWI..It served no purpose, did not reduce crime, and only further antagonized city residents. October, 1916.
Two independent studies have drawn the same conclusions: billions of dollars in surplus military equipment that have been transferred by the federal government to thousands of U.S. police departments have not reduced crime or increased officer safety.
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If you ever wondered what a police request for Ring footage looks like: here is one such request. This is part of a large haul of emails I got out of the LAPD concerning Ring requests and emails during this summer's protests against police violence.
#FOIA
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Very excited to announce something we've been working on for awhile: A Field Guide to Police Surveillance. It's a one-stop-shop to teach you all the basic things you need to know about the 16 most common types/categories of surveillance local PDs use.
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Police, politicians, and press have had to retract a number of statements that were just obvious police lies. From their crime stats to their stories, from the invention of police until today, police have always been untrustworthy producers of knowledge.
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This is absolutely ridiculous. I feel like I’m losing my mind.
Update: Mass arrests of up to 60 skaters and spectators proceeding in Dolores Park
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Police have more sophisticated surveillance equipment than you realize and have been known to arrest protestors after the fact. Please be safe and remember surveillance self defense.
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Just re-reading
@AdamSerwer
's "How the Police Turned Against Gun Control" because it's a question I think gives away the rot at the center of American Law & Order politics and one I've been thinking about a lot lately.
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Should have guessed that in the U.S., big brother-style surveillance wouldn't just come from the NSA, it would also come from nervous suburban folks saying "I need to protect my packages from people of a different race than me" until cops get video feeds of every porch in America
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Apparently my book, Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York, officially has a release date! See you all November 17, 2023.
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This rant brought to you by revising this chapter of my book, and this chart:
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Our edited volume The Essential Kerner Commission Report is an actual physical object I can hold now.
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The historical truth about reform is that politicians tried to "reform" police since police have existed. For many, it is a feature, not a bug, that when reform policy does pass it's mostly symbolic and rarely makes a difference the ground (for more than a few months)
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“Contact tracing arresstees.”
The punitive state is co-opting public health rhetoric faster than I realized. This makes everyone more unsafe. It erodes trust with the important public health work being done. People have to be confident COVID-19 efforts =\= police efforts.
Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington says they've begun contact tracing arrestees.
"Who are they associated with? What platforms are they advocating for? ... Is this organized crime? ... We are in the process right now of building that information network."
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Some folks don't realize this takes practice. Not everyone on Earth is equally equipped or comfortable explaining nuanced political demands on international media. That's why its not a good faith practice to grab a random person at a protest and bully them into talking on camera
“The students don’t know what they’re talking about”
The students:
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Page proofs for Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York are here! Couldn’t be more happy with the design and its great to get a peak at the table of contents.
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One month until the release of the Essential Kerner Commission Report edited by
@jelani9
and I. This version has been streamlined to highlight its key findings that urban uprisings are a result of systematic, economic, and violent oppression.
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Apparently my FOIA request to the LAPD for all emails having to do with or to/from Amazon Ring between June 2019 and May 2020 would require they release 270,693,273 emails.
Aggressive marketing to every local officer by Ring? Copious requests for footage? Or both?
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Take it from a historian of surveillance. Part of committing to
#NeverAgain
means helping yourself *and others* be unidentifiable, unknowable, unlocatable to the racial state and the people that serve it. That means standing up now against face recognition, data collection, etc.
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This is part of how the criminal justice system legitimizes itself every generation. Make the poster children of punishment the serial killers, gangsters, school shooters, insurrectionists, etc--meanwhile the other 98% of the system continues as it has for the last 150 years.
I hate mugshots. I get that it may feel great to see Giuliani, Powell, Eastman line up, but mugshots and the prevalence of them literally ruin the lives of millions of ordinary people. The more we celebrate horrible features of the legal system the further ingrained they get.
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Our article is almost here! The historiography of citizenship in the U.S. is so rich and it was fascinating to to consider how the de facto and de jure rights and privileges so often denied to so many are actually enhanced for others.
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Surveillance companies talk like early twentieth century eugenicists because they *are*---they use seemingly "objective" scientific discourse to bestow technocratic legitimacy on pre-concieved racial stereotypes and criminalization. They launder racist policing and make it math.
You have to assume surveillance tech companies speak like eugenicists behind the scenes, but It's still jarring to see a robot company openly say on their website:
"Once the Knightscope ASRs were deployed, the residents immediately recognized a mass exodus of undesirables."
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This is what we mean when we talk about mission creep. The Anti-Terrorism Unit isn't exclusively focused on terrorism--they're spending their time fighting fare evasion. That's why we're so confident when we say military equipment will find its way into everyday policing.
