Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government | Hacker News Reader

Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

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659 pointsnbrempel190 comments

A lot of statements and theories about these camera's from all sorts of directions, but they're just pole cams. LEA's have been using pole cams since before I was born (I'm 34). I worked in law enforcement as an analyst and spent some time staring at pole cams that were setup to surveil known drug dealers or criminal gang members. To do one correctly (i.e. legally) you typically need a warrant or a court order, but it can vary I guess based on jurisdiction. They're often deployed as an alternative to human surveillance efforts. They're called pole cams because, well, they get thrown up on telephone poles usually, to take advantage of the power source and ease of view. The surprising part of this isn't the cameras, its the fact that these are wide open on the internet. But honestly police are not IT people, and they often have officers or agents that work specifically as "surveillance techs" who are not IT people either.

I imagine this will draw a ton of ire about privacy and such, and I generally agree, but from my limited experience with them, they aren't wide spread, they're typically temporary, and they're usually purged except for the parts that are relevant to the investigation. These cams appear to be the exception, not the norm. If I saw a cam was sitting on an openly accessible server like this I would have filed a complaint with the agency and the OAG. I don't live in a state where any of the ones listed on Reddit are in, but I would encourage people who do live in a state with one of these cams to notify your OAG about it.

The point is the bloody things are unsecured.

It's one thing for LAPD to throw up a camera that looks in your windows with a warrant (not convinced they have one, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt).

It's another thing for LAPD to throw up a camera that looks in your windows AND LEAVE IT UNSECURED ON THE INTERNET.

If they are, or can be steered to, look in a window, that’s one thing. But if they can only see the public street, then they should be unsecured, for the convenience of the public. I can use them to check traffic, or see if the bus is coming.

A lot of these can be steered.

Even more convenient. And when the law enforcement purpose needs them to be fixed on a certain spot, then turn off public access until the investigation is over.

And by polling them to see when public access is disabled, you know exactly when and where stakeouts are happening!

Could you offer this as a SaaS? Any good literature on how to develop pricing models aimed at criminals?

Or see if you're being surveiled.

Mistakes in areas generally off limits to regular folks seem more outrageous because LEOs are trusted with powers of surveillance and lethal enforcement of the law.

But LEOs are people and people make mistakes. It happens and when it does it can be scary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WgxUoky4kg

It is an understatement to describe LE as not IT people. In general LE struggles greatly with technology and the ability to recruit technology people.

Totally agree, which is why I recommended people contact their local Attorney's General if they live in a state or city where one of these are located.

One might wonder how comes that US has so much drugs flowing with all this cameras around and massive surveillance.

One might think that drugs are only an excuse.

Inside one of the cameras:

"Due to its sensitive nature, the information contained on this website is restricted to law enforcement professionals and government agencies only. For access contact us at 503-932-6899 or email us at info@ipsurvconcepts.com"

http://ipsurvconcepts.com/

Good job fellas.

This phone number traces to Mike Bethers, Special Agent at Oregon Department of Justice. I might give them a call today and ask about these cameras.

Please post an update if you do.

just echoing please post update if you do

His Linkedin Bio: Specialities: Technical surveillance operations; audio, video, GPS tracking, telecom intercepts. IACIS Certified.

lol

At least he didn't say he's a specialist on security

The website appears to be compromised. It's hosting and redirecting to webstores/spam/porn/etc.

It seems an enterprising agent decided to start building and selling his own covert camera boxes but I wonder how old these things are now. Perhaps they've been forgotten?

I want it to be a conspiracy. No one is intended to see the inside of the box and thus the website unless the box is compromised. So when an unauthorized person sees it and goes to that website, they see it as a spammy forgotten domain, but it's actually trying to install surveillance software to see who you are and later why you've been poking around in a box they never intended you to poke around in. (This of course includes the fact that they never intended on an internet rando finding unsecured boxes and sharing it with the world on the internet.)

That's pretty clever.

If I had to bet money though, I'd assume something more mundane, like they are actually dumb enough to put a name and email on one of those.

Do we have any reason to think that the person posting this is not the FBI themselves? Or some other foreign surveillance types?

this reminds me of finfisher and payloaded media files used to drop the spyware.

thus mass surveilance, or mass botnet

Yeah, that's my romantic view, but probably unlikely.

The website doesn't appear to be compromised or registration expired to me. When I visited the site and presented a boring old chrome on mac useragent I got the following page back.

https://i.postimg.cc/D0GxnRdY/Screen-Shot-2020-05-13-at-1-44...

When I followed the link to the login page I got an error trace.

Google:

site:http://ipsurvconcepts.com/

You'll find stuff in /userfiles serving all sorts of shady things that have nothing to do with the site.

