The Only Way For Metro To Keep Resident Data from the Feds is Not To Have It

Now is not the time to collect more data on Nashvillians

The TN State Legislature has made it shatteringly clear that the US Constitution is of little concern to them in their efforts to collaborate with the agenda of an autocratic federal government.

Whether it is the 1st Amendment protection of speech, or the 4th Amendment protection of unreasonable search and seizure, our state legislators seem to think that the enshrined rights of all people residing within the borders of the United States are fair prices to pay to be put on the President’s list of loyal collaborators.

To these state legislators, be wary of who you try to appease.

The reward for acquiescence is not autonomy, it is only the opportunity to acquiesce further.

Abusers are not pushing you to see if you are loyal so that they can reward you for your obedience. They are pushing you to see how far they can go. You are only a tool to measure their perceived greatness against, and they would sooner break you into a thousand pieces than call you an equal.

But for Nashville, for Metro, what is a municipality to do? Legal action is certainly warranted, and needed, and in any other political environment in US history, assuredly an easy win.

When we have little power to do things, often our true power of resistance is in not doing things.

FUSUS, and all programs that collect the likeness and whereabouts of residents, are dangers to our civil liberties in a time when creating policies protecting our right to privacy are being criminalized.

Amongst those abreast of Nashville’s political currents, there is well known ambition to turn Nashville into a technocratically monitored haven for the higher earners who’d like to live in a folksy version of Silicon Valley without seeing the consequences of the inherent inequity of a city like that.

To accomplish this would require an array of surveillance systems, like AXON’s FUSUS. Regardless of whatever doublespeak is given about systems like this “not storing information”, these tools, by definition, would be preserving things like video and audio, and this could be later used for generating facial recognition data, object detection inferences, and other tools which are available and affordable to the general public.

Even if these later features were not initially applied to recorded video, anyone with a mild amount of programming literacy, including me, and certainly people like the 50 AI experts hired by DHS under President Biden, could apply this after the fact.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has a list of AI technologies it currently uses posted here. One of the active methods it uses with AI is “Video Analysis Tool DHS-172” which uses “Machine learning (ML) algorithms [to] identify human faces” to aid in “investigating crimes that threaten national security, public safety, and the economy”.

In case you were wondering if this could impact civil rights, ICE’s official website clarifies by stating: “Safety- and/or rights-impacting? Yes. Rights-impacting”

But is it currently deployed and in use? “Deployment Status: Deployed”

What types of video would DHS and ICE be using these tools on? Very plausibly publicly available content and surveillance content that is in the possession of federal and local law enforcement. Local law enforcement which, increasingly, has seemingly fewer legal rights to refuse to collaborate with federal officials – though that collaboration is often not something that local law enforcement has much objection to, nationally speaking.

When our right to regulate our own policies and processes are restricted, our only ability to not hand over data about the whereabouts of our residents, for purposes as vague and all encompassing as “investigating crimes that threaten national security, public safety, and the economy” is not to have it.

As spies throughout history have learned, no one holds up to torture, and no pipelines of information are without leaks. The best encryption is not knowing it to begin with.

Let’s, at the very least, do better with our data than France did.

We all can agree on wanting to be better than France, no?

Prior to the 1940s, France had an unusually robust documentation of racial and ethnic demographics within its borders. Partly due to its highly functioning bureaucracy dating back to Napoleon, compared to other nations in Europe, France had a robust paper database of what types of people were where. To some degree, this data helped France allocate resources in ways that aligned with their national values of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

But as antisemitism rose in Europe in the 1930s however, and France increasingly struggled with uprisings in its offshore colonies, its data on residents became increasingly filled with biographical and geolocation information of foreigners, perceived political dissidents, and generally “undesirable” members of society. Republican France did not do anything en masse with this information. But they did have it…

Then the Germans came.

In WWII, the country of France was never formally conquered by Germany. After their borders were overrun, the Armistice of 22 June, 1940 was signed. France would preserve its independence, but it would operate as a military autocracy and comply with German requests. All requests.

