Hello, friends and enemies. I told myself I was going to write a post last week even though my sister was here for the weekend, but that clearly didn’t work out! So enjoy this rare “three weeks in the life” post instead. My sister Mia is currently waiting to start a new job so I suggested she come see me for a little bit. We spent last weekend chilling and it was nice! She wanted to pet Fritz a lot and he kept letting her come in for some pets and then, halfway through, would realize she is not me and panic, which was amusing.
I almost forgot to take a photo of us together. We only got this one right before I took her back to the airport. Photographic evidence: check.
Current Events
I have been very busy this month on the DeFlock beat! I’ve been doing a lot of work with my local group, DeFlock Elk Grove, since April when I went to tell the city council not to expand its Flock contract (they did not listen to me). In case anyone is new here: Flock is a company that provides automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and an AI-powered service that law enforcement agencies can use to track people (there are other companies that do this, but Flock is the most prominent right now). It’s all very ugly. This week, Wired published an article about the code Flock uses and the kind of things users can ask it to do, including things like counting “how often other plates appear at the same cameras within a two-minute window of the target by default.” Police use this system without levying charges at anyone or getting a warrant.
Using data from a public records request, we released a community audit that showed what kind of searches Elk Grove’s data were appearing in. My job this month has been to communicate with the press and I have been extremely surprised at the response! I emailed our press release to a bunch of local media contacts and basically thought, we’ll that’s the end of that. Incorrect! Our local paper, Elk Grove News covered our audit in detail, then I did an interview with the Sacramento Bee about the audit, which was cool. Next, I did an on-camera news interview, which I think is even cooler! Here’s the video and here’s an accompanying article.
From there, I guess word got out to local reporters that I am willing to chat with them. I’m also connected to some of the other regional DeFlock groups and sometimes they ask if anyone is available to talk to a reporter. I always say yes because I want to make sure someone is out there saying “this sucks and we hate it” on the record. To that end, I commented on a local story from Galt in which the cops seemed to be posting sponsored content for Flock about how they used the system to catch a suspect quickly. I talked to ABC about Flock’s new “safeguards,” but barely got any airtime. (By the way, these safeguards are trash and perhaps fake given that a Flock spokesperson this week let slip that the company retains data indefinitely). I also provided a basic comment for a recent Sacramento News & Review article. This last week, I’ve been talking to reporters a lot for pieces about vandalism of Flock cameras (which, by the way, are not full of copper, gold, or other valuable metals. If you cut one down, it’s gotta be for the love of the game [I am not publicly endorsing said game!]). I did two Zoom interviews, but for one I didn’t make the cut (my views are too nuanced!) and for the other, the reporter said he had to move to a different story for that day but he was hoping to use my comments later. Just yesterday I talked to the Sacramento Bee about ALPR vandalism in Folsom, and those comments did make the edit.
I think the camera vandalism is particularly interesting. I thought having these cameras all over the place was supposed to “prevent crime” (lol). Of course, cameras don’t prevent crime, merely record what they see. It seems really easy for news agencies to latch on to these vandalism stories because it’s something tangible. Minor property damage! What a horror! Meanwhile, California law SB 34 stipulates that California agencies cannot share ALPR data with anyone outside of the state. Yet, based on the DeFlock Elk Grove audit, that seems to be what is happening here. I would argue that the whole Flock system is built to enable out-of-state sharing and anyone claiming otherwise is making shit up to close the deal. It’s the old the purpose of a system is what it does. If Flock isn’t supposed to violate our laws and our privacy rights, why is it constantly doing exactly that as if it were designed for this express purpose? It’s much harder for reporters to make that story legible to readers in 800 or fewer words because you can’t see the data moving from place to place. You have to think about spreadsheets and user interfaces and most people check out.
This stuff is so worrying and, as fired up as people are getting, I am not convinced it’s enough yet. 404 Media recently reported that the government is monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts. Are they using Flock to track the movements of people who oppose mass surveillance? When we’re already dealing with ICE detaining people (or just fucking executing them!) for nothing at all and an administration that sees no problem with punishing political opponents, the absolute worst thing to do is buy into the panopticon. I’m tired of people arguing that mass surveillance makes us “safer” when we have ample evidence that it’s making people less safe every day. Cops are using this to stalk women, and there are at least 50 cases of this that we know of. I simply cannot imagine how the alleged benefits of the system that watches everyone come and go, gathers identifying data about our cars, their drivers, and even the devices inside, and makes it trivially easy for men to stalk women is a net good on safety. Not in this benighted society.