Makes sense. I didn't really want to poke at the server itself in a manner any more in depth than firing a web browser at the thing in the normal manner.

That's not necessarialy a sign of the site being compromised, I've had that happen to my own domains by:

1. Host an application on some VPS with a static IP on a domain.

2. Destroy the VPS server but don't change the domain entry.

3. Boom, domain now seems to be hosting porn or other random stuff eventually as the IP in the A record gets used for other things.

The website is suspiciously gone now. Looks like the domain is for sale?

couldn't be bothered to configure HTTPS on their web server properly.

The login is insecure and lacks ssl.

Definitely needs SSLv3

https://web.archive.org/web/20100324173823/http://ipsurvconc...

> Inside one of the cameras:

> "Due to its sensitive nature, the information contained on this website is restricted to law enforcement professionals and government agencies only. For access contact us at 503-932-6899 or email us at info@ipsurvconcepts.com"

> http://ipsurvconcepts.com/

> Good job fellas.

Domain is gone. For sale.

My personal experience with these types of camera is based on a conversation I had with a friend who’s a public defender in washington state. She said it can be nearly impossible to figure out who owns or put up all the random cameras you see at traffic intersections. Also good luck trying to subpoena the footage. And this is from someone who has greater access to government information than the typical citizen and had reason to find out.

Is the implication that it is hard to find the owner because it is messy and any number of agencies could place them or that it is difficult to find the owner because it is purposefully hidden or "super secret"?

Is it not possible to destroy them and then find the owner by determining who has standing for the case?

I was thinking the same thing -- obscure its view with a few well-placed paintballs and see who shows up to clean it.

i wonder what would happen if you ran out there and snarfed license plates and vins

I can't imagine these tactics will end well for anyone caught doing it. I don't recommend that.

Then don't get caught, oldest strategy in the clandestine operations handbook ;)

Make use of the situation that because of COVID-19, lots of people wear face masks (or, more precisely, mouth-nose masks).

I'm walking around in a balaclava everyday, and nobody bats an eye.

Pretend to be innocent and mistakenly drop a heavy steel bar stolen from the gym on the camera and run away.

opps, I accidentally dropped this heavy steel bar while on a pole 30-40' off the ground.

There’s a few good reasons you need a certification to get liability insurance to climb radio towers and this is one of them.

It's fine as long as you don't get caught. Make sure there are no cameras around before you do it.

Be aware that firing a paintball gun in most major cities is a big nono.

That’s the strategy Marlo Stanfield’s crew in “The Wire” used to learn who was investigating them.

I mean the owner sticker and information is literally viewable from the camera. Not that hard to find who they are from that case.

What about for parallel construction?

I'm more surprised about how those cameras handle the reddit traffic without a glitch

Good point. Limited hangout?

these cameras cost thousands of dollars.

> The VB-H43's powerful DIGIC Net II Processor allows simultaneous streaming of M-JPEG and H.264 codecs in multiple resolutions (1080p, 720p and 4:3 category video sizes) to meet various end-user needs.

> Max. 30 Clients + 1 Admin Client - H.264: Max. 10 Clients

Previous discussion on "The DEA and ICE are hiding surveillance cameras in streetlights"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18427626

Anybody else afraid to click some of the links in that post until you hear about legality of accessing (and controlling!) a DEA camera that's likely part of an active investigation?

As a practical matter I'm not worried about clicking a link that's been clicked tens of thousands of times today.

There's enough ambiguous laws they could likely come after anyone who accesses it if they wanted but given the facts of the situation I doubt they'd be able to make anything stick and it would be a giant PR snafu.

I believe there is precedent that you’re allowed to enter any computer system until you’re specifically warned. It’s a bit like traveling through open land, you can’t get in trouble for trespassing until you’ve been warned that you’re entering private property.

IANAL.

> I believe there is precedent that you’re allowed to enter any computer system until you’re specifically warned.

Didn't work that well for weev

Absolutely untrue. In the US, the law is written such that you may only legally access a system that you own or have explicit authorization from the owner to access. It mirrors common law where you're not generally allowed to enter someone else's home even if they leave the door unlocked.

You can, of course (and plenty of people do), debate the specific application of the word, "access" in the context of computer networks.

So accessing a web site is illegal? I rarely see explicit "you are allowed to access the HTML files on this server" anywhere.

It can be if it was not intended to be public.

It's really not much different than walking around outside. You can walk in an unlocked retail store and it's okay, but if you walk into your neighbors bedroom it's not okay.

Yes, and opening an unlocked door will still qualify as breaking and entering if you don't have permission to enter it. Just like taking something that isn't yours is still theft even if you find it in a public space.

