FBI says utility pole surveillance cam locations must be kept secret
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
People in tech are in the best position to create some pushback on this, be it through lobbying as stubbornly single-issue voters, or creating some direct (legal) technical counter-measures. It's not that hard to tell which ones are bugged if you inspect the light poles closely, and threatening to imprison people who take pictures of public lightpoles would almost certainly create more backlash than they're willing to risk.
Or crowd-sourcing people to contribute photos from their neighbourhood and whenever they're out walking around.
A mobile app which:
a) captures GPS location and a photo upload
b) browse pictures like Tinder (with high-res zoom) and upvoting/commenting on ones you think are likely
c) browse (likely) utility poles near your location
Which is funny to me they try this anyway, how hard is it to get a warrant these days?
(IANAL) The majority opinion in Kyllo seems to have established that external surveillance featuring commercial, off-the-shelf devices did not require a warrant. Anything which features non-commercially available technology does.
Notably, Scalia dissented in his majority as arguing that even commercial availability (which changes as future tech popularizes) was a dangerous precedent to set and the line should be further in favor of home privacy. The dissent argued that the external nature of the surveillance made a warrant unnecessary.
Pretty difficult if you don't actually have a specific target
With the resources of modern IT, it renders the 4th Amendment almost useless: It only applies in your windowless, lead-lined basement, with communication coming in or out.
That, in itself, does not constitute stalking or invasion of privacy.
If we pass laws saying "No cameras in public," or "No stationary cameras in public," or "No cameras capable of storing more than X megabytes of image data per day in public," or "No public cameras equipped with OCR capability," then we will handicap ourselves far more than we will the police. (Who will, in any event, simply ignore any laws they find inconvenient.)
"... with no communication coming in or out."
While this logic, the "no expectation of privacy" principle, has long been the standard, and is certainly the logic law enforcement and businesses like Google push hard, I think we really do need to have a public discussion and consideration of how technology enabled Emergent Effects, with emphasis, creates new phenomena that are simply completely beyond the realm of human-oriented common sense that was operated under before. Yes, any single human has always in principle been able to happen to see an individual instance of something in view of public property, or follow somebody around, at any point throughout human history. With the advent of the camera, they could even possibly make a clearer, permanent record of that, but that didn't really change much either. Even simple basic video tape was a true shift.
But the ever increasing volume of storage and processing available at ever shrinking cost, combined with similar cost/quality improvements in sensors, objectively changes the situation. Even if it's 100% purely on public property where there is "no expectation of privacy" and involves nothing but video, a ubiquitous surveillance system plugged in to sufficient persistent storage and data processing creates capabilities that are on a different level. It equates to effective location tracking of any individual for a start, but additionally allows inferences to be drawn about everyone they meet with. It becomes possible to start back tracking people's relationship network graphs, and discerning all sorts of higher level private information. The most simple classic example would be knowing John Doe visited a private residence late at night with Jane Doe who is not his wife in a repeated pattern, and boom, blackmail material, but it could easily be used to make high-accuracy judgements on everything from health issues to private interests to overall group memberships.
This is a huge amount of potential power, and it's objectively something very very different from having a single warrant for an individual and having some investigators try to follow them around. Resource usage matters: in the end, all security is fundamentally an economic equation. If an adversary, or even an agency that nominally is supposed to be on "our side" can suddenly do a technique 100000x cheaper and more effectively then it cannot necessarily be judged by old standards. Emergent effects or properties that do not exist in a lesser collection of individual parts are a huge deal in all parts of our world, and they're becoming a big deal for information now too.
We really should not just allow "well, the police/military intel/investigators/big data corp are only doing what any individual could except a billion times more" to go unchallenged, because that "except a billion times more" is a huge deal. No, an individual human could never do that sort of thing themselves, or even with a huge group. Even the biggest, best funded police states of a half century ago, using far more intrusive techniques, couldn't manage the kind of efficient ubiquitous population categorization, information gathering and tracking now becoming possible "merely" through what's available from the sight of public roads. Don't dismiss what a change omniscience makes. I really hope the courts start to recognize that at some point what government is asking for is not a simple extension of what they've always had, it's something entirely new.
But, for me, there is something beyond strict legality. It's a question of what kind of society we want, and what kind of relationship the government should have with its people.
