From the opening
A mother walking her newborn looked up at the end of her block and saw a camera with a solar panel on top of it. She lived in Troy, New York, fifty-two thousand people. She had never seen it before. What she found, after she went home and looked it up, was an AI-assisted license plate reader that logs every vehicle that passes and feeds the result into a national database offered to police. She walked her block and counted. Then a few more blocks. Then she started telling her neighbors.
Twenty-six of the cameras had been installed across Troy. None had gone before the city council. None had gone before the residents. The contract, a hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars over two years, had been signed by the police department alone, though the city's own rules require council approval for anything over thirty-five thousand. When the council voted to defund the cameras, the mayor declared a state of emergency, the kind normally reserved for blizzards and infrastructure failure, to keep them running.
Nothing about the situation was anyone's strategy. It was what happened when an unusually powerful technology arrived faster than the systems that would normally govern it, and the cost of the gap was paid by people who were not in the rooms where the decisions were made. That pattern is the subject of this book.