The crime isn't circumventing the locks. It's accessing what you don't have the right to access.

People on message boards really want to believe there's a black -letter rule about what you can and can't do, but that's not how our criminal codes work. These cases will come down to the state of mind of the person accessing the website, as well as an argument about what a reasonable person would conclude upon reading what's on that website.

I think programmers especially like to view law through the lens of rules they could implement in code. Often they think it can be hacked by violating the spirit of the law while upholding the letter. Law in reality is a much more human thing that takes into account intention on the party of both legislators making the law and the people it is being applied to. Good thing too.

Is this that makes me think attempts to codify law on some blockchain is a doomed exercise most of the time.

I think some programmers try to think in the mindset of what laws would/wouldn't be violated if you could somehow fuzz-test a particular aspect of the court system.

I.e., if instead of an individual case, you could generate a million people who all tried to do every potential variation of breaking the law in that way, then what would the curve of the resulting judgements look like?

This can be a Good Thing, but it depends a lot on the courts not being lazy and taking shortcuts. When I was in front of a judge there was no disagreement as to the material facts of the case, but my guilt and my sentence were decided based on the Court's determination of my intent. The only evidence the court had regarding my intent was my own testimony and the differing hypothesis provided by the police officers I'd had a verbal disagreement with at the scene. Guess whose story they went with.

What determines what's a retail store and what's a house? Zoning? What if a place is zoned multipurpose commercial/residential, where there are both public offices and private apartments occupying undifferentiated sibling units of the same building? I would assume there would have to be some common-sense or explicit claim being made that a place is private property.

It doesn't really work that way. The entirety of the situation is taken into account.

What matters is what you knew, what you should have known, what you could be expected to know, what you were told, what you observed, what you were thinking, what actions you took, and why you did it, etc.... and how all of these things line up with your local laws which will vary to a degree.

If you walked into the place confused because it wasn't clear what was a home and what was a business, that might be a valid way to demonstrate a lack of intent. But it wouldn't be because of zoning, it would be because of it way it appeared to you.

Sure, that's what's important after-the-fact if someone's getting mad at you. But that's very murky territory—the kind individuals constantly wander into because of conflicting motivations, but which corporations tend to stay well clear of.

Let's instead talk about legal liability, and how corporations seek to discharge it in their delivery of products/services.

If I'm programming a political auto-dialer, there are rules about which numbers it's legally allowed to call, and which numbers it legally cannot. It can't call people's cell-phones, for example. If I don't want to get the people who buy one of these things in trouble (and then get sued by them), I have to program this device to follow these rules.

In such a case, it's not a matter of resolving the mens rea from committing such an act anyway; it's a question of how to avoid getting into a situation where my motivations (or the motivations of the purchaser) could ever possibly come into question. I don't want to come into court with a defense; I want to be bulletproof from being brought into court.

So, now, an analogy: if I'm programming a lifelogging-drone-as-a-service that people pay to follow them around all the time they're in "public space"—which, from what I recall, includes commercial spaces without access restrictions, e.g. retail shops, but does not include private residences—then what rules must I program this drone to follow about "what constitutes a public space", to avoid me (or a customer) ever being brought into court on charges of surveilling private property? (It's okay if such rules are next-to-impossible to resolve from the limited sensory data + local regulatory databases the drone has access to. The point isn't to construct such a drone; just to speak of more cut-and-dry case replacement for a human actor.)

Third parties do not typically have legal liability for how their customers use their products, but this a murky area that I am sure has tons of edge cases and exceptions depending on product, industry, and local regulations.

To your example: You can buy drones today that will follow people around. The person who uses it is generally responsible for using it to film legally.

Mind you, I said "camera drone as a service", which is not the same idea as a camera-drone IoT device product with cloud-subscription features. (Instead, it's stupider!)

You know how a politician might hire a PR firm to produce a "day in the life of" documentary about them? Part of the PR firm's job would be to handle any negotiation of the local legal terrain required to get filming rights for locations, and likeness rights for other people appearing in the film. If they couldn't get such rights, it would also be part of their job to inform the customer of what things they now can't film, so that the customer could either make the choice to just leave some parts of their day un-filmed; or to re-arrange their schedule so that only legally-filmable events are on the roster for that day.

A hypothetical "camera drone as a service", in my mind, would be that, but handled mostly by an AI, maybe with OnStar-like interactive support if you get into an edge-case. (Again, it's a stupid idea! It's a thought-experiment, not a viable startup. :)

There are many services where part of the service you're paying for, is the service provider's expertise in navigating the local legal landscape in their own regulatory domain of expertise. In fact, that's entirely the point of some services: anyone can do their own accounting in a technical sense, but you pay an accountant because they know how to do your accounting in a way that complies with all your local regulations.

