Welcome to SUS, or Southern Tier United for Responsible Surveillance.

We are a local activist organization in Binghamton in the Southern Tier of New York. We are against surveillance capitalism and mass surveillance by Big Tech companies and the federal government, and in favor of responsible surveillance, where people have control over their own surveillance and it is not connected in mass databases. We do not oppose all use of surveillance technology but we oppose misuse or abuse of surveillance technology like what is currently going on in our area, all over the United States, and around the entire world.

A reference book about surveillance capitalism is a book by Shoshana Zuboff called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in which she coined the term. A related concept is “enshittification”, coined by longtime privacy activist Cory Doctorow, a founding member of the pro-privacy organization The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which our local organization SUS has similar views to.

We are opposed to the use of cameras by the company Flock Safety and support the Stop Flock campaign, including advocating local governments in our area stop working with Flock Safety and stop using Flock cameras.

Another issue we have is with algorithmic wage and price discrimination, done by many companies, especially those in the gig economy like Uber and Lyft and DoorDash etc.

We also oppose most social media companies in their present form, such as those owned by Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, Twitter/X, Oracle/TikTok, etc., because of their mass surveillance, targeted ads, lack of any privacy, and personalized algorithmic rabbit holes to put each person in their own misinformation bubble and cut people off from each other and any shared sense of a common reality or any shared community that includes everyone.

We do not like the way almost all smartphones are tracking devices, and advocate using alternatives like GrapheneOS phones or dumbphones that lack the hardware and software capabilities for tracking.

We advocate using secure messaging apps like Signal and secure browsers like Tor and the email and VPN services of Proton and using CryptPad as a secure collaborative document editing/sharing suite instead of something like Google Docs.

We highly recommend instead of using Microsoft Windows (especially discontinued versions like Windows 10), or using Apple macOS, switching to Linux for better privacy and security and using free and open-source software. We recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition as the operating system most people should use for desktop and laptop computers, because it is very user-friendly and easy to use and has been around for years and there are good support forums.

We also recommend the office suite LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office for desktop and laptop computers, as a free and open-source alternative with better privacy. Another recommendation is the image-editing software GIMP instead of Adobe Photoshop because it is free and open-source and much more private. We recommend the media player VLC Media Player as a free open-source media player to play videos and audio files that works on almost any operating system. Programs like LibreOffice, GIMP, and VLC Media Player are cross-platform, meaning they work in many different operating systems. Once you are used to using them instead of proprietary programs that are only for Windows or macOS, you will be ready to switch to Linux and be able to keep using all the same programs, making the transition from Windows or macOS to Linux much easier.

We have grave concerns over generative AI and how it is used for mass surveillance, particularly the gathering of training data has led to many changes in privacy policies by Big Tech companies to give their users less privacy than ever and use all of their data to train generative AI models. However, we do not completely oppose AI and are for the responsible use of AI. Responsible AI usage respects the privacy of users, does not track them, does not violate the copyrights of copyright holders or steal their data, and has very minimal environmental impact, meaning it has a low computational cost and is not wasteful.

An example of an extremely irresponsible AI project is OpenClaw (formerly called Clawdbot and Moltbot), a terrible AI project that is bad in every conceivable way, from terrible privacy and security to being incredibly wasteful and expensive, as well as going rogue and doing things its users did not authorize on its own. Nobody at all should use projects like OpenClaw under any circumstances. If you are going to use generative AI, some good harm reduction is using something like duck.ai by DuckDuckGo or Lumo by Proton which do not track you or use you for training data and only use models with very low environmental impact if you are on the free plans. That is a good way to do harm minimization if you are going to use generative AI models. Another way is to run open-source AI models on your own hardware without sending any data back home to the developers or any Big Tech companies.

As far as what search engine to use for web search, we currently advocate Brave Search because it does its own search indexing independently from Google or Bing and is not making API requests to them like DuckDuckGo (which uses Bing) and Startpage (which uses Google), and has more complete results than other independent search engines. However, the default settings of Brave Search are not the best for privacy. We recommend to go to Brave Search Settings and: 1. Turn off Safe Search to eliminate censorship. 2. Turn off Answer with AI to turn off unnecessary AI usage. 3. Turn off Anonymous local results to disable sharing location data for personalization. 4. Turn off Anoymous usage metrics to disable Brave Search itself from tracking you. Changing those 4 settings is necessary to get a private search experience from it that is independent of Big Tech companies like Google and Bing. We recommend using Brave Search with those settings in order to avoid being tracked by Big Tech companies when doing web search.

As far as our name, SUS, it is a partial acronym for Southern tier United for responsible Surveillance, which only uses 3 of the letters of our group’s full name to spell out SUS. This is meant to make people question things, to think how things are super sus among us, and how maybe we should do something about it like having emergency meetings like in the game Among Us. It is a joke acronym but also supposed to help get people to think, to arouse suspicion about all the things around us that are super sus (short for suspcious).

We have weekly emergency meetings among us every Tuesday at 6:15 pm to 7:30 pm, typically at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Binghamton in the Youth Room at the end of the long hallway on the back, at 183 Riverside Drive Binghamton, NY 13905. They are not technically emergency meetings, just regular meetings, but that is the meme from Among Us. Join us as we try to dismantle the system of surveillance capitalism written about by Shoshana Zuboff in her book.