'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner': US DEA puts spycams in cleaner's kit | Hacker News Reader

'Say hello to my little vacuum cleaner': US DEA puts spycams in cleaner's kit

theregister.co.uk

101 pointssnazz29 comments

Ugh - the DEA is such a blight on American society. Who the hell is working for them?

As drug prohibition has become less popular, the DEA seems, at least to me, to be more desperate and childish. The raids on Amtrak trains are an example of this (which I myself suffered last year).

Can't we just end the drug war and have them go quietly like adults?

The whole 'war on X' meme should just go away. It is a ridiculous kind of analogy that implies that these things can be won, when in fact at best you can get to some kind of stalemate or a temporary advantage.

"war on X" is code for "let's ignore ethics".

https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillan...

This recent article asserts the DEA has placed cameras in traffic barrels and steer lights, and also mentions Cowboy Streetlight Concealments.

This is procurement for hardware for a DEA license plate monitoring system, linked in the above article.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=a0459e9...

As someone who casually follows the state of freedom and civil rights in the US the first thing that goes through my mind when I read a headline like this is "oh, so ICE and the ATF are doing this too". It's kinda sad that things have gotten this bad.

I’m unfamiliar with the badness of ATF. I haven’t seen any painfully embarrassing stories about ATF. What kinds of offenses have they committed?

Ruby Ridge and Waco are two of the more famous ATF misadventures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege

Operation Gunwalker/Fast and Furious is a pretty good head smacker: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

They'll have trouble getting audio. It's LOUD when the Shop-Vac's on.

That would be one very impressive DSP hack if you could eliminate the motor and other contact sounds. I highly doubt that you could cancel it out effectively but it is so tempting to try this to see how far you'd get.

A couple of approaches would be:

- bandpass filter in human voice range

- two mikes, only one facing outward, opposite polarity

- a lot of mechanical isolation

- a digital sample of the audio stored and subtracted from the input

And more such tricks. It would be a very interesting project to see how far you could push that.

My Amazon Echo can hear me fine over my vacuum cleaner, and far better than a human could. That makes me think general-purpose techniques alone might work.

Try strapping it to your vacuum cleaner, seeing how well it does.

Wiener/LMS filter

Lots of vibration too, seems like video would be difficult.

Part of me thinks this story is made up just to scare people. Why would it be public info if they were actually trying to catch people like this?

Everyone makes mistakes and this may have slipped through the cracks.

You're assuming they didn't just put a little rechargeable battery in the vacuum too. Id assume people weren't doing drug deals while people were shop-vacuuming. Id definitely want to be able to film while it was off.

Reminiscent of the comedic Graham Greene novel "Our Man in Havana" from the 1950s!

Quite.

"...video can be live-streamed - presumably to agents parked in a van nearby..."

How does this work? Does the camera act as an AP that a client can connect to? Or do you have to configure the camera to join an existing network that you control?

It could be over radio, analog or digital. Or perhaps some other em frequency. Or hyper-sonic transmission. Perhaps x-ray frequencies despite the poor irradiated cleaning lady. It doesn't have to be a script-kiddie solution.

Looks like it’s designed to connect to an existing network, assuming the DEA didn’t make any modifications to the device. You can see the specs at the Canon website: https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/products/d...

I bought a SQ-13 camera off AliExpress for $20ish, which streams over Wifi (it acts as an AP) and is about an inch by an inch cube. (It's small enough to be carried on my N-scale train cars for a train-eye view.)

I was interested in this one or a similar model (sq20) to be used as a dash cam with external supply as the internal cell doesn't last much. Can it be configured to connect to a wireless network and stream the video to a standard encoder/player on given address? I would use it to stream to a small NAS in order not to destroy the flash doing continuous recording. Hopefully it doesn't require a smartphone and a proprietary app to connect to its stream.

Not as far as I can tell - the SQ13 has a really dinky, shitty app that I wouldn't want to use for anything serious. I was unsuccessful finding any hacked firmware for it.

Companies like Cradlepoint or Sierra Wireless will sell you cellular radios you can hook up to anything with ethernet, including this camera.

Sure thing buddy, next thing you will tell me is that my microwave is spying on me!

And yet we still allow American goods in Canada.

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