So, again: if one of the legal requirements of the CDaaS service is to automatically avoid (or at least not-surveil) any private property—then what would the rule for that look like?

I did notice that you said "as a service". That doesn't change the situation, really. The person who films is responsible for making sure they film legally. The added "on behalf of a customer" probably doesn't make a difference, unless your local laws care about whether your filming is commercial or not.

Changing the technology from 35mm film to VHS Camcorder to AI powered drone doesn't make a difference. Adding abstractions between the lens and the operator makes no difference. If your organization films with cameras, it should make sure it does so legally.

> So, again: if one of the legal requirements of the CDaaS service is to automatically avoid (or at least not-surveil) any private property—then what would the rule for that look like?

If you have determined that you need to "avoid private property" in order to comply with the law, then the rule you'd want to implement is "don't film private property".

Yes. This is why weev went to prison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach

tldr: AT&T has an account status page that, for mobile devices, did not require any authorization. Something like /status?phone=8367492738 and you see the account data for that phone. It was guarded by a password if you navigated to it on a desktop/laptop, but it was unsecured if you navigated to it with a mobile device.

He spoofed the user agent string to make his laptop say it was a phone (this is extremely common, there is a button in your browser to do this in one click, and the spec that defines UA string specifically says not to use it for authorization for this exact reason), and dumped the account details from every url.

Despite these being pages publicly accessible on the open internet, he went to jail for years for unauthorized access under the CFAA

Well, I mean, that and (I'm sure) the fact that he was a notorious asshole and the authorities would rather make an example out of him than out of a more sympathetic defendant

Law is not really "rule-based" in the sense engineers tend to expect it to be

What about panning the camera to the right when there just may happen to be a drug deal you didn't notice happening to the left?

I'm not telling people what to do or not do. Only expressing my own fear!

>> I doubt they'd be able to make anything stick and it would be a giant PR snafu.

Both of those are true, however your life would still be massivly impacted and you would still be out thousands of dollars in legal fees with almost no hope of collecting them

Also better hope they do not find any other things in your life to charge you with, and you do not respond to any question in a way that could be seen as a lie, or about 100 other ways a federal agent can fuck you.

No it is best to simply avoid the system instead of putting your faith that "everything will work out in the end"

The only people that win in criminal cases are the courts, law enforcement, and the lawyers. as even if you "win" you lose

In theory your life could be massively impacted at random by such organizations, that's just how the justice system works.

I think the risk here is very very low to consider such a wildcard situation.

That's why VPNs exist.

I am, I can see the DEA or other Federal Agencies doing to me something like they did to Aaron Schwartz and abusing the CFAA to claim simply clicking a link is "Exceeding authorized access"

I'm not sure I've heard anything like "random web surfer who visits site charged with X" when they're not already the focus of some investigation or something.

Plenty of law related to tech that gets stretched to absurdity out there but I haven't seen anything to make me think hitting a rando site is a real risk in the US.

I'm having a chuckle from comments on Reddit: “It's an IPv4 address pointing directly to the camera, not so sure that there are any logs.”

Wonder how many of the VPN-employing folks in fact use something like NordVPN and pay for it with their credit card.

This is amusing to read because they largely/all seem to be AT&T mobile IPs, which get allocated from an absurdly sized pool with barely working geoip.

Well AT&T does own an entire /8 block (12.0.0.0/8) so they certainly have plenty to choose from

I guess for clarification what I mean is mobile pools are generally heavily mixed/NATed/etc all over the place, and the reddit OP claims that they're all hidden VPNs or something due to geo - mobile IP space geo literally does not work half the time and is an absolute mess. They're almost certainly just hotspots or an LTE SIM attached to the cameras with nothing else hiding it.

I use nordvpn that I purchased with a credit card. Before using it I would get notices from my ISP for pirating but not anymore.

As far as I'm concerned it just makes me not the lowest hanging fruit and that's good enough for me. Even if they wouldn't cut off my service from those notices I consider it worth $50 a yearfor peace of mind. Plus it comes in handy for getting around some geo restrictions.

Case in point: thinking that any of this is relevant in a thread about people logging into government-setup cameras.

Btw, you might want to look into what came out of this story: https://medium.com/@derek./how-is-nordvpn-unblocking-disney-... — it's mostly guesswork but I'm not sure how a company buys 32 million residential ips otherwise.

I have special insight into this situation (including both companies named within) and it is exactly as the article implies. These people are printing money on the backs of regular (unsuspecting) people, and nobody asks questions because of the amount of money involved. To be quite honest, this is what I imagine the fine line must look like, which exists between things that don't need regulation and things that do. That fine, fuzzy line of "These people are obviously up to some hinky bullshit and lying-not-lying to everybody involved".

