Trading one 'Big Brother' for another
Flock and other AI-powered surveillance tools are far from routine law enforcement technology, they are the architecture of a surveillance state. Guest column from Amanda Merkwae of the ACLU of WI.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
Stalking ex-partners, targeting immigrants and protesters, investigating abortion seekers: all made possible by Flock, a rapidly expanding surveillance technology that tracks the movement of vehicles through automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).
Communities across the state have pushed back against Flock — shout out to everyday people speaking out in Verona, Oshkosh, Sturgeon Bay, Fitchburg, Dane County, Monona, Grand Chute, Milwaukee, Appleton, Neenah, and many others.
Despite local success in terminating or not renewing these mass surveillance contracts, a troubling pattern has emerged. Instead of codifying policies governing procurement, transparency, and data sharing of surveillance tech, a response from many local officials — like in Oshkosh and Dane County — has simply been to propose switching vendors. In Grand Chute, for example, that new vendor is Axon Enterprises.
Let’s be real: swapping one dragnet surveillance company for another while trusting these for-profit companies to regulate themselves is a recipe for violating, not protecting, residents’ civil rights and liberties. Our freedom to organize, to dissent, and move through public life without constant government monitoring, as protected by the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, is precisely what is at stake when local officials invite Axon’s technology into their communities.
Axon is not a neutral technology provider. The company holds significant contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), meaning its hardware and software have directly supported deportation operations in Wisconsin and across the country. Ron Vitiello, Axon’s former head of DHS Program and Strategy and Acting Director of ICE during the first Trump administration, now serves as Acting Deputy Commissioner for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Public dollars flowing to this company flow directly into an infrastructure used by abusive federal agencies to kill our neighbors, harass and racially profile people, criminalize dissent, and tear thousands of families apart.
Of significant constitutional concern is not just who Axon works with, but also what Axon sells.
The company’s “AI-era plan” product bundle centers on Fusus, a platform that integrates live feeds from government and private cameras, doorbell cameras, license plate readers, drones, and other data then applies artificial intelligence to analyze it in real time.
This is far from routine law enforcement technology — it is the architecture of a surveillance state.
When government actors can monitor public movement continuously, integrate it with private data, and process it through predictive AI systems, the chilling effect on protected activity — attending a protest, visiting a place of worship, obtaining healthcare, knocking on a neighbor’s door — is real and legally significant. The risks posed by AI-powered surveillance are also not distributed equally. Black and brown residents bear the brunt of harms caused by algorithmic bias and inaccuracy leading to misidentification and over-policing.
In 2019, Axon’s own AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board, a group established by the company itself in 2018 to advise on ethical issues related to its policing technologies, published their second report covering ALPRs. The report found insufficient regulatory oversight for the technology, cited evidence that the impact of ALPRs falls disproportionately on low income people and people of color, and called for government and industry regulation. It warned, “Without regulatory intervention there is a risk that competition will encourage a race-to-the-bottom of more pervasive and more powerful surveillance.” Go figure.
In 2022, nine of Axon’s 12-member AI ethics board resigned in protest over the company’s plans to develop remotely-operated Taser-equipped drones. Axon is currently piloting body cameras equipped with AI facial recognition technology with a Canadian police department. Draft One, another Axon product, uses generative AI to write police reports from body cam audio. What could possibly go wrong?
The Milwaukee Police Department already uses some of these systems, such as Axon’s Fusus, and often acquires surveillance tech through no-bid sole-source contracts that bypass Common Council approval and public transparency.
Local surveillance infrastructure is actively being built around us, without us, in secret.
County and municipal governments across Wisconsin cannot afford to treat the flashy marketing materials and soothing assurances of surveillance tech PR teams as unquestioned truth. Good governance requires transparency, democratic decision-making, and accountability — not passive adoption of contracts in the face of overwhelming public outcry over legitimate harms.
Communities must adopt robust frameworks for evaluating new and existing surveillance tech — such as Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinances–to ensure local leaders have answers to very basic questions about each technology used to surveil residents with their own tax dollars:
How does the surveillance technology work?
What is the intended purpose(s) of the technology?
What is the fiscal impact of the technology?
What/whose information is being collected and how is data stored?
If the technology is not uniformly deployed or targeted throughout the jurisdiction, what factors will be used to determine where the technology is targeted?
What potential adverse impacts does the surveillance technology have on civil rights and liberties?
What standards must be met by government entities when sharing surveillance data with third parties, including the federal government?
The ACLU of Wisconsin will continue to scrutinize surveillance contracts that threaten the rights our Constitution guarantees. We urge Wisconsin communities to do the same, and to demand that their governments uphold transparency and democracy if considering any potential surveillance technology vendor. After all, what do they have to hide?
Amanda Merkwae is the Policy and Advocacy Director for the ACLU of Wisconsin where she leads policy and lobbying work at the state and local level. Before joining the ACLU, she served as a legislative advisor for a state agency and as a juvenile public defender in Milwaukee.
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