My car was stolen in Seattle and it was found with the person driving it when he was pulled over by police. In the car he had paperwork with his name on it, a weapon, and his work uniform in the trunk with a name badge (he was a security guard - lol) along with a neighborhood witness.
Despite a mountain of evidence, the prosecutors declined to press charges because without direct video evidence of him stealing the car, they would not get a jury to convict, because jurors in Seattle have become accustom to thinking that the only way to overcome reasonable doubt is to have it on video. And even that often isn't enough...
You know, sometimes, you just gotta get to work and the busses just aren't going to get you there in time. /s
I was in a jury pool not in Seattle for a guy that already pled guilty for GTA, so it was just the sentencing part. The defense attorney asked if I thought it might be possible to sentence the minimum. I said yes. The prosecutor asked if I thought I could give the the maximum sentence of 99 years. I said for stealing a car? I was bounced from the pool. So maybe juries in Seattle have had their fair share of prosecutorial shenanigans as well???
> Each surveillance technology in our field guide includes the following categories to help you “spot” surveillance technology in the wild
One shouldn't trust their eyes alone to spot all the hidden cameras that private property owners love to have covering the streets. For example, it took me months to realize that a tenant in my own building has three cameras pointed down from the windows of their unit and can track my every coming and going if they so wish, and that's an environment I have my eyes on every single day.
I have a modified Olympus OM-D E-M5Ⅱ MFT camera body that I picked up on a whim because it came with a bunch of lenses and batteries and other things I wanted to use with my PEN-F, and it turned out to be amazing for spotting hidden surveillance cameras.
The way it works is that the underlying camera sensor can see IR by design, and an IR-cut filter is installed over it to restrict it to the visible spectrum for photography. The mod simply opens up the camera body and removes that part. Surveillance cameras in dark rooms (or at night on the street) then show up as bright spots, because the modified body can see the ring of IR LEDs they use to illuminate dark scenes for night surveillance.
I don't have any surveillance-spotting images to share, because I usually only do that via the viewfinder live preview (because tbh a photo of an all-black room with a single bright IR blob isn't interesting enough to shoot), but for example here is my IR photo of the Windows XP “Bliss” hill (near the Sonoma/Napa border) both as-shot and after channel mixing:
I've rented modified cameras for using to shoot the night sky multiple times. Without fail, the weather for the dark sky that I've rented gear has been shite overcast, rainy, and one time even flooded the location. It has been a waste of money every. single. time.
One day, I'll actually get to use a modified camera body for purpose I just know it
> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.
[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]
It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).
Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.
I think it's clear what it means but indeed it's formulated in a critical theory framework (see also "male gaze" in feminist theory) that makes it seem more complicated.
Yes, they take camera images and videos and there is value judgment regarding the behaviors.
Reading between the lines, the authors criticize the approach of law enforcement around drug use and dealing, living on the street in tents etc.
But the language makes it sound like special academic expert language and hence automatically right and high prestige.
Agreed. I have a read a lot of social/political theory and I am sick of this language. These are academic/philosophical tropes presented as if they were scientific findings. Even when the ideas are interesting, the Theoretical baggage gets in the way and the result is at best clumsy and at worst insufferably pompous.
I try to make a habit of gently reminding academics I know how badly this gets in the way of communication with non-academic people and ends up hindering the transmission of their ideas. To be honest, I think quite a lot of academics wind up communicating this way because they're subconsciously looking for positive feedback from their colleagues and so slip into the abstruse language of the classroom without realizing it.
What came to mind is a camera pointed at the cash register tells a very different story than the camera pointed at the ATM, or pointing from the ATM for that matter. Placement and the stories behind them offer interesting perspectives on what the observers are trying to catch or deter.
America needs to realize that this is absolutely not the land of the free anymore. The government and big business are in cahoots to screw you out of every cent they can and to make sure you're not about to commit some unspeakable act of terror, like hold up the wrong protest sign.
There are too many technical inaccuracies in this to take it serious (or to try and address them all here). Directionally it is fairly accurate, but the author clearly has very little knowledge of surveillance cameras, their capabilities, or even broadly how to identify ALPR vs. traffic control cameras (and similar nuances).
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about statements like these which seem to assume the reader is incredibly uninformed and naive, to the point of condescension.
"sends the information to a central storing place (called a database)" TIL what the word database means?
"Amazon can use your purchases to know more about you using patterns." Is this news to someone? Condescending.
"It might be connected to a network (via Internet or radio frequency)" Radio frequency and Internet are not really directly comparable
Also don't like that the site hijacks the appearance of my mouse pointer, which feels similarly disrespectful of the reader.
> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you!
Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.