> Anybody else afraid to click some of the links in that post until you hear about legality of accessing (and controlling!) a DEA camera that's likely part of an active investigation?

In Tor (or Tails), we trust.

Only 350m people in the world need to worry, the rest of us are outside of your (legal) jurisdiction.

Ohhh boy, do I have some bad news for you...

I know what your risk-management matrix says, but there's a whole world out there to explore, buddy!

Good Luck, I'm Behind 7 Proxies.

The camera in LA is outside a bus rapid transit in the San Fernando Valley. It's being joysticked all over by the excited public. A car! Look! A car!

Maybe worth linking to: https://www.insecam.org/

Can you foia request images from these cameras?

Where is the conspiracy? I thought the US government had been surveiling its cities via aerial technology. Is the conspiracy that these are unsecured?

I don't think people have internalized the fact that the US gov has surveillance drones in holding patterns over most US metropolitan areas. Every time I've seen someone poke around one of those persistence ADSB/radar maps, they have gone through the stages of discovery: "What are those circles?" "Surveillance drones." "Haha, no, really, what are they? Planes circling the airport?" "No, that (points to thin circle) is a plane circling the airport. The heavy circles are surveillance drones. Really." "Uhh.... (shifts uncomfortably) so where do you want to go for lunch today?"

Have an example of this? Would be interesting to see it.

Seconded.

BuzzFeed News had a big feature and analysis here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-t...

This isn't about drones, but here is an article from last year about the DoD using surveillance balloons that use radar from 65,000 ft to generate high-res images of the ground:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-government-testing-survei...

It's so funny how you can whip up conspiracy theories just by adding superfluous adjectives. Instead of just saying "radar" you say "wireless radar device", as if prior radars used wires, and then you say it creates "high-resolution images using radio pulses", as if this did not apply to every radar ever built.

We have been using aircraft to track vehicles since the invention of aircraft. The people and their government have a legitimate interest in doing so. Nobody has a right to go about in a vehicle anonymously and privately.

https://www.modbee.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/bee-inv...

Where did I say there was no legitimate interest to do this? I am in agreement with you in saying this surveillance is not new and is not a conspiracy.

It's possible for something to be not new and not a conspiracy but also not good and not right, all at the same time.

Then it should have been posted in technology, security, or news subreddits.

We shouldn't expect the centuries old philosophical/legal/procedural balance we've crafted between investigatory powers and personal rights to remain valid and correct in the face of a 99.999% decrease in the cost of surveillance and corresponding explosion in scope.

Naturally, authorities didn't object to the technological expansion of their power. It's up to us to figure out if/when/how to push back. Step zero is admitting that it actually happened, admitting that we should reset our heuristics, and calling out the ludicrous argument "this is how it's always been," because, well it isn't.

Not a map but it being done openly in Baltimore.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-c...

This book is the best source on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449...

There are twitter bot accounts that post live when they detect aircraft flying in circles:

@SkyCirclesSF @SkyCirclesLA @SkyCirclesDC

I don't think people really think about it.

Another example: most cities have systems that can pinpoint a gunshot to a block radius anywhere in the city so that police can respond quickly.

It's funny. I remember a court case where Shotspotter had a pinprick on one block and the news said "the shooting actually occurred a block away". Haha, that's nuts. Crazy accurate.

The expert testimony did have the engineer saying "The accuracy is invented by sales and marketing. The pinpoint is just a starting point. It's in a radius around that." Which I found amusing because it seemed obvious to me.

It did improve my ability to sell, though. These caveats are useless when you're selling. You can always explain afterwards.

Oakland has shotspotter and my understanding is that it's been considered a failure

Really? Why?

In DC, I think it's been pretty successful because lots of gunshots do not result in police calls.

Looking into it more it's less clear than I remembered. OPD considered scrapping it in 2014 saying the costs weren't justified and they'd rather have more money for their helicopter. Other cities have said they're not confident in its effectiveness but that doesn't seem to be a large factor here. They ended up keeping it.

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Oakland-cops-aim-to-scr...

This is an interesting system. I have worked with this technology on large and small scales, and it's a lot less accurate than you'd think. You have no hope of sending a police cruiser to check out a single gunshot based on the outputs of this system. But a single gunshot won't generate a police call in many cities as it is, so no change there. But a gang war? Sure, that will get the phone lines going and also generate many data points to help pinpoint the location using this system. So many factors affect the speed of sound through air, that the problem becomes one of those logarithmic "How many more microphones do you want to install to eke out this tiny bit of accuracy?" kinds of things. I'm not sure it's useful to point to what cities are saying about it, either. The technology itself is a Hard Problem, but I'm also 100% sure many law enforcement bureaucrats will use any excuse to keep money flowing into their budgets, even if the money is earmarked for something that doesn't work (or doesn't work well).

