I really, really need folks to understand that deflecting blame away from the tool and trying to hold the human accountable feeds right into the marketing playbook of these companies in the first place.

The cops cannot be held accountable because the laws basically give them immunity. The politicians cannot be held accountable beyond being tossed out at the next election, because the laws otherwise give them immunity. The people operating the system cannot be held accountable, because the systems are marketed as authoritative despite being black boxes and lacking in transparency; they trusted the system just as they were told to, and thus cannot be held accountable.

And so when every human in the chain cannot be held accountable for these things, and the law prevents victims from receiving apologies, let alone recourse, then the tool and its maker is the only thing we can hold accountable. By deflecting blame away from the tools ("it wasn't AI, it was facial recognition"; "the human had to sign off on it"; "humans made the arrest, not machines"), you're protecting quite literally the only possible entity that could still potentially be held accountable: the dipshits making these stupid things and marketing them as superior and authoritative when compared to humans.

You want accountability? Start holding capital to account, and this shit falls away real fucking fast. Don't get lost in technical nuance over very real human issues.

It's the fault of the tool because our society treats the tools as superior judgements than humans and to be trusted completely as a means of deflecting accountability - something any and every minority group has been warning about for fucking decades.

The reason everyone rushes to defend the tool's use is because holding humans accountable would mean throwing these tools out entirely in most cases, due to internal human biases and a decline in basic critical and cognitive thinking skills. The marketing has been the same since the 80s: the tool is superior (until it isn't), the tool shall be trusted completely (until it fails), the tool cannot make mistakes (until it does).

If folks actually listened to the victims of this shit, companies like Flock and Palantir would be gutted and their founders barred from any sort of office of responsibility, at minimum. The fact so many deflect blame from the tool like the marketing manual demands shows they don't actually give a shit about the humans wrapped up in the harms, or the misuse and misappropriation of these tools by persons wholly unaccountable under the law, but only about defending a shiny thing they personally like.

You’re going crazy because up until this exact moment you’ve never had to confront the reality that these tools, placed into the hands of the common man, are viewed as authoritative and lack any accountability or consequence for misuse.

For anyone who has been victimized by law enforcement or governments before, we’ve been warning about this shit for decades. About the lack of consequence for police brutality. The lack of consequence for LPR abuse. The lack of consequence for facial recognition failures and AI mismatches.

You need to understand that by using these systems correctly and holding yourself accountable, you are in the minority. Most people do not think that critically, and are all too happy to finger the computer when things go badly.

And until you accept that, and work to actually hold folks accountable instead of deflecting blame away from the tool, then this won’t actually change.

I’m one of today’s lucky 10k, because this judo-threw me with how I (didn’t) understand CI/CD. My experience with it has largely been a cumbersome add-on to existing processes that are often incredibly fragile and impossible to amend; turns out, that’s kind of the point. Understanding that it’s the equivalent of doing rocket tests on kit you expect to fail and using that to build better rockets suddenly makes its value far more recognizable, at least to my eyes.

Solid writeup. Definitely keeping in my personal notes.

Done and done. As the weather warms up, I've got plans to wardrive my town and report every single Flock camera I find (already reported five).

I hate these things and want them gone. They do not serve any practical purpose other than intimidation of minority groups and warrantless mass surveillance.