Cops Tap Smart Streetlights Sparking Controversy and Legislation | Hacker News Reader

Cops Tap Smart Streetlights Sparking Controversy and Legislation

spectrum.ieee.org

30 pointssohkamyung13 comments

> “There was an expectation when we launched this that it was not a law-enforcement system, Says Erik Caldwell, deputy chief operating officer for the City of San Diego. “That’s true; that’s not the primary purpose,” he adds. “The primary purpose is to gather data to better run the city.”

The doublespeak is comical.

It sounds to me like intrinsic concerns aside, the original process for acquiring footage seemed reasonable. It’s not really any different from if the police asked for CCTV records from a local business or similar. A huge problem was the creation of a streamlined request portal where cops could just ask for whatever they wanted, with little oversight. I’m increasingly curious what a model for a society where voluntary compliance with production of business records wasn’t acceptable, and any request for records had to come with a real warrant, signed by a real judge.

It's possible to add more and more constraints on what the police can do when collecting evidence, but it can often have the opposite effect. The judges become overburdened by the multiplying requests and they start to rubberstamp things.

The reasonableness isn't the issue. San Diego has a few groups criticizing these cameras and if you read between the lines and look at what neighborhoods and communities they're advocating for it's obvious that the real concern is that the system will work and catch criminals in high crime neighborhoods.

They did something similar with power poles in the city I used to live in. The power company came up with cameras they would mount to read license plates. If a car went by with a stolen license plate the cops would get an alert.

In the first month they recovered more stolen cars than the previous year combined.

While this may be a reasonable use case (though personally I might dispute that), what's to stop them from using the same system to fine everybody with expired registration? One crime is obviously more serious than the other, but how serious must a crime be to warrant the use of mass surveillance as an enforcement tool? Where does one draw the line?

Isn't that a problem with the law/punishment if enforcement is too effective?

It looks like the API is open to the public although it looks like that access is currently closed, source: https://www.sandiego.gov/sustainability/energy-and-water-eff...

Found some perhaps outdated info on setting up Python with the API. I wonder if camera data is accessible with the public API.

Source: https://developer.here.com/blog/how-to-render-a-map-of-san-d...

Just following the general rule, if it can be used for surveillance, it will be sooner or later, because there is always a crime which justifies the surveillance.

> half a terabyte of memory

512gb ssd in each street light?

I had the same thought. They say memory, but it’s unlikely they mean RAM here.

512gb of SSD should fit 5 days x 2 HD cameras @ 30fps, so I’m pretty sure that’s what they mean.

I thought RAM too, but that'd be overkill even for a workstation I'd try to slip past the purchasing dept. Though the rest of the article makes it sound like they're streaming it to a central server, so that's a pretty beefy local buffer.

I guess it'd be appropriate for a local fallback if the network connection was dropped. Shouldn't take more than 5 days to get back up.

The reporters strength is not tech it seems, it is indeed a 512 GB hard drive that is part of the system.

Additionally it has a range of detectors, even a Gunshot detector.

Source http://www.smartercity.tech/smart-pole-node/

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