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An investigation published this week in the Tampa Bay Times charts the growth of police surveillance technology firm Fusus in the state of Florida.

Fusus helps police departments get live access to privately owned surveillance cameras. It integrates with AI analytics, which can allow police to search a city's camera network for a suspect wearing a specific colored shirt, or a certain type of car.

The Tampa Bay Times obtained public records showing that the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office and Clearwater Police Department had signed deals to access up to 2,500 local recording devices.

The investigation builds off reporting by Context published in May that found over 60 different cities and counties across more than a dozen states had Fusus platforms, networking over 30,000 cameras around the U.S.

The Tampa Bay Times spoke with privacy advocates who worried that the surveillance build-out would give police tools that are ripe for abuse.

"You're going to expect to see a lot more arrests, a lot more surveillance, a lot more harassment from police," Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Tampa Bay Times.

As Context reported in May, Fusus has been rapidly building big-city style surveillance networks in smaller towns and suburbs. Local privacy advocates say there's been too little public debate, and too few guidelines governing how the police can operate these new surveillance systems.

On Monday, Axios also reported on a new Fusus system being rolled out in Chesterfield, Virginia. And the local WTVR news site reported that police there are not answering questions about how the new surveillance camera network will be used.

Asia

Rina Chandran, Asia tech correspondent

Singapore last week passed the Online Criminal Harms Act, which allows the government to tell individuals, entities, internet service providers, and app stores to remove or block access to content it believes is harmful or criminal in nature.

The bill takes aim at illegal moneylending and gambling, and cyber scams and other activities that "inflict great harms on the victims, not just in terms of financial losses. The threshold to issue directions should therefore be lower than for other criminal offences," said Josephine Teo, minister for communications and information.

Singapore, like other countries in the region, has passed a slew of internet laws recently that rights groups say could limit freedom of expression online and curb government dissent.

Africa

Kim Harrisberg, South Africa correspondent

South Africa is the latest country where lawyers have been caught out by ChatGPT in referring to fictitious judgements in their argument.

The legal citations ChatGPT referred to were linked to unrelated cases, which the lawyers had not properly checked before presenting them in front of a court, MyBroadband site reported.

The magistrate at the Johannesburg regional court where the case was heard said no further action would be taken against the lawyers beyond the punitive costs order.

Europe

Adam Smith, UK tech correspondent

Reforms to a French law will allow police to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices.

Any monitoring must be approved by a judge, and can only be done for up to six months. Justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti claims it would only affect "dozens of cases a year", but digital rights group La Quadrature du Net called it a "slide into heavy-handed security".

The reform comes shortly after president Macron suggested that social media sites could be shut down to help quell violent demonstrations over the killing of a teenager of North African descent by a police officer. Parties across the political spectrum compared the notion to authoritarianism.

Latin America

Diana Baptista, Mexico correspondent

The Argentine Chamber of Deputies approved the 'Olympia Law', which incorporates the concept of "digital violence" into national legislation on women's safety.

If approved by the Senate as expected, Argentina will become the second country in Latin America to approve this law which seeks to curb crimes such as revenge porn, use of deepfakes, and sextortion.

The legislation was first approved in Mexico in 2021 following efforts by Olimpia Coral Melo, a Mexican woman who fought to criminalize revenge porn after an intimate video of her was posted online in 2013 without her consent.