The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities

Nate Bear | ¡Do Not Panic!

 

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen's firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the 'No Kings' protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July. 

 

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Brookings: Artificial Intelligence In America’s Digital City

This report smacks of Technocracy, where cities are little more than concentrated and convenient labor camps for big business. It contends that “technology is essential to make cities work.” ⁃ TN Editor

Technocracy News

Cities are an engine for human prosperity. By putting people and businesses in close proximity, cities serve as the vital hubs to exchange goods, services, and even ideas. Each year, more and more people move to cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas to take advantage of the opportunities available in these denser spaces.

Technology is essential to make cities work. While putting people in close proximity has certain advantages, there are also costs associated with fitting so many people and related activities into the same place. Whether it’s multistory buildings, aqueducts and water pipes, or lattice-like road networks, cities inspire people to develop new technologies that respond to the urban challenges of their day.

Today, we can see the responses made possible by the advances of the second industrial revolution, namely steel and electricity. Multistory buildings and skyscrapers responded to our demand for proximity to do business in the same locations. Electrified and subterranean railways offered faster travel for more people in tight, urban quarters. The elevator, escalator, and advanced construction equipment allowed our buildings to grow taller and our subways to burrow deeper. Electric lighting turned our cities, suburbs, and even small towns into 24-hour activity centers. Air conditioning greatly improved livability in warmer locations, unlocking a population boom. Radios and television extended how far we can communicate and the fidelity of the messages we sent.

We are now in the midst of a new industrial era: the digital age. And like the industrial revolutions to precede it, the digital age doesn’t represent a single set of new products. Instead, the digital age represents an entirely new platform on top of which many everyday activities operate. Making all this possible are rapid advances in the power, portability, and price of computing and the emergence of reliable, high-volume digital telecommunications.

 Like every form of technology to proceed it, society must be intentional with the exact challenges we want AI to solve and be considerate of the social groups and industries who stand to benefit from the applications we deliver.

How AI will function in the built environment certainly fits into that category—and for good reason. Even though AI is still in its infant stages, we already encounter it on a daily basis. When your video conference shifts the microphone to pick up the speaker’s voice, when your smartphone automatically reroutes you around traffic, when your thermostat automatically lowers the air conditioning on a cool day—that’s all AI in action.

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Why a hipster, vegan, green tech economy is not sustainable

Vijay Kolinjivadi

Al-Jazeera

Improving eco-efficiency within a capitalist growth-oriented system will not save the environment. 

On the western borderlands of Montreal's well-to-do Outremont district and the ultra-hipsterised and gentrified Mile End lies an expanse of land where the University of Montreal is currently building a new science campus. Just across is Parc-Extension, one of Canada's poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods and a port of call for many newly arrived immigrants.

The new campus has been touted as a model of "sustainable development". It boasts LEED-certified buildings to reduce environmental impact, rainwater collection structures, energy-efficient lighting and heat recycling, infrastructure for electric vehicles and bikes, lots of greenery, and overall, a minimal carbon footprint. A number of tech companies, including Microsoft's new AI Hub, are moving in and are expected to further enhance the "eco-efficiency" of the area.

The unspoken expectation is that once the green new campus is completed, capital and economic growth will naturally flow into the area. This means nearby neighbourhoods will get "revitalised", especially the poorer ones, like Parc-Extension.

Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones. 

In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably "greenwashed" and presented as development that would make the area more "sustainable", "beautiful" and "modern". 

Unfortunately, creation by destruction is what capitalism does best, and its damaging practices are anything but green. This market-driven "sustainable" vision of economic activity, ecological-conscious diets and "hipness" within modern capitalism reinforce inequality and still hurt the environment. 

Before I proceed further with my argument, I should mention that I am an academic, living in a "hip" part of Montreal and engage in activities that follow a particular aesthetic ethos, all of which make me very much a part of the reality I critique below. My aim is not to moralise, but rather to highlight the dangers of a political and economic system that profits from deceiving perhaps well-meaning self-proclaimed progressive folks into believing that a greener, more efficient capitalism is possible.

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San Diego Has Been Turned Into A Massive Chinese-Style Public Surveillance Network

Mass Private I

Can you imagine a city in the United States secretly creating a Chinese-style public surveillance network that can identify everyone? Can you imagine that same city secretly creating a Chinese-style public watchlisting network?

Well imagine no more because it has already happened.

When I wrote about "covert facial recognition streetlights coming to a city near you" last year, I never would have dreamt that my article would become a reality so quickly.

A recent article in the San Diego Reader reveals how a hacker discovered emails between the Port of San Diego and BriefCam. The emails revealed that law enforcement is secretly using a network of 400 facial recognition surveillance cameras to identify everyone.

Last year, BriefCam announced a "breakthrough" in real-time facial recognition surveillance.

"Robust multi-camera search capabilities identify men, women, children and vehicles with speed and precision, using 25 classes and attributes, face recognition, appearance similarity, color, size, speed, path, direction, and dwell time."

According to another article, the City of San Diego is using GE's CityIQ streetlights to listen to everyone.

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New DARPA Program Plans To Patrol Cities With AI Drones

Zero Hedge

On May 10, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled the Urban Reconnaissance through Supervised Autonomy (URSA) program, which addresses the issues of reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition within urban environments.