And most modern devices randomize MAC addresses ("Wi-Fi addresses" in Apple-ese, for probably obvious reasons) between networks, and even between broadcasts/connections to the same network.
Correct. All major OSes stopped broadcasting the preferred SSID list by 2017, with Android and Linux being the last. Apple stopped in 2014. Windows by 2009.
Still somehow was "impossible" for the Seattle police to recover security camera footage of my bike being stolen under the light rail station security camera.
Flat black circles on top of traffic signal control boxes, which are large, gray or painted metal boxes, typically found at street corners.
The Acyclica device casts a fake Wi-Fi network and tracks phones that try to join the network in passing cars. Since each phone has a unique identifier …, different Acyclica installations can track your personal location as you pass them in the city.
Is iOS latest susceptible on default settings? w/“Rotating” “Private Wi-Fi Address“
For everyone interested in this topic: with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance, anyone can easily see and update surveillance camera's in OpenStreetMap
They clearly have an agenda, but also openly acknowledge that public surveillance is a two sided coin, balancing public safety and convenience with privacy. Some of the risks they identify are real, but others are unabashedly exaggerated.
I still feel so conflicted on things like the Flock cameras. On one hand I understand that they have the capability of incredibly enhancing the ability for police departments to solve more crimes. Especially things related to vehicle theft, they could likely track down your stolen vehicle very quickly especially if they have a wide network of cameras.
However, my concern is always about the possibility for misuse. Even if I trust the current government, it doesn't mean I will trust a future one. What if they use the technology to track/monitor people like investigative journalists? We've already seen a recent state passing bills that would make it harder for investigative journalism to happen. So it's not even out of the realm of possibility for this technology to get used in ways that even would be deemed "legal" as they can simply expand the laws to use it unreasonably in the future.
There is also the other obvious concern which is surrounding things like data breaches or other unauthorized access issues. There have already been many people exposing some large security flaws in a lot of the devices currently out there.
Where I am stuck is how do we balance the huge set of benefits that can come from this kind of tech, with the tradeoffs? Ultimately this tech is unlikely to stop being implemented as governments and even most of the population is largely unbothered by mass surveillance. I almost don't even bother bringing up discussions on these topics with non-tech people as I have yet to find someone who seemed to care at all about this. If anything they are very in support of this technology being implemented as they seem unable to understand the tradeoffs due to it often requiring more technical knowledge. They just see all the positives it can give, and don't grasp the negatives.
Ultimately people usually desire safety, and these cameras definitely can give people more safety. Is it possible to balance safety with proper privacy safeguards?
What if instead of trying to figure out how to catch criminals, we focus on building a society where no one wants to be a criminal? Can we find solutions to what causes crime, like desperation, greed, fear, failure to understand and have compassion for other people, etc?
A lot of European countries manage it just fine. There can be reasonable rules and regulations put in place, but America usually waits until the worst harms have already occurred before regulating. It has already been heavily abused by the government/ICE. Hopefully we still have a functioning electoral system to make the necessary changes.
On one hand I understand that they have the capability of incredibly enhancing the ability for police departments to solve more crimes.
Do they?
There are millions of these cameras all around the country, yet when pressed about their value, Flock and cops can only point to one or two crimes prevented/solved at a time. And they're usually things like "caught a burglar after the fact," or "stopped someone from dumpster diving."
Also the gorilla example from many years ago makes it seem like the author just superficially follows this stuff from the media. It was a single instance of misclassification in a widely deployed photo categorization model, not some reproducible trend with the models.
The more eyes the better the chances. Obviously it’s not total information awareness the likes one of the previous DNIs dreampt about. We see its imperfection if the fact that a very public case in an Arizona abduction case is basically cold. They basically have zero leads -which is pretty incredible in this day and age.
Based on context on their site, this looks like it was generated in ~2019 from data gathered before that, and some stuff in it is out of date as other comments mention.
I think this is just the new normal.
My car was stolen in Seattle and it was found with the person driving it when he was pulled over by police. In the car he had paperwork with his name on it, a weapon, and his work uniform in the trunk with a name badge (he was a security guard - lol) along with a neighborhood witness.
Despite a mountain of evidence, the prosecutors declined to press charges because without direct video evidence of him stealing the car, they would not get a jury to convict, because jurors in Seattle have become accustom to thinking that the only way to overcome reasonable doubt is to have it on video. And even that often isn't enough...
so cameras are useless, but everywhere
You know, sometimes, you just gotta get to work and the busses just aren't going to get you there in time. /s
I was in a jury pool not in Seattle for a guy that already pled guilty for GTA, so it was just the sentencing part. The defense attorney asked if I thought it might be possible to sentence the minimum. I said yes. The prosecutor asked if I thought I could give the the maximum sentence of 99 years. I said for stealing a car? I was bounced from the pool. So maybe juries in Seattle have had their fair share of prosecutorial shenanigans as well???
