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State Police test out robot dogs
By adamg on Mon, 11/25/2019 - 9:04am
WBUR reports the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad got some loaners of Boston Dynamics's "Spot" robots - basically the pets a Terminator might have - and actually used them in the field at least twice. State Police declined to say exactly how they used them; the ACLU, of course, has some questions.
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Assumed usage
Defrauding the taxpayers with falsified hours somehow? That's the main focus of the Staties now, right?
Putting an end to legal skateboarding
I'm sure that's high on their agenda, too.
Black Mirror
All I can think of when I see these robots is the “Metalhead” episode of Black Mirror. And I want to beat it to a metallic pulp or drop it in the Mariana Trench.
For all of its potential,
I'd say police using something like this period counts as intimidating people.
What comes to mind to me is
What comes to mind to me is the potential for "always-on" sampling and recording - warrantless surveillance - in non-intervention settings (or after security functions).
Imagine you have officers and "Spot" on crowd duty at the Marathon or something. Spot has a sniffer module for the occasion - trying to detect airborne traces of something distinctive leaking from a homemade bomb or sloppy bombmaker. All well and good so far.
But... what if Spot has drug-sniffing and face-recording enabled, and somebody decides to go through that buffer in post-event processing before purging the units, to see what they might stir up...?