Artificial intelligence dominated the technology talk on panels, among sponsors, and across the trade floor at this year’s annual conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).
IACP, held Oct. 19 - 22 in Boston, brings together thousands of police employees with the businesses who want to sell them guns, gadgets, and gear. Across the four-day schedule were presentations on issues like election security and conversations with top brass like Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. But the central attraction was clearly the trade show floor.
Hundreds of vendors of police technology spent their days trying to attract new police customers and sell existing ones on their newest projects. Event sponsors included big names in consumer services, like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Verizon, and police technology giants, like Axon. There was a private ZZ Top concert at TD Garden for the 15,000+ attendees. Giveaways — stuffed animals, espresso, beer, challenge coins, and baked goods — appeared alongside Cybertrucks, massage stations, and tables of police supplies: vehicles, cameras, VR training systems, and screens displaying software for recordkeeping and data crunching.
And vendors were selling more ways than ever for police to surveillance the public and collect as much personal data as possible. EFF will continue to follow up on what we’ve seen in our research and at IACP.
A partial view of the vendor booths at IACP 2024
Doughnuts provided by police tech vendor Peregrine
“All in On AI” Demands AccountabilityPolice are pushing forward full speed ahead on AI.
EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance tracks use of AI-powered equipment like face recognition, automated license plate readers, drones, predictive policing, and gunshot detection. We’ve seen a trend toward the integration of these various data streams, along with private cameras, AI video analysis, and information bought from data brokers. We’ve been following the adoption of real-time crime centers. Recently, we started tracking the rise of what we call Third Party Investigative Platforms, which are AI-powered systems that claim to sort or provide huge swaths of data, personal and public, for investigative use.
The IACP conference featured companies selling all of these kinds of surveillance. Also, each day contained multiple panels on how AI could be integrated into local police work, including featured speakers like Axon founder Rick Smith, Chula Vista Police Chief Roxana Kennedy, and Fort Collins Police Chief Jeff Swoboda, whose agency was among the first to use Axon’s DraftOne, software using genAI to create police reports. Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs were prominently featured by Skydio, Flock Safety, and Brinc. Clearview AI marketed its face recognition software. Axon offered a whole set of different tools, centering its whole presentation around AxonAI and the computer-driven future.
The booth for police drone provider, Brinc
The policing “solution” du jour is AI, but in reality it demands oversight, skepticism, and, in some cases, total elimination. AI in policing carries a dire list of risks, including extreme privacy violations, bias, false accusations, and the sabotage of our civil liberties. Adoption of such tools at minimum requires community control of whether to acquire them, and if adopted, transparency and clear guardrails.
The Corporate/Law Enforcement Data Surveillance Venn Diagram Is Basically A CircleAI cannot exist without data: data to train the algorithms, to analyze even more data, to trawl for trends and generate assumptions. Police have been accruing their own data for years through cases, investigations, and surveillance. Corporations have also been gathering information from us: our behavior online, our purchases, how long we look at an image, what we click on.
As one vendor employee said to us, “Yeah, it’s scary.”
Corporate harvesting and monetizing of our data market is wildly unregulated. Data brokers have been busily vacuuming up whatever information they can. A whole industry provides law enforcement access to as much information about as many people as possible, and packages police data to “provide insights” and visualizations. At IACP, companies like LexisNexis, Peregrine, DataMinr, and others showed off how their platforms can give police access to evermore data from tens of thousands of sources.
Some Cops Care What the Public ThinksCops will move ahead with AI, but they would much rather do it without friction from their constituents. Some law enforcement officials remain shaken up by the global 2020 protests following the police murder of George Floyd. Officers at IACP regularly referred to the “public” or the “activists” who might oppose their use of drones and other equipment. One featured presentation, “Managing the Media's 24-Hour News Cycle and Finding a Reporter You Can Trust,” focused on how police can try to set the narrative that the media tells and the public generally believes. In another talk, Chula Vista showed off professionally-produced videos designed to win public favor.
This underlines something important: Community engagement, questions, and advocacy are well worth the effort. While many police officers think privacy is dead, it isn’t. We should have faith that when we push back and exert enough pressure, we can stop law enforcement’s full-scale invasion of our private lives.
Cop Tech is Coming To Every DepartmentThe companies that sell police spy tech, and many departments that use it, would like other departments to use it, too, expanding the sources of data feeding into these networks. In panels like “Revolutionizing Small and Mid-Sized Agency Practices with Artificial Intelligence,” and “Futureproof: Strategies for Implementing New Technology for Public Safety,” police officials and vendors encouraged agencies of all sizes to use AI in their communities. Representatives from state and federal agencies talked about regional information-sharing initiatives and ways smaller departments could be connecting and sharing information even as they work out funding for more advanced technology.
A Cybertruck at the booth for Skyfire AI
“Interoperability” and “collaboration” and “data sharing” are all the buzz. AI tools and surveillance equipment are available to police departments of all sizes, and that’s how companies, state agencies, and the federal government want it. It doesn’t matter if you think your Little Local Police Department doesn’t need or can’t afford this technology. Almost every company wants them as a customer, so they can start vacuuming their data into the company system and then share that data with everyone else.