Hm, I'm not so sure. Take this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#Shooting_a...

Officers were able to locate and respond within a minute because of a system like this.

There is a very big difference between a system that can localize gunshot sounds and surveillance drones.

Assuming, of course, that the gunshot detectors are in fact special gunshot detectors and not a giant array of normal microphones with some algorithms applied to them.

> Assuming, of course, that the gunshot detectors are in fact special gunshot detectors and not a giant array of normal microphones with some algorithms applied to them.

Why is your statement based at all on that assumption?

I don't see what makes surveillance drones necessarily worse than human cops flying helicopters overhead with cameras (which I know for a fact occurs in my city). What makes the "drone" part problematic?

Scale, oversight. Would you mind if we had one cop per person and followed them around in public at 20 foot distance everywhere they went?

I mean, a human in a helicopter is NOT the same as Gorgon Stare[0]. That's what's problematic, to me, anyhow.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

But if a human is piloting a helipcopter with a "gorgon stare"-esque technology attached, seems pretty much the same.

I guess I'm unsure what about the autonomous flying is what draws people ire, rather than just overhead surveillance as a concept.

Looks like they have an app for law enforcement. It does provide some audio.

>gunshot audio to gain situational awareness, and; precise location of the gunshot to search for evidence.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shotspotter-respond/id10968200...

Some thoughts on pole surveillance:

https://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/pole-camera-surveillance-f...

It's not 100% consistent, but part of it is a reasonable expectation of privacy, compared to what the public would normally see. E.g. having a camera up in the air is not what the public normally sees. Which in some cases violated suspects' rights.

That means LE should have warrants for these cameras. Plus, they're not allowed to go on fishing expeditions.... These cameras aren't designed to only look at one place, but a wide area... Which means public oversight is required to keep LE honest. If there are no public records, then it's unreasonable search.

IANAL. It's also surveying something openly visible from public space, so even distributing it accidentally isn't illegal, per se. Now, it's obviously fucked, and abuses and mistakes like this should make public officials think twice about building a surveillance state. My main hope is news outlets that pick this up tie it to the encryption debate.

Also worth noting that just about every redlight intersection has cameras mounted on top pointing at traffic in each direction.

It's pretty much impossible to navigate through a city anonymously in a vehicle.

Now with facial recognition software getting so advanced I'd water it's impossible to walk through a city anonymously as well.

They don't necessarily need aerial imagery when every intersection has HD cameras pointing at you.

They’re not cameras, they are metal/RF/infrared/whatever detectors used to detect vehicles waiting at the intersection so lights don’t stop traffic for no reason.

Source: I’ve had to call municipal governments to get the detectors rotated or angled properly due to them not detecting cars and therefore not changing the light to green.

Of course it’s technically possible they also contain cameras, but I have yet to see any proof.

Yes, optical detectors are often used for traffic control.

Traffic cameras which stream visible-light video are also very common. https://www.weatherbug.com/traffic-cam/

I'm not sure why you've been downvoted. Traffic-aware traffic lights are generally implemented using induction loops built into the road surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_loop

Today, many have cameras for other reasons. But this is not ubiquitous and the prevalence of these cameras varies from location to location. Many traffic lights don't have cameras (many don't even have induction loops, and work off timers instead.)

In areas where the ground is covered in a foot of snow and ice all year those aren't particularly effective and they do use devices that look kinda like cameras and everyone assumes are cameras.

They're actually just small radar devices. It's a much simpler problem to solve across a wide variety of conditions to simply point radar at the ground and when the distance suddenly drops 4-8' assume a vehicle is there.

These devices don't have any sort of lens assembly which should be your first clue, but they also are pretty easily differentiated if you own a radar detector as well...

Traffic signal cameras for traffic light control are common. They used to be dumb monochrome analog cameras connected to simple "non-pavement object detected in box" processing units. There's been considerable mission creep since. Here's the promo video from Econolite's current product.[1] HTDV, WiFi, car, truck, bus, bicycle and pedestrian detection, connects to control center if the bandwidth is available.

CALTRANS has most of their highway cameras available from their web site.[2][3] CALTRANS has been at this since the 1980s, and the cameras are mostly somewhat old and low-rez.

[1] https://www.econolite.com/products/detection/autoscope-visio...