The new French government collaborated with their occupiers by instituting strict antisemitic policies nationwide and outlawing support for anything that could appear Leftist (deeming all progressive politics as potentially corrosive to their collaboration with Germany).

Marshal Philippe Pétain, the military ruler of this wartime government called “Vichy”, was not a believer in Nazi ideology. For him, and most of the leaders of France’s new autocracy, it was all a strategy to extract concessions from their occupiers. They felt they could outmaneuver the Germans, gaining leverage through acquiescence.

Political researchers have asserted that Vichy France was never technically “Fascist”, it was “distinctly rightist and authoritarian but never fascist". This allowed supporters of the government that included both reactionaries against the progressive politics of the era, and centrist liberals who wanted to “modernize” their state through a strongman leader, to feel that they had not actually betrayed their beloved Republic.

But their actions, and the decisions they made that limited their actions, proved how you see yourself politically has little to do with the politics that you unleash on others.

Through a policy of official collaboration, France thought it could exercise leverage with its German overseers, gaining more concessions than nations like Poland, Denmark and Norway.

By agreeing not to oppose Germany’s policies against Jews and other “undesirables”, and not opposing their illegal march across Europe, Vichy France thought it had some negotiating room. The French did not understand that this was not a negotiation, and once they had conceded, their “autonomy” was meaningless.

Despite Pétain’s efforts to free them, Germany held two million French POWs in internment to hold leverage over the “independent” France. These hostages were used as power over France to turn over the bulk of its resources to fuel the German war effort, and to collaborate with the mass roundup of Jews and other “undesirables”.

Official French government records were used to round up Jews, communists, political refugees and more and turn them over to the Nazis.

This was primarily not by Nazi soldiers in France – it was done by local law enforcement acting on orders by their Vichy Government to comply with their Nazi occupiers, hoping it would help them get their French POWs released and have more leverage with Hitler.

At least 72,500 French Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

In the “Green Ticket Roundup” in 1941, French law enforcement used the data they had collected on their own residents over the past decades, and 3,700 foreign Jews responded to summons that claimed they had an immigration “status review” they needed to attend in person. On arrival, they were arrested, sent to prison labor camps, and some were eventually sent to Auschwitz where they were murdered.

This was only a preface to the horrific Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942 when 9,000 French police officers arrested 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children. They were placed in horrific, unsanitary conditions in an indoor sports arena, the Vélodrome d'Hiver. After five days living in squalor, they were sent on trains to die in extermination camps outside France.

France has grappled with its complicity in the extermination of the Jews since the end of the war, with varying degrees of honesty and self awareness. Part of their cultural processing was the decision that they are not, as a people, able to be trusted with information regarding the racial and ethnic identity of the people living within its borders.

Since WWII the French have concluded that they cannot be trusted with data about their minority populations. It became illegal to collect this at all. They learned that they simply could not be trusted with this type of data. Over the decades, their self awareness of their untrustworthiness with sensitive racial and ethnic data led to an illusion that as a nation they were post-racial and “colorblind”, a fiction that led to France’s own recent reckoning with inequity and racial oppression.

Some Knowledge Can Do Little Good, But Great Harm

We live in a different age of information than Vichy France. The United States and Nashville exist as much in the physical world as in a digitized matrix of datasets that track our identities and movements in databases both public and private. Unlike in modern France, the number of immigrants and other minorities is not a bureaucratically shielded secret. But we still have choices. We can still exert privacy.

We can take steps to not have our law enforcement have unfettered access to footage of private spaces, footage that has little legal or practical likelihood of staying within any boundaries that we’d set, footage that could be called up to investigate any perceived “crimes that threaten national security, public safety, and the economy.”

We are not in 1942 occupied France, neither literally or figuratively. Not yet at least. Let’s resist taking actions to get closer, however, and some of those are the simplest actions we can take – doing nothing.