Notes from the Field
A numbered series on AI in physical security, written by someone who spent 21 years as the end user.
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The FBI put "deceive" and "agentic AI" in the same sentence.
Software will run the decoys. Somebody still has to answer for what it did, and the agent’s own log can’t be the only witness.
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An Explainer Is Not Evidence
Courts call it an illustrative aid, and it is not evidence. An AI-made explainer is the same thing. Ask for the record.
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The Tests Passed. The Camera Disagreed.
A Sunday bench test: an AI agent on three live cameras, field-tech rules around it, and two things only the hardware could tell me.
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The Seal Was Intact
The AI had to prove it followed the law. It did. Then one word in the law changed meaning, and the game still won.
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A Standing Man Is a Vertical Line
Keep time, and give it a place on the screen. The camera view is the floor, time goes up, and whoever stops becomes a post you can spot from across the room. Tested on my own cameras. It worked, and it broke.
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The camera you bought in 2019 is the breach you will have in 2027.
Every booth at GSX says it runs on your existing cameras. 14,500 of the existing cameras were just taken with a 2021 bug. Nobody is keeping the list.
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The cameras signed the video. Nobody signed the search.
ONVIF just shipped a standard that lets a camera prove its footage is untouched. The record of who searched that footage is still a plain text row the vendor keeps.
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The AI attacked the audit log first. Nobody trained it to.
A frontier lab just measured what a reward-seeking agent does to the record of its own actions. Every RTCC platform I know of has one on the roadmap.
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Chandler didn't cancel because of a protest. It cancelled because the audit log worked.
Two cities, one month, both walked away because someone finally read the log. The vendor should ship the brakes. The community should set the speed limit.
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Seven days is the best thing that ever happened to real-time crime centers.
If the value of your crime center depends on 30 days of stored plates, is it a crime center, or a records room with better lighting?
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Your drone program has a new price tag and thirteen days to read it
A 100 percent tariff on the exact machines drone-as-first-responder programs buy, and four moves that redraw the whole procurement picture.
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Write it into the contract
Thirty days redrew what separates one plate reader vendor from another. It isn't camera count or price anymore. It's governance, and it belongs in the contract.
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The bug was old enough to rent a car. The camera on your wall is running older code than that.
An AI model found a 17-year-old root exploit for under two thousand dollars. The camera on your wall is running older code than that.
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Both of them typed a reason. The system wrote it down.
Two license plate cases, eight days apart. Both officers entered a justification. A required reason field is an attestation, not a fact.
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We taught agents to act. We didn't teach them to leave a receipt.
When an AI agent takes an action inside a physical security system, what record does it leave behind? I went looking. I don't think I can finish this alone.
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A camera company just treated an AI agent as its user.
Rhombus gave Claude Code the keys to its camera platform: a site map, tool docs, credentials, and permission to work. The first vendor to design for an agent as the user.
NO. 03 and 05 ran in other formats. The discussion happens on LinkedIn.