Are You Enjoying Dystopia?

The End of Privacy, Spit Hoods, and Performing for the NRA.

Mar 04, 2024

Everyone Is Watching All The Time

Do we really understand the impact of mass surveillance and surveillance capitalism?

Or are we the frog in the boiling water parable, too stupid to realize we are already in the process of being cooked?

Three stories…

Vincent and Janice Sclafani of Saugus, MA, were pissed when their home insurer canceled their policy because an aerial picture showed “heavy wear” to their roof. Odd, since they recently put on a new roof and offered to send the receipts. They were told by their insurance company, “It doesn’t matter what you send. No matter what, we’re using that aerial picture.”

Insurers cancel policies all the time based on aerial images. A woman in Worcester, MA, was told to replace her roof or face cancellation. A man in California had his policy canceled for clutter in his yard.

Where do insurers get these aerial pictures? Turns out, the world’s largest aerial imagery program is run by an association created by the insurance industry, the Geospatial Insurance Consortium. The insurer-only group operates in over 30 countries and has 100 manned planes flying and photographing over the US alone. The group says they do more aerial imagery than even Google. They continually gather high-resolution images of every single address in the US.

The New York Times William J. Broad reports that startup Albedo Space plans to launch a group of low-orbit satellites that can distinguish objects as small as about 4 inches square. (Current commercial satellites can distinguish objects about 1 foot square.)

There are many potential benefits from this technology. AP journalists have used satellite photography like this to expose slave labor in the fishing industry. There are many uses in agriculture, supply chain management, and environmental monitoring, not to mention military and aerospace uses. But…

“This is a giant camera in the sky for any government to use at any time without our knowledge,” Broad quotes Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We should definitely be worried.”

Kashmir Hill is uniquely skilled at reporting stories that illustrate the real cost of the Faustian bargain we’ve made with big tech. Her journalism chronicles our dystopian present.

Her recent book Your Face Belongs To Us tells the story of a secretive startup, Clearview AI, whose software can identify nearly anyone just by uploading a photo. (Interestingly, the company that wants to sell information about you tried to keep info about itself and its backers’ secret.) The company uses a witch’s brew of AI and billions of photos it scraped from the web, so when a photo is uploaded, it can spit out your name, address, friends, family members, and more. It’s currently being used by law enforcement all over the world.

Sure, face recognition software makes it easier to unlock your phone and is supposedly helping catch criminals. But at what cost? Stories keep popping up about face recognition software identifying the wrong person and causing all kinds of problems for the wrongly accused. We know that China is using similar technology for broader social control, and it’s also looking to export the technology.

If I were a frog, I’d feel hot right about now.

Sky High Surprise from WHDH in Boston

When Eyes in the Sky Start Looking Right at You - New York Times

Your Face Belongs To Us - Kashmir Hill

“Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”

- Edward Snowden

Casting Call

Last week, a New York jury found that former NRA head Wayne LaPierre misspent millions of the organization’s money on his lavish lifestyle and was ordered to pay back more than $4 million to the group he once ran.

On the heels of the verdict, The Trace reporter Mike Spies (whose coverage of the NRA is unmatched) published a must-read in The New Yorker and The Trace, “Even Before His Trial, the N.R.A.’s Wayne LaPierre Was a Fraud.”

In it, Spies details how LaPierre’s defense argued that all those private jets, expensive suits, trips to Botswana — that was all because the NRA was, as Spies writes, “a heavily scripted production—a kind of long-running political drama in which he (LaPierre) was paid to arouse passions and build a devoted, dues-paying audience.”

Those expensive suits were just wardrobe.

And while this is no defense for living like a king on the NRA’s dime, he was indeed performing; he was playing a role. (Nothing illustrates this better than Spies’ story about LaPierre’s hunting trips.)

Of course, LaPierre was a poor fill-in for the classically trained actor who made that role famous, Charlton Heston.

By the time Heston became the President of the NRA in 1998, his star power in Hollywood hadn’t just faded; it was a black hole. His acting style was too ‘big’ as they say. And in the movies, ‘big’ was out.

But as NRA President, ‘big’ is what the part demanded. NRA members loved him in the role of the angry pro-gun guy, especially when he would thrust a rifle in the air and defiantly deliver his signature line: “From my cold dead hands!” The crowd always went wild.

When Peter Jennings interviewed Heston in 2002, Jennings noted that what Heston did with the rifle reminded him of when Heston played Moses in The Ten Commandments and thrust a staff in the air as he parted the Red Sea.

I’ll never forget Heston’s response: “It’s acting.”

Let’s see who the NRA casts in the role next.

The New Yorker story here.

Did you say Spit Hood?

An investigation from The Marshall Project and WTSP-TV in Tampa has found that “police have used spit hoods on at least 31 people who died in their custody between 2013 and 2023.”

If you’re not familiar, Spit hoods are mesh bags used by law enforcement to prevent a person from spitting on them. The investigation found that many police departments have no policies for how they should be used, with some considering them sanitary devices and others seeing them as restraints.

According to the investigation, when tied over the head of someone vomiting or bleeding from the mouth, the mesh can become clogged, preventing the person from breathing. Those put in spit hoods say they can be pretty terrifying.

Handcuff Warehouse sells the Spit Sock Hood for $3.40 each or 100 for $315. One purchaser on the site gave it a glowing review: “It’s quick to deploy, easy to open, easy to slide over the offender’s head.”

The story was reported by Daphne Duret at The Marshall Project and Jennifer Titus and Libby Hendren at WTSP, Tampa Bay.

Marshall Project story here.

WTSP video story here.