[Air-L] Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy, book talk and discussion w/ Kelly Gates, April 22nd 5pm UK time

[Rakesh Biswas]

Other scenarios:


A French hobbyist, Sammy Azdoufal, turned a *PlayStation controller hack
into a nightmare,* accidentally hijacking 7,000 Romo robot vacuums
worldwide.

Using DJI's *flawed cloud permissions,* he accessed live camera feeds,
microphones, and home maps from strangers' devices.  DJI patched it
swiftly, *paid him $30K as a bounty,* and promised audits, but the breach
underscores how AI-driven IoT gadgets *amplify single-point failures* into
mass surveillance.

In this era, hacks explode via interconnected clouds and AI processing. A
minor permission glitch lets one experimenter pivot *from local control to
commanding thousands of devices,* turning vacuums into unwitting spies.
Accidental or not, *scale is the killer:* AI's real-time data crunching on
cameras and mics means *one bug equals global takeover,* echoing Roomba
photo leaks and Ring intrusions; *vulnerabilities* that law enforcement
must now probe as *potential cybercrimes* under frameworks like India's IT
Act.

The peril is clear: *smart homes become surveillance states* when AI
prioritizes features over fortresses. Weak cloud auth, unpatched firmware,
and opaque vendor practices invite chaos—accidental today, *malicious
tomorrow* by state actors or criminals. In India, with rising smart device
adoption amid data localization laws, this *signals regulatory gaps;*
without mandatory audits and zero-trust models, every gadget risks turning
citizens into *unwitting data donors.*

True *safeguards demand AI-native defenses:* self-healing code via machine
learning anomaly detection, blockchain-verified permissions, and *hardware
root-of-trust chips* that isolate cams/mics by default. AI tools must
*evolve to audit themselves* — flagging risks pre-deploy via simulated
attacks—while regulations enforce *"privacy-by-design."*

On Tue, 10 Mar 2026, 01:57 Patrick Smith via Air-L, <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> With apologies for cross-posting.
>
> The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures
> project) at the University of Salford welcomes Professor Kelly Gates
> (Associate Professor, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego) for
> this online talk and discussion on her new book Targeted: Corporations and
> the Police Surveillance Economy.
>
>
> https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/targeted-corporations-and-the-police-surveillance-economy-w-kelly-gates-tickets-1984777876056
>
> "Video cameras are everywhere: attached to buildings, drones, and
> dashboards; embedded in smartphones, laptops, and doorbells; worn on police
> uniforms and sunglasses. In Targeted, Kelly Gates argues that the resulting
> avalanche of video has transformed the landscape of policing and security
> in the twenty-first century. Video production, analysis, and archival
> management are now central to the ways police power is exercised, criminal
> law enforced, and spaces of human habitation securitized.
>
> Gates examines the primacy of video in four key areas of policing and
> security: the field of digital multimedia forensics, private video
> surveillance infrastructure development, police body-worn camera systems,
> and video analytics for automated surveillance (Video AI). Case studies of
> two companies illustrate the role of corporations in these far-reaching
> media-technological changes. Target Corporation has integrated its retail
> security operations with law enforcement, expanding its surveillance beyond
> its stores and parking lots and into the criminal legal system. Axon
> Enterprise is leveraging the growing volume of police body-cam video to
> build a large-scale proprietary platform for policing.
>
> Targeted reveals the role of video infrastructure development in the
> increasingly entangled relationship between the modern police and the
> modern corporation, in the long wake and ruins of neoliberalism."
>
> Kelly Gates is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at
> the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Our Biometric
> Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, as
> well as the editor of International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 6:
> Media Studies Futures and The New Media of Surveillance. Her writing has
> appeared in numerous journals, including Surveillance & Society,
> Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Social Semiotics.
>
> Best,
> Patrick
> --
> Dr. Patrick Brian Smith
> Assistant Professor and University Fellow
> School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology
> University of Salford
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