• dns, dnssec
• certificates
• root stores
• routing tables
• novel offensive postures
• ownership
• deescalation

That list is the global one, and I would like to be writing it. This is not going to be that piece.

I want the local one. Cyberwar in practice is the war that arrives at an intersection I drive through every week, and the place I want to put that discussion is Flock Safety. There is already a short Flock piece in this journal and it is really not the kind of thing I write; it stands there as a notice and nothing more. The bigger one belongs here.

They give it away because it is not the product

Flock wants to sell more than one product to our police. The way they do it is to give one of them away. The department tries it, the department likes it, the department keeps it. It works every time. It is candy to a baby.

The part worth saying out loud is that they specifically want it to compound. These are not deals cut one after another, each on its own merits, each survivable on its own. Put a Flock camera at virtually every intersection, the old restaurant chain dream of one on every corner, and then the drones they also gave the city are flying over a positioning system. Static in most of it, moving in some of it, all of it underneath them. The cameras that come next can be more sophisticated than the ones that came free, because by then there is a reason to install cameras that guide their drones as well as watch us.

What gets built is a net that lives over our heads, and it is there specifically to observe us. It will not stay digital. The digital things are what drive the things over our heads.

Our governments will look right at the constitution documents that govern how these AI agents work. Those documents will articulate our oppression in plain language, on the page, and our governments will read them and nod and say yes. Nobody is brave enough to say no to a tech company.

The parts were supposed to be inert

I want to be careful about what the complaint actually is. Saying that these systems will be used together is nearly saying “did you not think about that?” — and they did think about it. Thinking about it is the product. That is the thesis now: how much can be done with parts that each arrive looking innocuous, individually defensible, seemingly inert, and which together do more to betray us than any one of them could alone. The gunshot detection contracts are the easy example, and they are not the interesting one.

They will arm it, and we will be shown the arithmetic

There are military applications already. It will not take long for these drones to carry lethal force, and the argument for it is already written: the one who gets away before an officer could arrive is the one who could have been neutralized. If it only gets one more, they will say, it was worth mounting the gun.

It will obviously not stop at guns. They will talk about sonic weapons. What they are doing is finding the line — how much they are allowed to do — and the method for finding the line is to apply pressure until we scream loudly enough. The line is not a principle. It is the place where we finally made too much noise.

A police department can accept a gift

It is not only that we should be angry about surveillance. It is that our cities and our police departments are able to accept gifts from private entities at all.

And when the city councils ask questions about those gifts, the police get angry. That part is already happening, and it is already interesting.

On the ground

This is the section that ends up encompassing all of it. Everything above is an account of what is being built. This is what it is like to live underneath it, in quadruple headers, as many as it takes, because that is where we start discussing what it means to keep surviving in a place like that.

• name the subsections

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.