Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move from Above | Hacker News Reader

Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move from Above

bloomberg.com

230 pointscoloneltcb87 comments

Still waiting for the blockbuster case where the all-seeing-eye saved the day? At some level this is being sold to the public. Are we getting what we paid for?

This technology should be nothing if not incredibly useful. The potential of abuse is so bad because it's so damn useful. So, if it's inevitable that it's going to be created, and inevitable that it's going to be abuse, can we at least try to ensure we use it for good as much as possible?

An all-seeing eye is perhaps too apropos....

'You are wise and powerful. Will you not take the Ring?’

'No!' cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. 'With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.' His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. 'Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.'

Here is another opinion on the matter, probably closer to how politicians would feel about it

‘And what business is it of yours, anyway, to know what I do with my own things? It is my own. I found it. It came to me. It is mine, I tell you. My own. My Precious. Yes, my Precious.’

--Bilbo Baggins

There was a great Radiolab episode [1] on this very technology about how this has saved the day multiple times in the civilian world. They also cover the questions you bring up. The radio hosts couldn't come up with a good answer on how to best use it. I highly recommend listening to the Radiolab episode in full.

[1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

Edit: Updated to only link to Radiolab. Note to Self's staff was just a guest. The Radiolab episode covers a lot more detail on the Juarez murder covered on the Bloomberg article.

This is Alan Dershowitz' argument for "torture warrants" [1] applied to pervasive surveillance.

If that association bothers you, please reconsider glossing over the assumption that pervasive surveillance is inevitable and unstoppable.

If anything, is it not less inevitable than abuses during a particular interrogation that rise to the level of torture? If we're unwilling to give torture the approval of regulation, we ought to be even more unwilling to give the less-inevitable pervasive surveillance that kind of approval.

[1] http://www.spectacle.org/0202/seth.html

(To clarify: I'm comparing the inevitability of individual acts of torture with pervasive surveillance, not inevitability of pervasive torture with particular technological ability to mass-surveil. Of course the technical ability to do something may be inevitable, but not the transformation of Western cities into Panopticons.)

I think it's a fair comparison, but here's where it breaks down. The technology already exists and is already widely deployed. I think the reporting has not kept up with the facts on the ground. If the battle against widespread deployment of cameras and microphones is already lost, it comes down to a utilization battle.

For now I think we see parallel construction obfuscating much the tech is actually being used and giving it cover against constitutional challenges. As that changes, the Supreme Court will have to grapple with how much of this Panopticonal evidence can be used in court.

Drive around the Bay Area and almost every single intersection has CCTV aiming down at driver's faces & license plates in all directions. I must assume that's all recorded indefinitely and also feeds license plate and facial recognition systems.

Torture (by US military and domestic police) already exists, and is employed more widely than the general populace seems to care about. This has been going on a long time. Is the fight against torture already lost, in which case we're just down to figuring out utilization?

> almost every single intersection has CCTV aiming down at driver's faces & license plates in all directions.

I'm not against trying to reign in the surveillance that exists. By all means, lets push for ways to do so. The difference we have is that you seem to be more interested in how best to use all this cool tech than in any sort of principle opposing it.

What is inevitable about all those street cameras? Do they just grow out of the poles like branches on trees?

Homeland Security grants fund the installation, so it's "free money" for the cities and states, which turning it down can cause negative press. In very limited circumstances we do see taking this free money too far can blow back on the city, like the case of buying surplus armored vehicles that serve no purpose and cost money to maintain.

But installing a camera is, on it's face, an ethically neutral point. So it's hard to motivate a strong political force against it. Maybe the analogy is that we're outfitting the interrogation rooms with bottled water, or maybe towels. The bottles of water or towels on their own are completely benign, and could even be used positively. Trying to stop the proliferation of bottled water is probably a lost cause.

So I think the key point we are disagreeing on is that while torture is inherently evil and wrong, CCTV is not, so I think your analogy is flawed. You can use torture towards a positive end, but that doesn't make the torture right, it's the ends justifying the means. You can use CCTV towards a positive end where the entire process is morally just from start to finish.

This is why I think while there's a fight to be fought against torture of any form, and it's a fight that humanity must win, in the case of surveillance it is not a fight over whether the capability will exist, because the price of total surveillance goes to zero over time, and the existence of total surveillance of its own right is morally neutral. It goes down to how the capability is utilized.

