Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant.Mother Jones illustration; Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/Zuma; Arthur Ogleznev/Unsplash; Logan Weaver/Unsplash In April 2024, the American police tech firm Axon, which leads the market for police body cameras, released a tool it billed as "revolutionary": Draft One, an AI-powered software package that would turn body camera footage and audio into intelligible police reports. Once best known for developing the Taser, Axon has transformed into a 50 billion military and law enforcement tech giant, providing more than 5,000 police departments across the country with a suite of cloud-based products to manage evidence collection and storage. Draft One, the AI tool, connects with the company's body cameras and evidence storage service to write police reports with little human intervention. At least 21 departments have experimented with the software. The use of artificial intelligence in generating police reports has been particularly troubling, according to civil rights advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU, because of generative AI's propensity towards racial and gender bias, and its tendency to insert inaccuracies into texts--including wholesale inventions known by technologists as "hallucinations." "I can almost guarantee [AI] reports have been used in plea deals," a police captain wrote.

A searchable database of public records concerning use of force and misconduct by California law enforcement officers -- some 1.5 million pages from nearly 700 law enforcement agencies -- is now available to the public. The Police Records Access Project, a database built by UC Berkeley and Stanford University, is being published by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and CalMatters. It will vastly expand public access to internal affairs records that show how law enforcement agencies throughout the state handle misconduct allegations and uses of police force that result in death or serious injury. The database currently includes records from nearly 12,000 cases. The database is the product of years of work by a multidisciplinary team of journalists, data scientists, lawyers and civil liberties advocates, led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), UC Berkeley Journalism's Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) and Stanford University's Big Local News.

Many US election deniers have spent the past three years inundating local election officials with paperwork and filing thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests in order to surface supposed instances of fraud. "I've had election officials telling me that in an office where there's one or two workers, they literally were satisfying public records requests from 9 to 5 every day, and then it's 5 o'clock and they would shift to their normal election duties," says Tammy Patrick, CEO of the National Association of Election Officials. In Washington state, elections officials were receiving so many FOIA requests following the 2020 presidential elections about the state's voter registration database that the legislature had to change the law, rerouting these requests to the Secretary of State's office to relieve the burden on local elections workers. "Our county auditors came in and testified as to how much time having to respond to public records requests was taking," says democratic state senator Patty Kederer, who cosponsored the legislation. "It can cost a lot of money to process those requests. And some of these smaller counties do not have the manpower to handle them. You could easily overwhelm some of our smaller counties."

Indian law enforcement is starting to place huge importance on facial recognition technology. Delhi police, looking into identifying people involved in civil unrest in northern India in the past few years, said that they would consider 80 percent accuracy and above as a "positive" match, according to documents obtained by the Internet Freedom Foundation through a public records request. Facial recognition's arrival in India's capital region marks the expansion of Indian law enforcement officials using facial recognition data as evidence for potential prosecution, ringing alarm bells among privacy and civil liberties experts. There are also concerns about the 80 percent accuracy threshold, which critics say is arbitrary and far too low, given the potential consequences for those marked as a match. India's lack of a comprehensive data protection law makes matters even more concerning.

New York police must now comply with a public records request related to its use of facial recognition and other surveillance on protestors. A judge has ordered the New York Police Department to release documents pertaining to its monitoring of Black Lives Matters protests during the summer of 2020, requiring it to release 2,700 emails and other documents to the public or state why it fall"and/or allege with specificity that each document falls within one of the enumerated exemptions of Public Officers Law." The NYPD previously rejected a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request by Amnesty International and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project for records related to its use of facial recognition and surveillance tools on activists (as well as a subsequent appeal to that FOIL request), leading both groups to sue the law enforcement organization last year. The police agency has argued that the records request would cover over 30 million documents, and that following through would be "unreasonably burdensome." In a ruling issued on Friday, New York Supreme Court Justice Lawrence Love rejected the NYPD's reasoning.

The Los Angeles Police Department has used facial-recognition software nearly 30,000 times since 2009, with hundreds of officers running images of suspects from surveillance cameras and other sources against a massive database of mugshots taken by law enforcement. The new figures, released to The Times, reveal for the first time how commonly facial recognition is used in the department, which for years has provided vague and contradictory information about how and whether it uses the technology. The LAPD has consistently denied having records related to facial recognition, and at times denied using the technology at all. The truth is that, while it does not have its own facial-recognition platform, LAPD personnel have access to facial-recognition software through a regional database maintained by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. And between Nov. 6, 2009, and Sept. 11 of this year, LAPD officers used the system's software 29,817 times.

Elon Musk doesn't think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It's a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it's either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution. The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials--"spikes"--that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain.

In the coming months, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce a new task force on "Automated Decision Systems" -- the first of its kind in the United States. The task force will recommend how each city agency should be accountable for using algorithms and other advanced computing techniques to make important decisions. As a first step toward this goal, we urge the task force to consider a framework structured around Algorithmic Impact Assessments (AIAs). Automated decision systems are here, and are already being integrated across many core social institutions, reshaping how our criminal justice system works via risk assessment algorithms and predictive policing systems, optimizing energy use in critical infrastructure through AI-driven resource allocation, and changing our educational system through new teacher evaluation tools and student-school matching algorithms. And these are merely what journalists, researchers, and the public record expose -- to date, no city in the US has explicitly mandated that its agencies disclose anything about the automated decision systems they have in place or are planning to use.