The people behind the numbers.

"Surveillance technology does not exist in a vacuum."

Lindsey Isaacs, 23, of Palm Coast, Florida, spent 13 days in jail in 2026, part of it in solitary confinement, facing three counts of vehicular homicide for a crash she had nothing to do with. A Flock Safety plate reader had recorded her black Dodge Durango a few miles from the scene; investigators treated the record as a lead that needed no corroboration. Her car sat in a Florida Highway Patrol lot with no collision damage; photographs of it got the charges dropped. On 23 September 2026 she told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing "Always Watching" what the record did to her. The four plate-reader CEOs invited to the same hearing declined to appear. Flock says its data showed her car three miles away two minutes before the first 911 call and was exculpatory; she says investigators treated it as definitive. Her lawsuit against the Florida Highway Patrol is pending.

What the index sees: at step 3, a human with authority received the system's output and did not check it against the evidence that was already in custody. At step 4, the notification was the arrest. The system did its job; nobody in the chain had the duty to say no.

"She had never been to North Dakota."

Angela Lipps, 50, a grandmother from Tennessee, spent nearly six months in jail after a facial recognition search by Fargo, North Dakota police linked her to bank thefts in a state she says she had never visited. Her federal lawsuit, filed in September 2026 against the City of Fargo and a detective, seeks 10 million dollars and alleges that police treated a possible match as a positive identification without checking basic facts.

What the index sees: the same chain as Isaacs, with a face instead of a plate. A possible match became a certainty at the moment a person with authority declined to verify it, and the first notification the affected person received was custody. The founder of this project was identified by a facial recognition camera at a protest in Moscow in 2018 and has litigated that chain to the European Court of Human Rights; the American version differs in the technology's vendor, not in the absence of anyone who could say no.

"We do not accept appeals and cannot override the outcome of the Tenant Screening."

Mary Louis had a housing voucher and a long rental history. A score said no, and the management company wrote back that nobody could change it. She found a place two hundred dollars a month more expensive, in a worse area. In 2024 a court approved a settlement under which the score is no longer shown for anyone using a voucher.

What the index sees: the landlord had authority on paper and none in practice, so both sides score low. Recourse arrived only through a class action, years later.

More than a hundred applications. Every one closed by the same software.

Derek Mobley applied through platforms running one screening system and heard no from all of them. One rejection, according to his complaint, arrived in the middle of the night, less than an hour after he pressed submit. A court has let thousands of applicants over forty join his case and ruled that the vendor can be treated as the employer's agent.

What the index sees: the applicant did not know a machine was involved, so every later step scores near zero. The vendor is treated as the employer's agent, which is where responsibility for a human option now sits.

"From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income."

Between 2018 and 2022, when Uber's software suspected fraud or saw a rating fall below a threshold, it switched drivers off. No warning, no person. More than 170 French drivers took their case to a human rights league, then to the regulator. Six years later Uber was fined 825 million euros. The words are the regulator's.

What the index sees: nobody had a human option, not the driver and not the company. A small gap here is the worst result, and only a two-sided score shows it.

Silence counted as guilt.

From 2013 to 2015 Michigan's unemployment system flagged tens of thousands of people as fraudsters without a person reviewing a file. Questionnaires went to old addresses. Wages were garnished and tax refunds seized. The state later acknowledged that nobody had double-checked the computer, and in 2024 a court approved a 20 million dollar settlement.

What the index sees: an appeal existed on paper and failed in practice. Recourse depth, not the existence of an appeal, is what the scale measures.

"No one could say why."

A father and his daughter, living in their car, qualified for food assistance, emergency cash and Medicaid, and were denied all three. Each call ended without a person who could explain the decision or take responsibility for it. Legal aid lawyers later traced the denials to the state's automated eligibility system, which they say had been wrongly rejecting people by the thousands.

What the index sees: a decision with no reachable human at any step. Medicare's WISeR program, which began screening some services in six states on 1 January 2026, is the next case in this cluster.