For example, we will eventually have the cryptographic and AI capabilities to implement strong controls over the utilization of a total surveillance apparatus to guarantee it confirms with constitutional requirements. Obviously there are many people (in government) who would not want to cede control over their surveillance systems to a program which guaranteed adherence to a strict code of conduct around how information is ingested, processed, correlated, and ultimately reported for further action. But it is not beyond our human technical capabilities to construct such a system over the next ~50 years, and clearly it would have an immense positive effect on solving and likely deterring many crimes.

http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Se...

The big equalizer in mature justice systems is a strict set of laws that regulate and restrict the instances in which evidence can be gathered and used in a courtroom. I think it's inevitable that technology is created, but not inevitable that it will be abused, at least, to the level we fear. However, this is ONLY if those checks are put into place. It requires a critical legislature to write balanced laws, and a strong judiciary that can hold investigators to account and throw out illegal uses of this technology in cases where it's abused.

An example of using it for good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHm_QOoFGAc

http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

Here is a really interesting episode where the technology was able to backtrack from the assassination of a police officer to the perps and resulted in arrests (iirc).

I know what my gut reaction to the always on camera in the ski technology is, but after examples like the above I'm not sure how my thinking brain feels about it yet.

I don't think the public cares anymore. They are numb from all the "think of the children" and "Terrorists, mmmmkay?"

This appears to be the FBI surveillance plane John Wiseman tracked using a BeagleBone black, an RTL-SDR dongle, dump1090 and PlanePlotter

https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/605825895295651840

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/how-i-tracked-fbi...

Correction: The FBI plane is not the primary focus of this article, but it is mentioned:

"Occasionally, [Persistent Surveillance's] Cessna has had to share airspace with an FBI airplane. Last year, two days after the Freddie Gray riots began, the FBI flew over Baltimore for five days—actions that were discovered when local aviation enthusiasts noticed a plane’s strange flight orbits on a public website that tracks radar data. According to information and footage released this summer by the FBI, its plane wasn’t doing the sort of wide-area motion imaging that Persistent Surveillance does but instead was zooming in on specific targets. McNutt says the FBI doesn’t coordinate its flights with him, and he doesn’t know what the agency is investigating; however, when his plane is in the air at the same time as the FBI’s, air traffic controllers insist that McNutt’s plane remain at a lower altitude than the federal craft."

It's interesting to note that FBI has released all of that footage to the public.

https://vault.fbi.gov/protests-in-baltimore-maryland-2015/un...

Is there any remote hope for a way to have this happen while preventing abuse? I am not in a very creative mood right now so I can't imagine a scenario where it's not quickly being used incredibly selectively (to "just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore"), or used to catalog protesters, bulk shipped to the nsa, or many other obvious forms of abuse.

Edit: and of course, where is the countersurveillance guide that examines easy techniques to evade a persistent and widespread aerial threat?

I'd go the other way -- is there any remote hope of stopping this from spreading, regardless of abuses? History has shown that on a long enough time line this will be abused. Under what authority do they operate these systems? Since when has persistent surveillance become permissible?

I feel like I'm going to end up a minority here, but this is not a good thing.

I would paraphrase it as, "unregulated indiscriminate use of surveillance" is not a good thing. And I'd agree, as did the authors of the Bill of Rights.

Like unwarranted multi-target wiretaps, surveillance of the general public without oversight is the real threat. One option is to demand that all surveillance be closely regulated (ideally by open courts), and police departments must get authorization before buying/renting any new ISR tech.

But until we elect more courageous pols who care more for their oath to uphold the Constitution than protecting their job with knee-jerk militarized responses that satisfy hysterical public backlash to crime, indiscriminate surveillance will only get lazier, more expensive, and more destructive to everyone who isn't dressed in black.

Hmm.. the complementary and problematic fact here is that technology has also shown that on a long enough timeline this will spread.

Seems like the only way to halt the spread would be to criminalize it. But since the justice system has repeatedly upheld specific cases of aerial surveillance, that has a good likelihood of becoming generalized without some executive or congressional action? Would anyone step up?

The potential of abusive use of technology is there for every single new technology, every single one. The question is how to best control it with somebody we can trust, and the use case is morally OK.

Who says it's not already being abused? We don't know how the system is secured, and it's staffed by entry-level temp workers hired by a private company with apparently no oversight.

It's also available to anyone with the money, from the company in the article or competitors.

(I assume there are no laws forbidding the system in the USA?)

For example, a large company could pay to track whether any of its employees attend a protest. An insurance company could measure whether policy holders are exceeding speed limits (approximately). A person could track the movements of their partner or relative.

