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Title: Surveillance, Control and Repression Author: Datacide Language: en Topics: surveillance, political repression, police brutality, Technology Source: https://datacide-magazine.com/news-datacide-15-pt-3-surveillance-control-and-repression/#more-4061
GPS enabled smartphone apps are being used by private companies to track
and surveil employees during business hours and also during off times. A
sales executive employee at the international wire-transfer service
Intermex has sued because she was being tracked via the Xora StreetSmart
app on the company issued phone which she was not allowed to turn off
even while not at work. After complaining about the privacy intrusions
and spying by the company, she was fired.
Bank of America is one company using âsmart badgesâ to biosurveil the
voice and behavior patterns of call-center workers. Monitoring includes
how employees talk to customers, who talks to whom within the office,
when employees send emails and respond, make phone calls, go on breaks,
leave their desk to go somewhere else in the office, etc. The technology
and data analysis is done by Humanyze, a spin off from the MIT Media
Lab, which works with over 20 companies in banking, technology,
pharmaceutical and health care industries monitoring thousands of
employees. The analyzed data shows how each monitored employee performs
compared to others, which amongst other things can be correlated to
sales data and analyzed to assess individual and collective job
performance.
In the UK, a Cambridge neuroscientist and former Golden Sachs trader,
John Coates, is working with companies to use biosurveillance to create
âhuman optimizationâ in business performance. This researcher focuses on
using technology that measures hormones that increase confidence and
other âpositiveâ emotions and those that produce negative, stressful
behavior that would impact a traderâs performance. The idea is to
monitor employees and alert supervisors with an âearly warning systemâ
if traders are getting close to a âhormonal danger zoneâ where they
wonât produce the desired trading results. Such biosurveillance is used
on employees at hedge funds, banks, call centers, consultant firms, and
many others.
Lamar Pierce, associate professor at Washington University St. Louis
published a research paper about the effect of wearable biosurveillance
in the restaurant industry. The monitoring software called Restaurant
Guard by NCR analyzes data on all payment transactions and all employee
behavior. The data, for example, showed that when employees were
surveilled, the restaurantâs earnings increased weekly because employees
felt pressured to increase sales. Other data showed that an employee who
serves several tables faster may be less good at increasing sales with
specific customers. The study looked at 392 restaurants in 39 states
that used the biosurveillance and software programs on the employees.
Many companies in the US demand that employees provide their social
media usernames and passwords to even be considered for employment
and/or to stay employed. This can also be applicable to company owned
computers, phones or other technology used by an employee. Only 9 US
states have passed laws to ban companies and/or schools from such
practices, however, in many other states like Florida a company can fire
an employee who refuses to give up their private information.
A new Texas law (H.B. 121) allows police officers to function as debt
collectors with credit and debit card readers in their patrol cars,
which take payment from people with outstanding court fines and warrants
during a police stop. Abuse is being reported in the tangled
relationship between the police and the company Vigilant that provides
the automated license plate reader machines (ALPR) and the data system
for free. Vigilant forms a âhot listâ of outstanding fees given to them
by the police, and this is part of the data police officers read when
scanning license plates. During a police stop, a person is given a
âdealâ: either get arrested or pay the fine with a 25% additional
processing fee that goes to Vigliant. Vigilant has sent erroneous
warrant notices to an undisclosed number of people who never had
warrants in their names in Texas, some of whom then may have paid the
warrant fine or have been wrongly arrested. The ALPR system by Vigilant
uploads 70 million images a month to the 2.8-billion plate scan
database. Outstanding fines are a major source of city revenue, and are
one aspect of institutional racism practiced in places like Ferguson,
Missouri.
North Dakota police have weaponized drones with tasers, tear gas, bean
bags, pepper spray, sound cannons, rubber bullets and other so-called
ânon-lethalâ and âless than lethalâ weapons, which is legal by an
amendment to the law H.B. 1328.
The Associate Press reported that the FBI has a large fleet of airplanes
that surveil entire cities and large rural areas with high-tech cameras,
and cell phone monitoring equipment. In a 30-day period, the FBI made
100 spy plane flights over 30 cities in 11 states to collect data. The
Wall Street Journal revealed that the US Marshals have their own program
using planes mounted with Stingrays, which direct all cellphone
activities to the machine rather than the closest cell phone tower and
collect all the data. The CIA is involved in and is financing the
Marshalâs program. On April 19, 2015, Freddie Gray died of a severe
spinal injury 7 days after having being transported in a police car
after being arrested by the Baltimore police. Protests began on April
18, and riots, protests and other actions escalated immediately after
Grayâs funeral on April 27. A State of Emergency was declared, along
with a mandatory curfew, and 2,500 National Guardsmen were deployed in
the city. During this period, the ACLU has revealed that two planes
operated by FBI in cooperation with the local police surveilled the city
for hours at a time. It is unclear what surveillance equipment was
onboard the planes, what kind of data was collected, who was targeted,
or how the surveillance related to any of the 486 arrests made during
the Baltimore riots.
Numerous investigative reports have shown how various local, state, and
national police forces have surveilled and targeted #BlackLivesMatter
protestors, sympathizers and activists. The Missouri National Guard
labeled people involved in protests and riots in Ferguson after the
killing of Mike Brown by police officer Darren Wilson as âenemy forcesâ
and âadversariesâ. Likewise, the Department of Homeland Security
regularly coordinates and surveils Black Lives Matter activists and
protests in numerous cities and rural areas around the country. The
California Highway Patrol along with other police agencies spied on
Black Lives Matter protests under the coordination of the Northern
California Regional Intelligence Center, the counter-terrorism fusion
center, which also supplied information back to the regional police
agencies. The NYPD used numerous undercover officers and agent
provocateurs to infiltrate Black Lives Matter protests. Surveillance was
also conducted by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, New York State
police, and counter-terrorism officers against Black Lives Matter
protestors.