Keep putting pressure on City Council about Axon FUSUS & the expanding surveillance state
Backstory: I've spent about 25 years in software and security, and most of the last decade in banking.
I've navigated the same kinda high-stakes data environments the APD is trying to build here (with arguably the same sort of technical resources sometimes).
After watching the council briefing this morning, I need to sound the alarm on things that aren't being discussed.
City council is voting this Tuesday to let the city manager 'negotiate' a million dollar grant for a Real-Time Intelligence Center (RTIC).
Everything about this is a dumpster fire.
- This is a grant through everyone's favorite 'love-to-hate' congressional rep, Chuck Edwards. Why are we insistent on taking the slop he's providing? Should we, as a 'nominally liberal' city council, be seriously concerned with the opposition party is giving us money to enact their agenda, instead of doing what's best for our neighbors?
- Council and Staff confirmed they don't have a drafted contract with Axon, makers of the FUSUS system. If they vote YES on Tuesday, they're giving the city manager the power to sign whatever Axon puts in front of them without any other Council review. If this was in banking, you'd say it was a catastrophic failure of due diligence.
- Axon is mining our data for profit (ACEIP) Axon’s data use policy (ACEIP) is a nightmare. They use our private data to train their AI models and make a profit. Their policy allows them to change how they use our data with just 30 days' notice on a webpage. No email, no reach-out, no public notice. They can change the rules of our privacy before we even have time to review them.
- "But it solves crime": So, what happens is, the sales people come out, point to the white paper that Flock wrote, and guess what: it's marketing material! It's not peer reviewed! It has no control groups! It doesn't factor in other possible concerns. It's a fluff piece meant to sell you something and make you believe that you're buying something that does what it says.
- While I believe Councilor Hess' resolution is well meaning, but it needs teeth. Unless it specifically mandates independent external audits, and not just 'internal reviews', an explicit ban on facial recognition, and a mandatory opt-out of Axon's ACEIP data-mining, it's just a PR shield for another bad contract.
- This literally opens the door for Trump, the FBI, DHS, ICE, NSA to all look at our data. These sort of security vulnerabilities aren't 'rare', they're all over the place in similar application stats, and they're not audited, nor responsible for them. If your bank gave out your personal information after a leak was determined, you'd be entitled to compensation and restitution, and yet, these companies profiting off of our public information, do not have any similar process. All the liability lies at the hands of the city. In 2026 Denver City Auditor refused to sign their Flock contract for this exact reason. Why do we put ourselves in this mess?
We are being sold 'public safety' by a company that was caught using police "shills" with secret equity stakes to push this tech. In 2020, a misidentified ALPR data point led to an innocent mother and her kids being held at gunpoint by police.
As a parent, and someone who cares about the safety of our residents, is terrorizing innocent residents due to technical failures truly in the best interest of 'public safety'?
It's not.
If you want an easy way to email all the people involved and tell them to stop this madness, I have a form here for y'all.
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/7bec77518e36a31d3e83c78f3c9f72325d0ef49d
Let's keep fighting the good fight, we can win this.