While I admit that this kind of system can be abused, I am trying to think of a specific, believeable example of abuse. Having lived in Baltimore, I can say that city is literally besieged with crime of all kinds. Its hard to see how a staff worker could abuse the system without having access not only to the cessna cameras but also street cameras and police to do the footwork.

Maybe I'm not thinking about this correctly...

but couldn't you use this to stalk your spouse ??? Or neighbor ??? Or anyone else really ???

Could also be used to follow councilmen, or even representatives and senators around and document their meetings. Tip off the other party's operatives, (for a price), and have them waiting with photography equipment at the senator's next liaison.

I don't know ??? Maybe I've just got a more corrupt mind than everyone else ? But I could think of quite a few ways to abuse this system. And make a BOATLOAD of money while I'm at it.

GCHQ and NAS employees have been reprimanded in the past for using their databases to look up data on their friends and family(one employee used the database of cell phone locations to fill his own car usage sheet, it was easier than remembering all the locations he went to). It's not hard to imagine that people would use cameras in the sky to spy on their spouses, friends, or just use them for personal knowledge(is there traffic on the A1 today? Let's use this publicly funded spying equipment to find out!)

I could be used to stalk.

So could a private investigator, and while I don't know anything about PSS's pricing, a PI would probably be easier as well as cheaper. In this context, is one okay and the other not? Why, or why not?

While it's not ideal to model real life policies on television, the show Person of Interest actually covers a situation very similar to this. Instead of humans interacting directly with the information and system, the protagonist designs a black-box artificial intelligence (called The Machine) that utilizes NSA-provided feeds to classify persons as national security threats. The only information that law enforcement and the government receive is the social security number of the "person of interest."

By being a closed system, this kind of setup circumvents a lot of privacy issues. The AI acts as a neutral 3rd party (provided that the training set is neutral) in classifying individuals and actions. In addition, law enforcement retains full autonomy in deciding if and how to act on the information provided.

In that show, law enforcement get the full data. The reason the story protagonist only gets SSNs is that this is the only data that can be siphoned out of the system to him undetected, which is necessary as he is using the data without the approval of the NSA.

Not so. The major plot arc of the last three seasons originates in the fact that law enforcement only gets SSNs too, and finds this insufficient.

In your example it's art imitating life, and there is indeed a neutrality problem:

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

>easy techniques to evade a persistent and widespread aerial threat?

This particular system is very easy to fool. Just walk into some crowded place, wait a moment, and walk out.

Crowded places often have cctv, they could track you enter and leave. Then continue following you from above as before.

It would be harder though.

Enemy of the state anti surveillance 101: Walk under a bridge

Check first if that bridge doesn't have cameras there.

>“Let’s go get some dirt bikes, Sarge!”

To better understand this reaction and why the police want to use this technology to their advantage in winning the cat-and-mouse game with Baltimore's urban dirt bikers, see the documentary film "12 O'clock Boys".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOMQY6k16TU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_O'Clock_Boys

There's an easy way to prevent abuse: require the data to be made available to the public in real time. It's not surveillance I object to, it's the coupling of information asymmetry with unaccountability.

Maybe when people start flying their own drones and the data gets aggregated into OpenStreetMap (or some similar project), there will be a decent motivation for transparency.

After all, if the police forces are doing nothing wrong, what do they have to fear from continual public surveillance? ;)

Seems there are many variants of this type of tech. PBS [1 - video] had once called AGRUS [2 - wiki] (looks older 2013 and more advanced). They also deployed something like this in Rio for the Olympics [3 - blog/video].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13BahrdkMU8

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

[3] http://www.sporttechie.com/2016/08/01/surveillance-blimps-to...

"[..] and the funding came from a private donor."

That it's interesting.

Is just somebody with interest in the company that provide the service, in the line of "the first one is for free"?

Because, otherwise, I can't think who could be funding this or their reasons.

If you would have read the article:

> John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made billions before he retired in 2012. Since then, the Arnolds have funded a variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension rollbacks and charter schools.

Doesn't sound like a pro-privacy activist...

>Doesn't sound like a pro-privacy activist...

Well, funding putting cameras in the sky supports that certainly, but what do pensions and charter schools have to do with privacy?

If anything I'd imagine teachers unions are full of the "think of the children" types that encourage these sorts of surveillance.

You are right. It seems I skipped that part.

I'm fine with this because all the data is encrypted until representatives from all three branches of government agree to unlock it (and even then it only decrypts the last 7 days).

Oh, wait.

