Kroger (chain grocery store) is running paramilitary spy gear in parking lots | Hacker News Reader

Kroger (chain grocery store) is running paramilitary spy gear in parking lots

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They just put security cameras on their own property, or on somebody else's? I wouldn't have an expectation of privacy in a store's parking lot, just like hopefully criminals would think twice about breaking into cars in the area. Are there special circumstances behind these security cameras that I'm not understanding?

Yep.

People are being unreasonable here. Let's say Kroger didn't have security cams on their lots, and they were to hit the national news because the next Walmart shooter chose a Kroger instead. I bet the first thing the people complaining about having security cams in the parking lots would complain about, would be the lack of security cams in the parking lot.

What makes this “paramilitary spy gear?” It’s some portable security cameras positioned in a parking lot.

The company responsible: LiveView Technologies https://lvt.co/

They specialize in surveillance gear for private and nation-state operations. They work with multiple federal TLA's, and also just announced a joint USA-Israel surveillance operations.

I talk more of it here https://www.reddit.com/r/bloomington/comments/f4xv9t/info_on...

Walmart sells guns; that doesn't mean everything they sell is a gun. If these are just cameras, does it matter where they came from?

‘Nation-state’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. It’s not a fancy way of saying ‘countries’. It means one small subset of countries such as Japan that are both nations and states at the same time.

Hmmm. I didn't know this.

What are some countries that aren't nations?

For example the UK is not a nation-state because it’s one state but four nations.

So "paramilitary" is still a clickbaity exaggeration. Their website mentions Target markets such as state DoTs, retailers (specifically Lowe's), oil companies, construction. Hardly a roster of paramilitary forces.

Are you buying military equipment any time you deal with a company that does business with a military? Would "man buys equipment from missile manufacturer Honeywell" be an appropriate description of me having bought an air humidifier from them?

> What makes this “paramilitary spy gear?”

The need for an attention grab as confirmed by the hashtags. There's nothing "paramilitary" about this system [0] that wouldn't also apply to any number of other things like a laptop, or an OS, etc.

It's that much more amusing given that the author of the tweet (and the present submission) appears to be a Linux user, something some UK authorities using the same broken logic already deemed to be the hallmark of a criminal hacker.

[0] https://lvt.co/security/

I've seen similar towers at walmart. I usually park next to them to make it easy to find my car.

Not really that different in application than the security cameras we've had for decades though, unless I'm misunderstanding something.

Many if not most Walmarts in my area have these. I believe that stores are installing them when the amount of incidents they have with crazy/wild folks is large, as I've seen police at the stores with them rather frequently. This sadly seems somewhat corelated with nearby socioeconomics, but it doesn't change the fact that the things the police are getting called for are real. Like another poster I tend to try and park near one if I have to shop at a place with one.

How is a random clickbait Twitter post making it to the hn frontpage?

This is just a random dude venting against Kroger putting a few security cameras on their parking lot.

If these are vanilla security cameras, this is a non-story. If, instead, this is the development of a trend of using cameras with live feeds to law enforcement, real-time facial recognition or license tag identification, I think it warrants discussion.

Yes, these are on private property. However, aren’t there ethical issues around these technologies should they be employed, say, at every food store in a geographic area?

Is this like the Lot Cop system Walmart uses? https://www.kshb.com/news/crime/walmart-using-lot-cop-camera...

I'm concerned iff they're networked.

They definitely are networked. This one is over LTE. I used a KerberosSDR to accurately triangulate and verify that signal was originating from that spytower.

And they also to appear to have rudimentary "person", "vehicle", and other tracking, with an API to forward regions of interest to a more robust ML facial recognition algo.

Wait, did you actually demodulate the LTE Signal? Or did you just treat it as a source of broadband noise?

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