We Need Federal Data Privacy LegislationThere isn’t a comprehensive federal data privacy law, and it shows. Police officials and their vendors know that there are no guardrails from Congress preventing use of these new tools, and they’re typically able to navigate around piecemeal state legislation.
We need real laws against this mass harvesting and marketing of our sensitive personal information — a real line in the sand that limits these data companies from helping police surveil us lest we cede even more of our rapidly dwindling privacy. We need new laws to protect ourselves from complete strangers trying to buy and search data on our lives, so we can explore and create and grow without fear of indefinite retention of every character we type, every icon we click.
Having a computer, using the internet, or buying a cell phone shouldn’t mean signing away your life and its activities to any random person or company that wants to make a dollar off of it.
This year, a far-reaching, complex new piece of legislation comes into effect in EU: the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which represents some of the most ambitious tech policy in European history. We don’t love everything in the DMA, but some of its provisions are great, because they center the rights of users of technology, and they do that by taking away some of the control platforms exercise over users, and handing that control back to the public who rely on those platforms.
Our favorite parts of the DMA are the interoperability provisions. IP laws in the EU (and the US) have all but killed the longstanding and honorable tradition of adversarial interoperability: that’s when you can alter a service, program or device you use, without permission from the company that made it. Whether that’s getting your car fixed by a third-party mechanic, using third-party ink in your printer, or choosing which apps run on your phone, you should have the final word. If a company wants you to use its official services, it should make the best services, at the best price – not use the law to force you to respect its business-model.
It seems the EU agrees with us, at least on this issue. The DMA includes several provisions that force the giant tech companies that control so much of our online lives (AKA “gatekeeper platforms”) to provide official channels for interoperators. This is a great idea, though, frankly, lawmakers should also restore the right of tinkerers and hackers to reverse-engineer your stuff and let you make it work the way you want.
One of these interop provisions is aimed at app stores for mobile devices. Right now, the only (legal) way to install software on your iPhone is through Apple’s App Store. That’s fine, so long as you trust Apple and you think they’re doing a great job, but pobody’s nerfect, and even if you love Apple, they won’t always get it right – like when they tell you you’re not allowed to have an app that records civilian deaths from US drone strikes, or a game that simulates life in a sweatshop, or a dictionary (because it has swear words!). The final word on which apps you use on your device should be yours.
Which is why the EU ordered Apple to open up iOS devices to rival app stores, something Apple categorically refuses to do. Apple’s “plan” for complying with the DMA is, shall we say, sorely lacking (this is part of a grand tradition of American tech giants wiping their butts with EU laws that protect Europeans from predatory activity, like the years Facebook spent ignoring European privacy laws, manufacturing stupid legal theories to defend the indefensible).
Apple’s plan for opening the App Store is effectively impossible for any competitor to use, but this goes double for anyone hoping to offer free and open source software to iOS users. Without free software – operating systems like GNU/Linux, website tools like WordPress, programming languages like Rust and Python, and so on – the internet would grind to a halt.
Our dear friends at Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) have filed an important brief with the European Commission, formally objecting to Apple’s ridiculous plan on the grounds that it effectively bars iOS users from choosing free software for their devices.
FSFE’s brief makes a series of legal arguments, rebutting Apple’s self-serving theories about what the DMA really means. FSFE shoots down Apple’s tired argument that copyrights and patents override any interoperability requirements. U.S. courts have been inconsistent on this issue, but we’re hopeful that the Court of Justice of the E.U. will reject the “intellectual property trump card.” Even more importantly, FSFE makes moral and technical arguments about the importance of safeguarding the technological self-determination of users by letting them choose free software, and about why this is as safe – or safer – than giving Apple a veto over its customers’ software choices.
Apple claims that because you might choose bad software, you shouldn’t be able to choose software, period. They say that if competing app stores are allowed to exist, users won’t be safe or private. We disagree – and so do some of the most respected security experts in the world.
It’s true that Apple can use its power wisely to ensure that you only choose good software. But it’s also used that power to attack its users, like in China, where Apple blocked all working privacy tools from iPhones and then neutered a tool used to organize pro-democracy protests.
It’s not just in China, either. Apple has blanketed the world with billboards celebrating its commitment to its users’ privacy, and they made good on that promise, blocking third-party surveillance (to the $10 billion dollar chagrin of Facebook). But right in the middle of all that, Apple also started secretly spying on iOS users to fuel its own surveillance advertising network, and then lied about it.
Pobody’s nerfect. If you trust Apple with your privacy and security, that’s great. But for people who don’t trust Apple to have the final word – for people who value software freedom, or privacy (from Apple), or democracy (in China), users should have the final say.
We’re so pleased to see the EU making tech policy we can get behind – and we’re grateful to our friends at FSFE for holding Apple’s feet to the fire when they flout that law.