Explanation given for why this is not a threat to civil liberties is:

resolution is limited to "one pixel per person"!

Wait for it... wait for it... 5 years and it will be 30px x 30px per person.

You mean 30x30Mp?

1x1px is enough to track person.

30x30px is enough to run face detection and recognition.

Can't see how 30x30Mpx would be useful? To see what products they is holding in a basket probably. They would be interested in your pressure cooker probably.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-polic...

It's a foot in the door.

1px is all you need: the article cites instances where they track a pixel to a ground-based camera to get a higher res image.

Classic social engineering tactic.

Its been a long time, but in 1988 Sierra Online had a game that featured just this.

Tracking "criminals" from above, following the signal from their implants and their every move until they disappeared underground.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/manhunter-new-york

I am as concerned about privacy as next person, but I would have thought that this is similar to what the satellites are already collecting for NSA, CIA and similar (and their counterparts in other countries).

Is flying Cessna planes really the optimal way of obtaining images? Why not drones (if you can't get satellites)? Or is this just MVP with room for optimization?

NSA, CIA and all their friends exist for the sole reason that they can't spy on Americans. That's why they exist, because the constitution doesn't apply to foreigners. They would be a walking terrorist organisation otherwise.

So your question becomes "why can't the police do what the intelligence services already do?" and the obvious answer is that "because then they stop being police and are instead secret police or Gestapo".

>NSA, CIA and all their friends exist for the sole reason that they can't spy on Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.#NSA_mon...

Theres the legal theory and then there is the 100 years worth of experience with intelligence agencies, which is that they are mostly useless and will over time expand their influence and power and dig under the pillars of democracy.

Satellites are in orbit, so can't be used if you want more than a few minutes of continuous surveillance.

Drones have an iffy legal status. Using a piloted light aircraft gets rid of that uncertainty.

There are over 400 satellites in geostationary orbit, so maybe some of those could be used. However, that places them so high that photography might not be practical.

This ain't your Daddy's 'The Wire' IRL.

Is this really a surprise? PSS activity has been documented for years.[0]

Good rule of thumb: If it's not illegal, people will do it if it is profitable.

[0]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/a-tivo-for-crime-...

I don't see anyone claiming to be surprised the technology exists, the notable thing is the update on the deployment progression of WAPS systems on civilian populations in the US.

I believe the newsworthy thing here is that the system has been in active use in Baltimore for the entire year 2016 so far, which is a surprise, in contrast to the 2014 article you linked that reported the company had "no active contracts inside the United States".

It also says:

"[McNutt] is lobbying 10 US cities—he won’t name them, apart from Chicago—for longer contracts. He’s also dangling a sizable carrot in front of them: a new analysis center that would have “hundreds” of jobs and would act as a command center for all of the company’s operations nationwide."

Obviously one of those was Baltimore. Is it a leap to think that there may be others? Not to be crass, but this isn't gumshoe detective work here. He told us what his company was doing.

In light of Snowden leaks, this is just another piece in what appears to be a global panopticon construction project.

There's worse things than Snowden's revelations though, like cheerfully donating your organs to a government that executes you over some religious aerobics classes. [1]

I hope this whole panopticon thing doesn't get finished until after we can grow organs in vitro, rendering my donations moot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

I don't understand what you're saying here. I don't see the connection between organ harvesting and the construction of a global panopticon.

You also seem to be supporter of such a panopticon. Could you explain why? Or are you just trolling?

He's saying, I think, that it's worth keeping a sense of perspective - that there are much worse things than being watched. He's not wrong there.

Comparing to the lowest common denominator to feel better about something is often akin to denial.

No doubt. But I've had a while to consider this possibility, having noticed general aviation aircraft loitering over Baltimore for some time now and half surmised something like this may be going on, and you know what? I'm fine with it. Being watched from the sky is hardly ideal, I concede. But also worth considering, I think, is that the next time I get mugged, if there has to be a next time, maybe being watched from the sky will make it possible for the police to catch the son of a bitch who does it.

That's one of the things that can happen in Baltimore. It is far from the worst. Indeed, it, and things much worse, happen in Baltimore every day. Don't misunderstand me here - media depictions aside, this is a wonderful city with which I fell in love very quickly, and where I expect and intend to continue living for the remainder of my life. But this is also a city, wonderful though it be in many ways, in which many bad things happen to many innocent people. Being observed from on high by our government bears a certain degree of potential danger, of course. There's an argument to be made, and I think a very cogent one, that that potential danger is outweighed by the very real danger evident in this city's crime statistics. I'm okay with being watched from the sky if it is likely to reduce that danger, and I think that it is.