> Each surveillance technology in our field guide includes the following categories to help you “spot” surveillance technology in the wild
One shouldn't trust their eyes alone to spot all the hidden cameras that private property owners love to have covering the streets. For example, it took me months to realize that a tenant in my own building has three cameras pointed down from the windows of their unit and can track my every coming and going if they so wish, and that's an environment I have my eyes on every single day.
I have a modified Olympus OM-D E-M5Ⅱ MFT camera body that I picked up on a whim because it came with a bunch of lenses and batteries and other things I wanted to use with my PEN-F, and it turned out to be amazing for spotting hidden surveillance cameras.
The way it works is that the underlying camera sensor can see IR by design, and an IR-cut filter is installed over it to restrict it to the visible spectrum for photography. The mod simply opens up the camera body and removes that part. Surveillance cameras in dark rooms (or at night on the street) then show up as bright spots, because the modified body can see the ring of IR LEDs they use to illuminate dark scenes for night surveillance.
I don't have any surveillance-spotting images to share, because I usually only do that via the viewfinder live preview (because tbh a photo of an all-black room with a single bright IR blob isn't interesting enough to shoot), but for example here is my IR photo of the Windows XP “Bliss” hill (near the Sonoma/Napa border) both as-shot and after channel mixing:
- https://i.ibb.co/23t4HdrZ/P5160220-1.jpg
- https://i.ibb.co/1Yw8RFLS/P5160220-2.jpg
Not affiliated with and have never purchased from this store, but here are bodies converted for every system: https://www.lifepixel.com/product-category/converted-cameras
I've rented modified cameras for using to shoot the night sky multiple times. Without fail, the weather for the dark sky that I've rented gear has been shite overcast, rainy, and one time even flooded the location. It has been a waste of money every. single. time.
One day, I'll actually get to use a modified camera body for purpose I just know it
I wonder what they mean by this?
> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.
My best guess would be
[[Surveillance cameras normalize/denormalize behavior in a way that is easily biased and undemocratic.]]
It might e.g. direct the full force of law against a drunk urinating on a tree (easy to spot/classify), while tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language (missing data/difficult to detect).
Letting automated surveillance systems judge people will inevitably influence our own collective judgement.
> acting bizarre and dangerous
The problem with surveillance like this becomes "who gets to decide what is bizarre and dangerous?"
I think it's clear what it means but indeed it's formulated in a critical theory framework (see also "male gaze" in feminist theory) that makes it seem more complicated.
Yes, they take camera images and videos and there is value judgment regarding the behaviors.
Reading between the lines, the authors criticize the approach of law enforcement around drug use and dealing, living on the street in tents etc.
But the language makes it sound like special academic expert language and hence automatically right and high prestige.
Agreed. I have a read a lot of social/political theory and I am sick of this language. These are academic/philosophical tropes presented as if they were scientific findings. Even when the ideas are interesting, the Theoretical baggage gets in the way and the result is at best clumsy and at worst insufferably pompous.
I try to make a habit of gently reminding academics I know how badly this gets in the way of communication with non-academic people and ends up hindering the transmission of their ideas. To be honest, I think quite a lot of academics wind up communicating this way because they're subconsciously looking for positive feedback from their colleagues and so slip into the abstruse language of the classroom without realizing it.
There's a PG essay related to this: https://paulgraham.com/orth.html
What came to mind is a camera pointed at the cash register tells a very different story than the camera pointed at the ATM, or pointing from the ATM for that matter. Placement and the stories behind them offer interesting perspectives on what the observers are trying to catch or deter.
I miss when every second comment on hn didn't sound like a cop
Gaze language needed to be fleshed out perhaps
>> enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”
> What a normal person sees here
The post is talking about you.
America needs to realize that this is absolutely not the land of the free anymore. The government and big business are in cahoots to screw you out of every cent they can and to make sure you're not about to commit some unspeakable act of terror, like hold up the wrong protest sign.
Edit: case in point by https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-oracle-co-...
Where do you suggest we move to then, China?
There are too many technical inaccuracies in this to take it serious (or to try and address them all here). Directionally it is fairly accurate, but the author clearly has very little knowledge of surveillance cameras, their capabilities, or even broadly how to identify ALPR vs. traffic control cameras (and similar nuances).
"The Acyclica device casts a fake Wi-Fi network and tracks phones that try to join"
an incorrect start to a bunch of incorrect/outdated info
Lots of po-mo art-school language on this site about “encoding ways of seeing” and “gazes.”
The content itself is somewhat interesting but imo plain language would be more accessible.
