Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison, the world's second-richest man, recently revealed how his company could furnish authorities with the technological means to better surveil the populace and socially engineer those involuntarily living their lives on camera.
"Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," Ellison
said last week at the database and cloud computing company's financial analyst meeting. "It's AI that's looking at the cameras."
After discussing broadening and implementing surveillance systems in the health and education sectors, Ellison raised the matter of law enforcement applications and police body cameras.
'Truth is we don't really turn it off.'
"We completely redesigned body cameras," said the billionaire. "The camera's always on. You don't turn it on and off."
Whether an officer is having lunch with friends or in the lavatory, Oracle will never shut its eyes.
Ellison noted, for example, that if a police officer wants a moment of relative privacy so that he can go to the washroom, he must notify Oracle.
"We'll turn it off.
Truth is, we don't really turn it off. What we do is we record it so no one can see it," said Ellison. "No one can get into that recording without a court order. You get the privacy you requested ... but if you get a court order, we will judge — I want to look at that, this so-called bathroom break."
"We transmit the video back to headquarters," continued the Oracle CTO, "and AI is constantly monitoring the video."
If AI spots behavior it has been trained to regard as suspicious, then it will flag it and issue an alert to the relevant authorities.
By constructing what is effectively a high-tech panopticon, Ellison indicated that police officers and citizens alike would be more inclined to behave as convention and law dictated they should "because we're constantly recording — watching and recording — everything that's going on."
Ellison indicated that this system of digital eyes on cars, drones, and humans amounts to "supervision."
The tech magnate framed these applications as benign — as ways to curb police brutality. However, Oracle has recently given cause to suspect that there is potential for abuse.
In July, Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit in which the company was accused of running roughshod over people's privacy by collecting their data and selling it to third parties,
reported Reuters.
According to the plaintiffs, Oracle created unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people, which were then allegedly sold to marketers and other organizations.
Critics responding online to Ellison's remarks also expressed concerns over how such applications will all but guarantee a communist Chinese-style surveillance state in the West — something that's already under way in the U.K.,
one of the most surveilled countries on the planet.
'There isn't much not being watched by somebody.'
The U.K.'s former Home Office biometrics and surveillance commissioner Fraser Sampson
told the Guardian before ending his term last year that AI was supercharging Britain's public-private "omni-surveillance" society.
"There was a lawyer back in 2010 who used the expression 'omni-surveillance,' and I think, yes, we are in that. There isn't much not being watched by somebody. The thing is, almost all of it's been watched by people on private devices. And they now share it, whether they want them to or not, with everybody, the police, the state, the foreign government, anybody," said Sampson.
"When all that needed a human to edit it, it wasn't an issue because no one was going to live long enough to get through 10 minutes. But now you can do it with AI editing. All of a sudden you can tap that ocean," added the watchdog.
The U.K. has ostensibly taken a turn for the worse under the current Labor government, which is working
to greatly expand the use of live facial recognition technology.
While some have taken to keyboards to bemoan the growth of the Western surveillance state, so-called Blade Runner activists have, in recent years, taken to chopping down public and private cameras,
including low-emission cameras.
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