To the editor:

For the past year I’ve worked in an eye doctor’s office in East Providence, literally helping hundreds of East Providence residents to see. Today I am writing this article in the hopes of helping the people of East Providence to see something that may still be unclear to them.

In her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, Shoshana Zuboff compares the emerging domination of companies like Facebook and Google to the Spanish conquerors who came to the Caribbean islands. The indigenous peoples had no concept for what these strange men who came from the sea were. They figured them as gods and performed elaborate rituals to welcome them.

But of course the conquerors had no interest in these indigenous peoples except to be able to dispossess them of their lands. In the same way, these corporate tech companies were welcomed into the lives of billions of peoples, not recognizing that the convenience and connection provided by them were an act of dispossession. People became dispossessed of their right to privacy. Their ability to control what information about them was private or not, their decision rights, were handed over to these surveillance companies.

In a similar way, in recent years we have seen a new wave of dispossession. Local governments and police departments around the country have welcomed with open arms new technologies known as Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) with AI capabilities, not understanding the rights they are signing away or the implications it has for our entire way of life.

We were all taught in school how important the balance of power was to our government. The executive, judicial, and legislative branches all have important functions that provide checks and balances on the other branches to avoid an imbalance of power which would favor certain groups or individuals.

Yet in the past 25 years we have seen an unprecedented concentration of power in the executive branch, where ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have become a huge outgrowth of executive power with seemingly limitless access to personal information about all American citizens. And more recently our own local police forces have become empowered with access to information they couldn’t have dreamed of in the past. These developments create a huge imbalance of power which places you, the American citizen, at an ultimate disadvantage.

People will often try to evade this issue by saying that if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about. But this completely misses the danger of the situation we are in. When someone is trying to escape from an abusive partner or a stalker, they have to go to great lengths to try to conceal their intentions and find the help they need. With the amount of knowledge and power these technologies give to a specific group of government and corporate entities over the entire population, the potential for abuse is unlimited.

As former Pawtucket police officer, Noel Pichardo, has pointed out, the technology used by these surveillance companies may be new, but the philosophy behind it is not. It’s grounded on the idea that you, the citizen, are a potential suspect that needs to be tracked and monitored for your own safety and for the safety of others. It’s the same philosophy that the Soviet Union and many other authoritarian states during the 20th century adopted.

History has shown where this philosophy leads, and it’s up to us if we want to prevent this history from being repeated to call out the surveillance state for what it is and hold our elected officials accountable in rejecting it and all that it stands for.

I am a part of a local group called Rhode Islanders for Personal Privacy that is helping community members to understand the implications of surveillance and learn how to voice their concerns. We will be having a free library event on Sunday Oct. 4 from 2-4 p.m. at the Weaver Library to discuss these topics as well as provide updates on cities across Rhode Island that have been canceling contracts with their surveillance vendors.

Timothy Haggerty
Rhode Islanders for Personal Privacy