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about statements like these which seem to assume the reader is incredibly uninformed and naive, to the point of condescension.
"sends the information to a central storing place (called a database)" TIL what the word database means?
"Amazon can use your purchases to know more about you using patterns." Is this news to someone? Condescending.
"It might be connected to a network (via Internet or radio frequency)" Radio frequency and Internet are not really directly comparable
Also don't like that the site hijacks the appearance of my mouse pointer, which feels similarly disrespectful of the reader.
It's a very strange mix of overexplaining basic concepts and in-depth details. I suspect AI.
> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you!
Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.
And most modern devices randomize MAC addresses ("Wi-Fi addresses" in Apple-ese, for probably obvious reasons) between networks, and even between broadcasts/connections to the same network.
Correct. All major OSes stopped broadcasting the preferred SSID list by 2017, with Android and Linux being the last. Apple stopped in 2014. Windows by 2009.
Still somehow was "impossible" for the Seattle police to recover security camera footage of my bike being stolen under the light rail station security camera.
No.
For everyone interested in this topic: with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance, anyone can easily see and update surveillance camera's in OpenStreetMap
Surprisingly milquetoast list given the title
They clearly have an agenda, but also openly acknowledge that public surveillance is a two sided coin, balancing public safety and convenience with privacy. Some of the risks they identify are real, but others are unabashedly exaggerated.
I still feel so conflicted on things like the Flock cameras. On one hand I understand that they have the capability of incredibly enhancing the ability for police departments to solve more crimes. Especially things related to vehicle theft, they could likely track down your stolen vehicle very quickly especially if they have a wide network of cameras.
However, my concern is always about the possibility for misuse. Even if I trust the current government, it doesn't mean I will trust a future one. What if they use the technology to track/monitor people like investigative journalists? We've already seen a recent state passing bills that would make it harder for investigative journalism to happen. So it's not even out of the realm of possibility for this technology to get used in ways that even would be deemed "legal" as they can simply expand the laws to use it unreasonably in the future.
There is also the other obvious concern which is surrounding things like data breaches or other unauthorized access issues. There have already been many people exposing some large security flaws in a lot of the devices currently out there.
Where I am stuck is how do we balance the huge set of benefits that can come from this kind of tech, with the tradeoffs? Ultimately this tech is unlikely to stop being implemented as governments and even most of the population is largely unbothered by mass surveillance. I almost don't even bother bringing up discussions on these topics with non-tech people as I have yet to find someone who seemed to care at all about this. If anything they are very in support of this technology being implemented as they seem unable to understand the tradeoffs due to it often requiring more technical knowledge. They just see all the positives it can give, and don't grasp the negatives.
Ultimately people usually desire safety, and these cameras definitely can give people more safety. Is it possible to balance safety with proper privacy safeguards?
What if instead of trying to figure out how to catch criminals, we focus on building a society where no one wants to be a criminal? Can we find solutions to what causes crime, like desperation, greed, fear, failure to understand and have compassion for other people, etc?
What's that quote about essential Liberty and temporary Safety again...
A lot of European countries manage it just fine. There can be reasonable rules and regulations put in place, but America usually waits until the worst harms have already occurred before regulating. It has already been heavily abused by the government/ICE. Hopefully we still have a functioning electoral system to make the necessary changes.
Kind of moot if, when the police allegedly call you to report finding your stolen car, they use misleading caller ID and don't leave a message.
On one hand I understand that they have the capability of incredibly enhancing the ability for police departments to solve more crimes.
Do they?
There are millions of these cameras all around the country, yet when pressed about their value, Flock and cops can only point to one or two crimes prevented/solved at a time. And they're usually things like "caught a burglar after the fact," or "stopped someone from dumpster diving."
Get back to me when they find Samantha Guthrie.
https://github.com/stanford-policylab/surveilling-surveillan...
Saying that patterns are dangerous because they can reinforce stereotypes sounds a lot like you are saying the stereotypes are true.
Also the gorilla example from many years ago makes it seem like the author just superficially follows this stuff from the media. It was a single instance of misclassification in a widely deployed photo categorization model, not some reproducible trend with the models.
If the survelliance tech is so great, why post amber alert messages with the license plate numbers all over all highways to help find the car?
The more eyes the better the chances. Obviously it’s not total information awareness the likes one of the previous DNIs dreampt about. We see its imperfection if the fact that a very public case in an Arizona abduction case is basically cold. They basically have zero leads -which is pretty incredible in this day and age.
Based on context on their site, this looks like it was generated in ~2019 from data gathered before that, and some stuff in it is out of date as other comments mention.
This is out of date, Amazon Go has shut down. RIP to some really cool tech.
> Amazon Go has shut down
Good riddance.