While I agree what happens on public streets should be open to the public there should however be privacy rules and such when the actor is government or a private entity operating on the behalf or working with the government
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/04/11/red-light-robin-hood-...
Good luck putting everyone in jail. But hey, we'll all be safer in cells, right? That's what this is for, isn't it? Our safety?
Have you looked at red light camera traffic death stats? This person cited in the story is correct.
Well then... I guess everything the FBI does should be withheld from public scrutiny because national security.
http://www.dailytech.com/Federal+Court+Cops+Cant+Spy+on+Your...
https://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/04/smile-yo...
And the Covert-Systems.com one is clever, but would take dangerous work to install properly. But then, it could maybe communicate via power grid.
Unless you mean how do you detect utility poles, in which case visually should suffice ;)
I can't imagine that putting stickers on utility poles is illegal ;)
But might be for something like this
But seriously, it'd be cool if someone could share a photo of one.
I'd rather see my government operating above the board (even if the records are sealed until trial) rather than casting a wide net and throwing back what they ought not have caught later.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-...
> Winn, meanwhile, wrote to Judge Jones that the location information about the disguised surveillance cams should be withheld because the public might think they are an "invasion of privacy."
If so, looking for infrared spotlights may be a good idea
E.g. - the War on Drugs going from somehow (merely) "keeping the peace" to Zero Tolerance and zero sense.
CCTV with a view of public areas in the UK are generally labelled with the operating agency's name and contact details.
Per the Information Commissioner's Office:
You must let people know when they are in an area where a surveillance system is in operation.
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1542/cc...
Even so, if you capture the public (you run a shop or other venue that invites the public in, or you have a camera capturing areas beyond your property), you need to label your cameras, and you will be subject to the Data Protection Act (and in a wider context, this is an implementation of the EU Data Protection Directive, so similar laws apply in all EU countries, though details may vary).
This means that you need to regularly assess whether there is an objective need for the camera, and register your data controller with the Information Commissioners Office. You'll need to have clear procedures for how you handle the data to ensure compliance. You need to ensure the data is stored securely.
You need to ensure the public can't see monitors showing the camera feeds unless the cameras are placed in public in the immediate vincinity (e.g. store cameras with visible monitors are fine; visible monitors with camera feeds from elsewhere is not without ensuring people are not recognisable)
You also need to deal with Subject Access Requests - basically anyone can file a request with you to obtain copies of footage of themselves, with minor restrictions, within 40 days, and charging no more than 10 pounds.
Public authorities are further subject to Freedom of Information requests.
And you need to ensure retention is as short as possible for your intended use.
So while we're filmed a lot, there are lots of safeguards and a lot of the restrictions are aimed at making it beneficial to retain as little as possible for as short as possible (e.g. if you only have a 24h loop you save yourself the hassle of anyone filing a subject access notice more than 24h after they believe they were filmed)
Doesn't mean I like it, but most of the time when the high amount of UK CCTV is brought up, people have a very skewed idea of the actual impact it has because it seems people have this idea of widespread networked government monitored cameras, while most of them are only rarely ever looked after a crime has occurred.
(Most cameras are private, for example in a shop. I don't know if anyone has a list of these.)
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/fixed_cctv_camera_loc...
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/surveillance%3Atype=ca...
I'd like some protections on it though. Like deleting the data after 5 days, or requiring a warrant to look at it. No one should look at live. And the cameras shouldn't be better than what google maps or a person in a low flying plane could see.
It makes it possible to solve a huge number of crimes much easier. People spend so much energy living in fear of crime. Kids aren't allowed outside anymore, housing is segregated, etc. Irrational or not, anything that decreases people's fear without being too invasive is a huge positive.
yet
>> Irrational or not, anything that decreases people's fear without being too invasive is a huge positive.
I don't think people really live in that much fear, or should. I also don't want their fear to dictate what my definition of invasive is.
Give them time.
The thing is, they mostly dont keep months of footage, its too expensive to store that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consi...
But destruction of government property is a crime.
Surely that is illegal (destruction of property or something, with no reference to the fact that it is an FBI camera), whereas preventing the disclosure of something that you won't even acknowledge exists is probably harder to prosecute.