The primary objective of the URSA program is to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of blending unmanned aerial systems, sensor technologies, and advanced machine learning algorithms to “enable improved techniques for rapidly discriminating hostile intent and filtering out threats in complex urban environments,” said FedBizOpps.

In other words, the Pentagon is developing a program of high-tech cameras mounted on drones and other robots that monitor cities, which enable identification and discrimination between civilians and terrorists through machine learning computers.

DARPA provides a simple scenario of what a URSA engagement would look like: 

“A static sensor located near an overseas military installation detects an individual moving across an urban intersection and towards the installation outside of normal pedestrian pathways. An unmanned aerial system (UAS) equipped with a loudspeaker delivers a warning message. The person is then observed running into a neighboring building. Later, URSA detects an individual emerging from a different door at the opposite end of the building, but confirms it is the same person and sends a different UAS to investigate.
This second UAS determines that the individual has resumed movement toward a restricted area. It releases a nonlethal flash-bang device at a safe distance to ensure the individual attends to the second message and delivers a sterner warning. This second UAS takes video of the subject and determines that the person’s gait and direction are unchanged even when a third UAS flies directly in front of the person and illuminates him with an eye-safe laser dot. URSA then alerts the human supervisor and provides a summary of these observations, warning actions, and the person’s responses and current location.”

The URSA program is a two-phase, 36-month development effort. The first phase of concept/development will begin in the first quarter of FY19 and continue into the second half of FY20. Phase two will start in 3Q20 and continue through 2Q22.

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Pentagon’s Bizarre Future Plans: Megacities and Urban Warfare [Video]

Anon HQ

 

Megacities, climate change, living habitats, dysfunctional social functions and the “remaining 1% represents the threat of 100,000,” are the context of a pentagon sponsored video revealed by The Intercept. The narrator speaks of environments not yet experienced in city landscapes but that are inevitable, with the military requiring an adaptation of urban warfare and a willingness to “drain the swamp of non-combatants” to engage in a “high intensity conflict” with the remaining “adversaries” within. 

“Social structures are dysfunctional,” and therefore, alternate forms of governance have taken control, according to the narrator. The military must adapt to the new ways of war and must work within these “ecosystems” with minimal disruption to the non-combatant. 

The video, obtained by The Intercept via the FOI Act, is a bizarre documentary produced anonymously for a military audience, to highlight the challenges that will face the military. According to the narrator, this is an inevitable path that the military must set upon – going into a city to engage in  urban warfare.

[...]

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The Mystery of Urban Psychosis

Vaughan Bell
The Atlantic

Southwyck House in South London is a block of flats so intimidating that it is often mistaken for a prison. Locally known as the Brixton ‘barrier block,’ it has a stark exterior of brick and concrete that literally looms over you, giving the impression that unseen people are staring down through the sparse rectangular windows.

It was built as a social housing project, designed to shield its residents from the noise of a phantom motorway that was intended to run from Blackheath to Battersea. The road was never built due to petty political squabbles, but the building now stands as a seven-story barricade against its illusory traffic.

If you’re not used to the built-up environment of the inner city, the block can certainly feel unsettling. 

But here, urban alienation may run deeper than mere architecture. The area was found to have the highest rate of diagnosed schizophrenia in a large study of South London, even when compared with directly adjacent neighborhoods.

The research that found this striking variation was led by epidemiologist James Kirkbride, now at University College London. Kirkbride’s work is but one in more than a century of studies that have found higher rates of psychosis in cities and which have sparked an intense debate over whether—to put it in its original terms —‘cities cause madness’ or whether those affected by ‘madness’ just tend to end up in cities.

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Americans Are Fleeing These US Cities In Droves

Zero Hedge


What do El Paso, New York, and Chicago have in common? They are among the top 20 cities from which Americans are fleeing in droves...

The map below shows the 20 metropolitan areas that lost the greatest share of local people to other parts of the country between July 2013 and July 2014, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. The New York City area ranked 2nd, losing about a net 163,000 U.S. residents, closely followed by a couple surrounding suburbs in Connecticut. Honolulu ranked fourth and Los Angeles ranked 14th. The Bloomberg calculations looked at the 100 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas. 

So what's going on here? As Bloomberg notes, Michael Stoll, a professor of public policy and urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles, has an idea.

Soaring home prices are pushing local residents out and scaring away potential new ones from other parts of the country, he said. (Everyone knows how unaffordable the Manhattan area has become.)

And as Americans leave, people from abroad move in to these bustling cities to fill the vacant low-skilled jobs. They are able to do so by living in what Stoll calls "creative housing arrangements" in which they pack six to eight individuals, or two to four families, into one apartment or home. It's an arrangement that most Americans just aren't willing to pursue, and even many immigrants decide it's not for them as time goes by, he said.

El Paso, Texas, the city that residents fled from at the fastest pace, also saw a surprisingly small number of foreigners settling in given how close it is to Mexico.

"A lot of young, reasonably educated people are having a hard time finding work there," Stoll said. "They're not staying in town after they graduate," leaving for the faster-growing economies."

Source: Bloomberg