[2] http://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/streamlist.htm

[3] http://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm

How often is this done? Do they also detect if a bike is at the intersection? Will they eventually cycle the light even if nothing is detected (just in case the sensor is not working)?

They are at almost every intersection in my state. I’ve heard people in bikes complaining about having hard time getting detected sometimes. I suppose it depends on how the light is programmed if it has a max time before it cycles, but I’ve had to go through intersections on a red light because I waited minutes and it didn’t turn green.

Video-based lane occupancy detection is widely used by traffic lights, but it's rare for these cameras to be connected to anything other than a trigger module in the signal cabinet. It is conceptually possible to also connect these cameras to a remote monitoring system, but this comes at a very high cost. My city has been one of the stronger proponents of doing so but has only connected a very limited number of intersections due to the expense.

The city (major suburb) I used to live in has done this with all the intersections that lead into the city, effectively making it impossible to enter or leave the city without them having a record of it. I know they are able to scan license plates from these cameras -- and do so automatically -- because it's how they are able to "catch" people trying to use those 3M strobe lights that ambulances and fire trucks use to make the lights turn green: An intersection detects the use of the strobe, but also is able to know that no (deployed) emergency vehicle is near that intersection, so it automatically "calls" the police department with the license plate of the offender. This information was buried on that city's website in a bunch of short videos the traffic engineers made about their new gee-whiz traffic management system.

Which, by the way, many municipalities are building (or have already built) "new gee-whiz traffic management systems" which are Orwellian nightmare machines. They seem to be flying well under the radar because everybody hates traffic, and especially because nobody is allowed into the new traffic management buildings for tours, to see the capabilities of the system that seem to be hooked directly into law enforcement's computers.

Do they directly say that they are using license plate reading? I find it far more likely that they are using the OPTICOM GPS solution which, in hybrid with OPTICOM IR, solves the same problem using cooperative radio equipment in emergency vehicles. Reporting on received IR preemption with no matching radio communication is an advertised feature of this system, whereas performing ALPR at the range and conditions of lane occupancy cameras is still largely experimental. ALPR virtually requires IR illumination, while lane occupancy cameras have no illuminators and are usually monochrome.

Your comment isn't totally true in the narrow sense that it's not being done domestically by the USG specifically (at least at the time I was reading about it).

The best book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449...

The primary domestic use was by the Baltimore police department and it was supplied by an individual billionaire interested in funding the project.

Interesting fact in that book was that the initial spark for the project was someone in government watching Enemy of the State in the 90s and thinking "we should be building this". Somewhat comically the guy who worked on the camera effects in the movie also has a defense company and was asked to help build the real thing.

True if you don't count JLENS, and ARGUS, which have been deployed wherever they feel like for years. Further muddied is that there are federal grants to let local law enforcement buy this gear.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/the-rap...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/harford/aegis/bs-md-jl...

Always enjoyed that movie. I suggest everyone check it out!

> comically

Synergy!

What do you mean by "conspiracy"? I'm not trying to be funny here, I think it's worth examining what precisely you mean by that word when you use it. It's a word with a specific meaning that is frequently abused in wishy-washy ways, often used to describe loony beliefs not grounded in reality, or beliefs that run contrary to the official narrative.

If the official narrative is that we aren't being constantly surveilled, then this submission pales in comparison to what should be on the front page.

But I don't think that is the official narrative, per se.

Is the official narrative posted on the official narrative report somewhere for reference?

Note that if you're using the term "conspiracy" in the strict sense, it's not contrary to the official narrative. The official narrative for 9/11 for instance, the 9/11 Commission Report, is terrorists conspired to crash airplanes.

In the colloquial wishy-washy sense, that report is not a conspiracy theory, despite being a theory about a conspiracy. However every other theory that disagrees with it is a conspiracy theory.

It's an opportunity for people to fein surprise. And people always like a little treasure hunt...

It is possible that it is my general weariness talking, but based on our US government amazing level of incompetence displayed when dealing with COVID-19, I am now way less inclined to accept as a given that government can do conspiracies well.

The local manager of the Burger King doesn't decide what beef is on your burger, complaining about the temperature of fries to HQ is not going to help you either.

My idiot brother shot a county Sheriff during a traffic stop many years ago. The entire thing was captured on a dash cam so there was no doubt who did it. He immediately ran and was never captured.
These camera types were placed around his house from the power poles. The neighbor actually filmed the install.
I suspect this is standard le practice for various scenarios.

it’s been 9 years and my brother has never been seen since that night. I suspect he killed himself in the expansive, Wild, thick forests the area is known for.

I was surprised to find that one of the cameras listed is just down the street from where I live, and I frequently walk near it. It’s a pretty safe area, so I’m curious what sort of suspected crime they’re monitoring.

