SpaceX confirmed a loan agreement with L3Harris to provide Starlink satellite communication terminals to the FAA for infrastructure testing, specifically in Alaska. The agreement involves providing 4,000 Starlink kits free of charge for an initial evaluation period, raising potential conflict of …
Starlink has secured contracts and deployed internet infrastructure across multiple federal agencies, including the FAA, GSA, and Customs and Border Protection. The rapid adoption has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, particularly given Musk’s close ties to the Trump …
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announces the city is terminating its contract with ShotSpotter, the controversial gunshot detection technology company, bringing to an end one of the largest and longest-running deployments of acoustic surveillance in American policing. The contract will expire on …
The reliability and accuracy of ShotSpotter’s gunshot detection technology face a major crisis in August 2021 as the Chicago Office of Inspector General releases a damning report on the system’s effectiveness, while the Michael Williams case exposes evidence that ShotSpotter analysts …
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PredPol, the controversial predictive policing software company, rebrands itself as Geolitica in 2021 as criticism of algorithmic bias in law enforcement intensifies. The rebrand represents an attempt to distance the company from growing scrutiny of predictive policing’s discriminatory impacts …
Multiple academic studies and internal police audits published in 2019 provide comprehensive evidence of PredPol’s racial bias and failure to demonstrate effectiveness, undermining the fundamental claims that have justified the technology’s widespread adoption.
An internal audit by the …
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Grayshift is founded in Atlanta, Georgia by David Miles, Braden Thomas, Justin Fisher, and Sean Larsson, directly motivated by the FBI’s difficulties extracting data from the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone. The company develops GrayKey, a small gray box measuring four inches by four …
ShotSpotter’s acoustic gunshot detection system undergoes major expansion across the United States during 2015, with significant deployments in New York City and Sacramento representing the technology’s growing adoption by major metropolitan police departments.
PredPol’s predictive policing software reaches widespread adoption across the United States, with almost 60 police departments using the technology by early 2015. Major cities including Los Angeles, Atlanta, and numerous smaller jurisdictions have implemented the algorithmic crime prediction …
The Chicago Police Department launches the Strategic Subject List (SSL), colloquially known as the “heat list,” a predictive policing mechanism designed to identify individuals most likely to be involved in gun violence either as perpetrators or victims. The program’s public debut …
Chicago Police Departmentsurveillancetechnologypoliceaicivil-rights
The New Orleans Police Department launches a secretive predictive policing program in partnership with Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The program operates without public knowledge or oversight, escaping scrutiny …
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PredPol, a predictive policing software company, is founded in Santa Cruz, California by UCLA Professor of Anthropology Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler. The company emerges from research begun in 2010 when Brantingham recruited UCLA mathematicians to develop algorithms for …
George MohlerJeff Brantinghamsurveillancetechnologyaipolice
Amazon Implements Automated Worker Surveillance and Tracking System
Beginning around 2012, Amazon deployed comprehensive automated surveillance systems in its warehouses that tracked worker productivity per second through handheld scanners, creating what labor advocates described as algorithmic …
Jeff BezosAmazonWorker ExploitationSurveillanceCorporate AccountabilityTechnologyAmazon
The Los Angeles Police Department launches Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration), a controversial predictive policing program that runs from 2011 to 2019. The program is designed to identify and target individuals deemed at high risk of committing violent crimes using a …
Geofeedia was founded in Chicago by Phil Harris, Mike Mulroy, and Scott Mitchell to provide location-based social media monitoring software. The platform used algorithms to isolate publicly available geotagging data from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and other social channels, …
Phil HarrisMike MulroyScott MitchellIn-Q-Telsurveillancesocial-medialaw-enforcementtechnologyprivacy
Dataminr was founded in New York City by Yale University graduates Ted Bailey, Sam Hendel, and Jeff Kinsey to provide real-time monitoring and analysis of social media data streams. The company secured a direct licensing agreement with Twitter to purchase the platform’s complete …
Ted BaileySam HendelJeff KinseyIn-Q-TelTwittersurveillancesocial-mediaintelligence-agencieslaw-enforcementtechnology+1 more
Cellebrite establishes its Mobile Forensics Division and introduces the first version of the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a portable tool capable of extracting both physical and logical data from mobile phones, including deleted data and encrypted or password-protected information. …
Cellebrite is established in Petah Tikva, Israel by founders Avi Yablonka, Yaron Baratz, and Yuval Aflalo. Initially focused on phone-to-phone data transfer technology for wireless carriers and retail operations, the company develops tools to help consumers transfer contacts, photos, and other data …