I realize that people who have never been the victim of a violent crime may feel differently about this. I understand that their perspective on a matter such as this may well be different from mine. I also don't think it is unreasonable of me to regard their perspective as incompletely informed. Basing an argument around my personal experience is not something with which I'm wholly comfortable for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it's often deployed as a tactic against dissent. But there's also something to be said for the idea that there's only so much a virgin can be expected to know about sex. I don't really know if it's reasonable to expect there be a single right answer on a question like this one. But I certainly know where I come down on it.

I'm sorry to hear about your experiences and thank-you for being straight up.

First of all, I don't know your experiences and am in no way trying to cheapen them, but I too have been the victim of crime (a break in while I was sleeping and I woke up and screamed and woke up the house and assailants thankfully fled) and lots of treasured possessions were taken. If I'd been asked in the first year of that, I'd have let the government put cameras in my bathroom and the death penalty would not be enough for them. But of course as things have cooled off; I've moved on and found peace. And now the idea of giving away completely the right to private movement in the name of safety seems plain wrong.

Certainly that's fair enough. As I said before, I don't know that it makes sense to expect there be a single right answer to a question like this.

Your response neatly demonstrates the other primary reason I do not like to construct an argument around personal experience. Everyone's experience is unique, and such arguments are thus both unlikely to be convincing and weak in the extreme. To use such an argument was an error on my part which I even expected at the time I would probably regret, but I foolishly went ahead and did so anyway. Perhaps I will use better sense next time.

It is curious to me that you speak of a "right to private movement". This is an idea I find it difficult to comprehend, because the movements of which you speak are not private. They are public. They may largely have taken place unobserved heretofore, but I find it difficult to construct an argument for the idea that, simply because some, perhaps many, of your actions in public have not been seen up to now, this implies the existence of a positive right that such actions in public not be seen into the indefinite future. There is case law to the effect that you do not have a general right to privacy within the confines of a motor vehicle. What about a sidewalk is different?

Not sure about the legalities of a right to privacy in public spaces, although perhaps I could have used the word unobserved instead of the word private. For me the idea of observation goes hand in hand with the idea of self censure.

I would be interested to know why this is the case, or why it's a serious concern, because I really don't find myself able to comprehend it. The closest I can come is something like not wanting to adjust my trousers or scratch myself in a vulgar fashion if someone might see me doing it, but I doubt that's what you mean.

You don't ever self censor posts thinking a potential future employer might see it?

Now imagine having all your movements recorded(and possibly actions too). Who will have access to that info now and in future? Target? Facebook? Your parents? Your boss? Your wife/partner?

Most self-censoring and social conformity is done subconsciously as an important evolutionary survival mechanism, thus most people are completely unaware of it.

You want to cite a source for that at all?

Google "subconscious social conformity" and take your pick

Off topic

NO U

Good old "anonymous donor" providing third party technology to collect surveillance.

It still needs analysts to work; could they be replaced with machine learning?

Yes, 99.99% of the data analysis could be done with machine learning which could then send alerts to human operators once a certain pattern of interest is discovered.

Assuming a non-oppressive government I'm all for using this type of technology to stop crime. It is a very powerful tool that will really level the playing field. Many crimes are from repeat offenders and this will just help catch them quicker and more accurately. I suspect crime rates will drop dramatically as a result of these types of technologies.

As for privacy we already give more away just to have free online services. Think how much is tracked by Google through their searches, gmail, etc. by Facebook to use their free service. Apple, Microsoft, etc are all known to track all kinds of data on you. It's not like this isn't already happening.

They key is to make sure it's not abused, and I think for the most part in first world countries this won't be a big issue. That and the benefits will far outweigh the costs.

We just have to prevent it from escalating like in the South Park drone episode ;)

I guess the difference for me between Facebook, Google, etc. and the government, is that the former can't imprison me.

But I can choose not to participate with apple, MS, google, etc. And I do.

When did I opt-into surveillance?

The flip-side of that question is "When can I opt-in to surveillance if I really want that? Can my neighborhood watch be a real neighborhood watch, with collated telemetry and machine learning, but owned by private citizens?"

And then we're on the slippery slope to the burbclaves of Snow Crash. ;)

> I suspect crime rates will drop dramatically as a result of these types of technologies.

Just like how terrorism rates dropped after the PATRIOT Act?

All governments are oppressive to different extents.

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