If you’re local, please try to come out and comment at the city council meeting this Wednesday, August 26. We’re using the open comment period to let the city council know that this has to stop. Spread the word!
Books and Other Words
We can always count on Kate Elliott to get us lusting after a man in some kind of weird-ass magical situation and The Witch Roads is no exception. Our protagonist, Deputy Courier Elen, gets caught up in some palace drama when one of the Tranquil Empire’s princes shows up in her backwater town and starts making demands. The prince ends up getting possessed by a magical entity that is supposed to stand guard against the rise of now-mythical sorcerer kings from another age. High jinks ensue? Elen leads the prince and his party through a not very well-known mountain pass and, in the process, gets pretty flirty with the magical entity who has taken over the prince’s corporeal form (however the entity is unwilling to kiss or more while wearing someone else’s body. We all have our limits). Why are we rooting for a guy who doesn’t even have a body? Kate Elliott, you madwoman. This is one of those very rich fantasy stories that’s impossible to describe in under three paragraphs, so you kind of just have to trust me here. I enjoyed this book very much and I’m currently halfway through this duology’s sequel The Nameless Land.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing via 404 Media. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI, has made it their official position that words don’t matter. As someone whose whole job can basically be summed up by the idea “words have specific meanings,” I do take offense. As a form of “watermarking” a text, their system will select replace certain words with similar words to indicate that the text came from their LLM. As the article notes, this “shows how little they actually care about writing.” Yep.
- College Men’s Propensity for Sexual Aggression and Perceived Justifications for Sexual Aggression Toward a Heterosexual or Bisexual College Woman via the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. So, past research has shown that bisexual women are more likely to report sexual assault than heterosexual women and this new study is looking into one reason why that could be. They found that men seem to be more hostile towards women who they perceive as being more “sexually available” (aka bisexuals). “These findings suggest that particular traits associated with sexual aggression may predispose men to misperceive cues of bisexual women’s sexual disinterest and judge bisexual women as more sexually available relative to heterosexual women.” Gross.
- Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same via Lauren’s data Substack. In short: everyone is using algorithms to determine the most likely thing that people will spend money on. Of course, driving everything to “most likely” means we’re living in a world of whimsy-less mediocrity. From the article:
Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want. If an algorithm feeds me Scandinavian crime dramas for ten years because I once watched two, my viewing history becomes airtight evidence that I love Scandinavian crime dramas. Admittedly, I have watched two Scandinavian crime dramas in my life. Netflix has since decided this is my entire personality. We risk mistaking a world shaped by prediction for a world shaped by preference, and the more these systems decide what survives, the more power moves from the people choosing among options to the systems deciding which options get a chance to be chosen.
Languages
For my fake masters degree in Spanish, this week I started reading Los Combatientes by Cristina Morales. I was working on some Sor Juana, but decided I might be better off starting with some more recent literature and working backwards. To go with the current reading, I translated the author’s Wikipedia page into English. This woman in particular sounds really fucking cool and I wish we could hang out, but I’ll have to settle for reading her work and tending her Wikipedia page. I also translated the page for her best-known work Lectura fácil, which I am now really looking forward to reading because it sounds very interesting too! This book isn’t on any of the reading lists I compiled from various masters in Spanish programs, but the good thing is I am not bound to a university and I can do whatever I want. The whole point of my fake masters degree was to get me inspired and working towards something with the language again, so it seems to be working perfectly.
Moving It
I think I’m missing one of these since this is a “three weeks” post, but it’s too late now! I’ve been doing my best while being busy, getting in my pool time and another workout. This last week, my water aerobics classes were unexpectedly canceled, and there’s no class next week, so hopefully I will find the motivation to do some exercise at home (and it won’t be too hot!)
Kitchen Witchery
I guess the recent dinner theme has been “beans and stuff with cheese on top.” There are worse ways to live! We had cheesy gnocchi with corn and pesto. I made this a month or two ago, but this time I added chickpeas and that turned it into a good meal. Kirk said I should make it again, which is one of his high compliments. I did a similar recipe with black beans, corn, and linguica. This is based on something from The Bean Book, but I added the sausage and skipped baking eggs into it, as the recipe suggests, because I am an egg-hater. Finally, I realized I had puff pastry in the freezer and free will, so I rolled up a sheet with a bunch of cheese and baked that in the oven. It was a very nice snack.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
