HN

Comments (191)

• senderista
  BTW, you can drive around in Seattle with no plates at all and police are not allowed to pull you over ("primary stops" are forbidden[1]).[1] https://westseattleblog.com/2022/01/heres-what-spd-isnt-like...
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  nostromo
  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...
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  smithkl42
  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.
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  titzer
  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-...
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  shermantanktop
  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.
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  throwaway-blaze
  I don't like needless surveillance either but we have people (and kids!) getting shot all over the city, and juries and judges that won't do anything without video or photographic evidence of the crime. I am literally willing to trade some of my liberty for safety in this case. When crime is under control, let's discuss getting rid of them (which I know is farfetched).
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  xx_ns
  > 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.
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  brk
  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).
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  Fogest
  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?
• mips_avatar
  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.
• richardfey
  > To do this, your device is shouting to the world a ton of your personal information in something called a probe packet. 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!In the 2010s, maybe. Nowadays MAC address randomisation is the norm and past WiFi networks are not broadcast anymore.
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  richard_chase
  Saying that patterns are dangerous because they can reinforce stereotypes sounds a lot like you are saying the stereotypes are true.
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  Lammy
  > Each surveillance technology in our field guide includes the following categories to help you “spot” surveillance technology in the wildOne 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.jpgedit: Fine, link to web store removed at behest of shithead [dead] commenter. Find your own if you want one. If you must know, I got mine from Seawood Photo in San Rafael. How's this for an ad if you're so fucking bothered? – I'm Lammy and this is my favorite camera shop in the San Francisco Bay Area: d(^^ ) https://www.seawood.shop/ ( ^^)b
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  SauntSolaire
  Surprisingly milquetoast list given the title
• pietervdvn
  For everyone interested in this topic: with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance, anyone can easily see and update surveillance camera's in OpenStreetMap
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  Barbing
  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“
• marssaxman
  I walked around downtown Seattle twenty-five years ago helping my ex-wife make a survey like this, cataloging & photographing surveillance devices for a project she was working on. I wonder whatever came of it. Even then, it was difficult to get very far without passing through the view of some security camera or other.
• anon
  undefined
• metalrain
  Isn't any camera with low enough angle good for license plate reading with additional software?
• corprew
  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.
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  tpolm
  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?
• haossr
  https://github.com/stanford-policylab/surveilling-surveillan...
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  zeafoamrun
  This is out of date, Amazon Go has shut down. RIP to some really cool tech.
• cyberax
  This is an example of a political science phenomenon: delegation of authority.The state itself can't deal with a problem (sky-high nuisance and property crime rates) so people are taking the issue into their own hands. That's also why all this video surveillance startup that shall remain unnamed is still doing quite well: a lot of people WANT cameras to watch every movement in the streets.What is the fix? Solve the original problem: highly visible property crime by repeat offenders.
• mertleee
  [dead]
• nobody_r_knows
  [dead]
• GenericDev
  [dead]