Author: Hannah Murphy
Publisher: Financial Times
Publication Year: 2021
Summary: The following article describes how activists are fighting against the collusion between big tech companies and government security apparatus. Public anxiety has grown over state surveillance comes as the state forces use of increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor and track people which include: Facial monitoring, stingray devices that gather phone location data, tasers with cameras, predictive artificial intelligence analytics to predict offenders, body cameras and automatic license plate readers, all of these technologies were used by police in the recent George Floyd, Black Lives Matter and various global protests. Activists have responded with matching sophistication such as encrypted or disappearing messages, and shirt or facial camouflage designed to defeat facial recognition and object detection software. This article raises serious questions on what is the proper use of surveillance by a surveillance state.