That being said, the camera itself doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. What does make me feel uncomfortable is the realization that such cameras are often open to the internet for anyone to view. That sort of incompetence isn’t what I like to see.

What would happen to the camera if you ran a script that had the camera look directly at the sun and tracked the sun all day?

Is this like when Redditors found the Boston Marathon bomber?

from the webpage [http://ipsurvconcepts.com/ ] source

" <td width="780" height="30" valign="top" class="copyright1">3030 Briana Ct.NW, Salem, OR 97304 (503) 932-6899</td> "

also check these out:

https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=19005

https://builtwith.com/ipsurvconcepts.com

https://hu.cybo.com/US-kapcsolat/ip-surveillance-concepts-ll...

the one in Hawaii is currently pointed at the SN & access info for the cell data connection...

This is going to get interesting.

At least in the UK they are known to public and secured.

The cameras are all password protected for me (from Europe). Did someone get notified and changed it?

Looks like they did. The logins weren't there earlier. Would love to see the frantic email thread that led to that. Still worth noting that none of those sites appear to have any sort of TLS enabled.

Just file a FOIA and ask for the email.

only a couple are left password free

has any body thought to call this fellow up and perhaps give him heads up that there is a potential problem with his website?

i know i would appreciate it if someone did that for me, and id bet a lot of people here would.

might not actually be govt... i've often effected federal-looking stickers and titles on things to keep random people afraid of digging into my stuff.

apropos considering your username.

i vaguely recall something about gangs/narcos setting up nieghborhood networks and cameras in a similar manner to keep watch for cops and warrant activity teams.

im also wondering if mike bethers is a tripwire-pseudonym should someone call and poke around

there is a linkedin page:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-bethers-8002a24

yeah, probably not a tripwire name if you leave your cameras open and not secured. Seems more like a sec rookie to me

The only thing surprising about this is that they are so easy to pwn. Then again, PDs aren't exactly tech-savvy.

Yeah, it's actually quite easy to find misconfigured IP cameras like these online and be able to control them, used to do it for kicks back in high school.

Surprised this has gotten so many upvotes.

Kind of surprising that at least one of the URLs still lets me not only look through the camera, but control it!

How long until these get taken down?

The links and discussion or the cameras?

/r/conspiracy kids discovers public city weather and traffic cameras that have been around Since the 00s

It’s pretty cool. You can change where they point and zoom in/out. Usually can’t do that with public cameras

It’s pretty cool. You can change where they point and zoom in/out. Usually can’t do that with public cameras

Really? I occasionally visit public construction site cameras that real estate developers put up, and they're almost always interactive.

Not true - back when I used to mess around with this in high school quite a few cameras had the controls.

Maybe, but you normally can't move weather cameras and I don't think they have such a high resolution...

From another comment, apparently the cameras are distributed by https://www.crimepoint.net/

One guy there was playing around and found presets for: "Richards House"

Maybe Richard has a lot of weather anomalies

LMAO

Here's the link to the relevant camera: http://72.250.57.49:8000/viewer/live/index.html?lang=en

Because the DEA totally has an excuse to own public city weather and traffic cameras.

I don’t think they generally ask permission....

Play around with one and you'll see quickly that these are designed for remote surveillance. Traffic / weather cameras don't have telephoto lenses, motorized 3 axis control or high-quality sensors.

You just made up every aspect of that statement. Caltrans traffic cameras are all variable telephoto cameras on pan/tilt/zoom rigs. Many weather cameras even allow random web visitors to control the PTZ for a minute or two.

From elsewhere in this discussion: "Due to its sensitive nature, the information contained on this website is restricted to law enforcement professionals and government agencies only. For access contact us at 503-932-6899 or email us at info@ipsurvconcepts.com" ... "This phone number traces to Mike Bethers, Special Agent at Oregon Department of Justice."

So cut the shit, these aren't traffic cameras.

I've never seen a traffic camera that could make out a license plate from 2 blocks away.

I've never seen a traffic camera that could make out a license plate from 2 blocks away.

How many have you installed?

One TV station that I worked for in the early 00's had cameras all over the city that could easily do that, all fibered back into the newsroom.

> weather and traffic cameras

Several are clearly disguised; the view is framed by "high voltage" etc. decals in reverse, similar to:

https://www.qpcs.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/2015-06-17_2...

So what? Even weather cameras need deterrence from vandals.

Weather and traffic cams don't have "Due to its sensitive nature, the information contained on this website is restricted to law enforcement professionals and government agencies only. For access contact us at 503-932-6899 or email us at info@ipsurvconcepts.com"

Any screenshots? Cameras are busy.

«Muh freedom!»

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