Officers from
@NYPDTransit
Anti-Terrorism Unit recently stopped an individual for fare evasion in the subway system & learned that he was wanted for a past gunpoint robbery by our
@NYPDDetectives
. Another routine fare evasion encounter, another wanted felon arrested,
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Happy to announce that
@brian_hochman
and I will be working w/
@wwnorton
to put out a 50th anniversary single-volume edition of the Church Committee's Report on government surveillance, assassinations, and sabotage in the 20th century. This has long been a dream project of mine.
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The style of policing that involves collecting as much information as possible on individuals and communities didn't emerge by accident. It was deliberately developed after police spent decades trying find ways of forcibly pacify diversifying U.S. cities.
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@jasonintrator
@ijbailey
@CathyYoung63
@DavidNeiwert
Policing "began" in a lot of different places, in the South slave patrols were subsumed by police departments, why many southern departments have later founding dates than in the north.
But after 1850 fugitive slave act meant northern police were deputized to return escapees.
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As my book argues, all digital “innovations” used by policing basically purely exist to launder and legitimize already existing police biases and practices.
Police used DNA and probability software to invent a likely face for a subject and then put that fake face through face recognition software. This is policing done by pure chance and it's beyond dangerous.
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This is something we tried to hint at when we wrote "Police as Supercitizens" --police anticipate electoral politics to cater to their whims and if not threaten violence should they not get their way. Sometimes all it takes is a candidate who questions absolute police authority.
.
@FOP7Chicago
President John Catanzara tells
@jonathanweisman
of the
@nytimes
that 800 to 1,000 Chicago Police officers will resign if
@Brandon4Chicago
is elected mayor & there will be “blood in the streets.”
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I’m imaging an alternate Star Trek where the holodeck harvested very personal data on users, inserted sponsored ads into the simulation, and then you got served targeted ads referencing stuff you did in the holodeck when you try to use a food replicator.
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In case you missed it, the NYC municipal archives have uploaded and made accessible thousands of NYPD surveillance videos from the 1960s, including this view of a 1962 transit worker strike.
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You have to assume surveillance tech companies speak like eugenicists behind the scenes, but It's still jarring to see a robot company openly say on their website:
"Once the Knightscope ASRs were deployed, the residents immediately recognized a mass exodus of undesirables."
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I’m in
@Slate
today writing about how the flawed criminal justice system cannot, and should not, be trusted to keep all of our faces under suspicion. The moral arguments for banning face recognition go back to the origins of the mug shot.
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Got a rejected public records request because *supposedly* no one from the office of the president at UT Austin sent or received any emails from Texas DPS the week of the encampment sweeping.
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In my new piece for
@NBCNews
, I take on leniant views of police “recklessness” since the only officer charged after Breonna Taylor’s death has been acquitted of recklessly endangering her neighbors.
Recklessness is historically built into the system.
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I personally want to commend
@conniechansf
@DeanPreston
@shamannwalton
@HillaryRonen
for standing up and saying, not only is the new surveillance policy invasive and ripe for abuse—but the SFPD have not demonstrated the need for it and history has shown it’s imminent downsides.
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Don't let anyone say that this wasn't premeditated, or that it was spur of the moment or mob mentality where emotions ran high. The IEDs were not spontaneous. showing up with zip tie cuffs are not spontaneous.
They arrived ready to take prisoners. What the intended end-game could have been, is a chilling thought.
This is domestic terrorism, lead and coordinated by the President, from the White House.
#WashingtonDC
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@CRodriguez48
As always, doing my best to try to articulate these problems as simply and accessibly as I can for the people who havn't been reading abolitionist lit for a decade.
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Here I am on NPR talking about how Amazon's Ring surveillance doorbells can actually end up getting people hurt:
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Politicians promising abortion seekers safe passage and healthcare in their state have run out of time to get wise to the technologies their police departments are using and how it undermines their public sentiments.
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Love to give police the ability to search a home for the first time ever by presenting the warrant to Amazon and not the home owner.
This Ring drone patrols your house… the future is weird y’all
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While invoking crime, cities will spend any amount of money just to look proactive…including spend a ton of cash that could go to libraries on rolling surveillance devices that wil do nothing about safety.
.
@NYCMayor
with the robocop, which cannot make the heart with the mayor because it has no arms
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Someone at HBO, let me pitch a TV show about radicalism/anti-radicalism between 1880 and 1921..probably culminating in the Palmer Raids. It can really be set anywhere, but characters bouncing around in New York, Chicago, Tampa, Alabama, DC, Pacific Northwest, San Diego, is best.
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Ok, my book is officially slated for
@DukePress
’s Fall 2023 release lineup. It feels so nice, but anxiety inducing, to have it out of my hands now.
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