This is a work of fiction. Kira, Sabrina, Dr. Raines, the machine, the seventeen names — invented, all of them. The Starling Network is invented too.
The starlings are the only invention in that part of the story that required imagination. Mostly, I changed a name.
Automated license-plate-reading camera networks are real, and they are being adopted by cities and neighborhoods across the United States right now — usually for good reasons, usually with good results, usually by good people voting yes. The recoveries and rescues in this book's 2028 are modeled on the kinds of outcomes these systems genuinely produce. That part is not the warning. That part is why the warning is hard.
Here is the part I did not invent either: as of this writing, there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States. There is no law that broadly prevents companies from assembling detailed psychological profiles out of consumer surveillance data — where you go, what you linger on, what you watch, what you buy — and there is no law that broadly prevents those profiles from being used to deliver individually fitted political persuasion. The catalog page in 2037 is fiction. The market it describes is not.
The lawsuit that dies in eleven weeks is fiction. The doctrine that kills it — standing — is real, and it has ended real challenges to real surveillance programs.
The Fourth Amendment does offer a live route against government surveillance meshes: courts have begun to recognize, in cases about location tracking, that watching everyone everywhere all the time is different in kind from a cop on a corner. That argument is being made in courtrooms now, and it deserves support. But the Constitution restrains governments, not data brokers. The private market for the inside of your mind can only be closed by legislation — which means by people asking for it.
I don't think cameras are evil, and this book doesn't either. I think infrastructure outlives intentions. Everything in the dark branch happens without a single law being broken and without a single villain building anything — it is assembled out of reasonable steps and then, one election, inherited. If that possibility is worth preventing, prevention looks like unglamorous questions asked early, while asking is still easy:
Who owns the cameras in my city — the government, or a private company?
What data do they keep, and for how long?
Who is allowed to buy it, and who audits that?
Can I see what has been collected about me? Can I challenge it?
What happens to all of it when the administration changes?
Rosa said it in nine words, and I'll leave it with her: chickens don't lay right when they're watched. Nothing does.
Thank you for reading. It means more than I can say.
— Kaelion Lyra Vesper