Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
sandiegouniontribune.com
sandiegouniontribune.com
I know that this is a minority opinion, but I'm in favor of cameras in public places. There will always be the potential for abuse even with strong restrictions, but I think the benefits are worth it.
As mentioned elsewhere, there are better ways to reduce criminality than a "guilty until proven innocent" view that comes with rising mass surveillance and authoritarianism.
I also think the fact that there is essentially no consequence whatsoever for police plainly lying in warrant applications is a major oversight.
100% of the applications for granted warrants I’ve read have had clear factual errors in them, sworn under penalty of perjury (ha!).
We don’t even track what percentage of warrant applications contain perjury (~100% in my estimation), much less what percentage of those so swearing face consequences as a result (~0% in my estimation).
The system is broken.
I agree with that 100%. I dk believ that is orthogonal to using warrants on public surveillance. Maybe politically it might be a nice lever, though: we will authorize surveillance with this new system in place for all warrants.
You're lucky that in this case it helped you maintain your innocence, but that use will be in the tiny tiny minority. The actual solution to your particular problem is proper due process and rooting out police sloppiness and prosecutorial overreach, not adding features to our society that make it easy for those in power to violate people's civil rights.
Can you give an example of this abuse?
Police databases have been routinely abused so I don't see how the watchers can be trusted with more information when they have zero oversight and ability to manage what they already have :/
You're the one that placed it there.
I think that's debatable. If an individual can abuse the system in a way that undermines the intent of the system, we need to think carefully about what it is that we're actually building.
> we can't even give cops sticks because at least one of them is going to beat an innocent person with it.
Considering the debate around police violence in America right now, I think it's amusing that we're using this as an example of a ridiculous proposition. Maybe not sticks, no, but the level to which our police are armed is definitely under scrutiny.
What's your data source for this prediction? Are you saying that wrongful arrest and prosecution is a negligible problem?
> The actual solution to your particular problem is proper due process and rooting out police sloppiness and prosecutorial overreach, ...
Easy for you to say. Proper due process would have cost me a year or more of hell plus a lot of money. As for "police sloppiness and prosecutorial overreach", that's pounding on the table and has nothing to do with this discussion on cameras.
> ... not adding features to our society that make it easy for those in power to violate people's civil rights.
Cameras show when civil rights are violated.
This is the REAL problem and not the camera.
"Innocent until proven broke" needs to be fixed.
Unaccountable mass surveillance without any oversight is just incompatible with our form of government. That's what's getting stopped here.
It's not that they can't be used for good things - it's their potential for misuse.
Isn’t that is the entire concept behind separation of power. If we can’t trust democratic principles how can we trust any power or technology? The potential for misuse can apply to all power, big and small.
> If we can’t trust democratic principles how can we trust any power or technology? The potential for misuse can apply to all power, big and small.
Exactly, we inherently DONT. That is why we have a constitution and bill of rights - to prevent abuse of the system.
Also I'm not buying the "all technology can be misused" argument. It's MUCH easier to be tempted into spying on a political opponent with cameras than it is to nuke them.
Right exactly, and the powers those guard are far greater than the sorts of surveillance being discussed here.
And now in this age of social media, any seemingly meaningless activity can be used against anyone - because surveillance can be cut and devoid of context.
I was very much in the "few bad apples" camp until recently. But the protests have made it abundantly clear that my understanding of the situation was wrong. The last thing we want to do is give more tools of control and abuse to corrupt systems.
It's not that I don't agree with you or that I even disagree with my old belief in responsible surveillance technology. But we (America) clearly need to do a _lot_ of work reforming law enforcement and public health first and foremost. Augmenting those systems can only come after.
That was revealed by wide spread video surveillance, though.
This is distinct in that the people present control access to the footage and whether or not the footage is taken instead of some surveillance body controlling access and footage always being taken.
Some professor coined this sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
The same applies to facial recognition. The technology will improve and it behooves us to be making sure that when it does end up in daily life we made sure it does behave in the best interest of all. This means making sure mismatch issues don't get brushed aside or hidden and its all out in the open to see how it works.
The next major privacy concern may not have a Snowden type in place with everyone standing outside the doors stamping their feet refusing to play.
Don't fool yourself into believing a few cities and even states declaring that it is not allowed, that has never stopped the intelligence community before and certainly won't going forward. Too many will buy into the idea that even a law at Congressional level will do anything but so many exclusions exist and so much is permitted under completely innocent sounding legislation you can never be sure.
Then turn your own phone on and continuously upload your video and data to a lockbox.
If you want to be continuously surveilled, you have the technology to do it to yourself for a fairly cheap price nowadays (see: arrest recording apps). It also has the advantage that it is WAY more likely to exonerate you than some random CCTV that just so happens to be able to provide an alibi.
Don't force ME into that situation via government fiat, thanks.
But you're right, Smart city technology is always wrapped up in marketing lingo to obfuscate its surveillance properties.
And really, the safety aspect is easily circumvented for the bad guys. Take a standard corona mask, hoodie and some sunglasses and you're done.
For the rest of us it means living even more in a panopticon than ever before.
In theory they're supposed to be for things like real time pollution monitoring and real time traffic so they can change light timings, that kind of thing.
Once the technological hurdles are overcome, the social barriers are more a matter of "when" not "if". Having dumb streetlights is much more of a protection against surveillance, and less of a temptation, than having streetlights capable of it, but guarantees "that we don't intend surveillance". It's a lot harder to sneak $30 million dollar expenditures through a city budget than a memo in the police department about fully using capabilities that already existed anyways...
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/ipyei8/san_diegos...
How do I stay up to date on information like this? What can I do as a resident to help the cause?
For our effort in SD specifically, we need to add more help and voices to get 2 ordinances passed, to establish oversight of existing & future surveillance technology. Once we are successful at that, we will have a huge amount of work ahead of us to process San Diego's existing inventory of surveillance tech. We need volunteers to help do that work. We need a lot of them, to help keep the workload manageable.
For other cities, you need to get started by challenging an existing surveillance tech & assembling a coalition. Then you can work to establish local oversight of your local surveillance tech.
>Surveillance ordinance that will put in stronger rules for how the city acquires and operates this tech ...
Eager to hear how this might shape up. Especially how to break the spyware-vendor/police cabal, and move authority back to local residents and shopowners, and their elected representatives.
Speaking for myself, however, it's been over a year since reddit was part of my daily routine.
https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/stree...
09 00 ba 8a b6 f7 42 c8 8f d0 aa 8e bf f5 99 b6 5a f2 42 26
Oc 92 25 4a 14 2f 6d fc ee e7 c3 f3 e7 19 82 a0 14 6f dc 7b
Oc b8 0e 11 e7 5d c5 0d a0 19 bb 97 32 79 13 11 d2 af 8e fc
Oc ee 29 af c6 8d 3c 59 9f 73 23 ab f6 58 22 ae aa fd 30 c5
0e f5 fO d1 1f 31 00 ec 6d e6 7d 53 a9 36 2a 8d Of 46 8e 48
10 76 20 ee ac 87 af 7b 2a ec 85 f8 b9 88 43 60 78 6S a6 ea
13 b8 b8 93 d8 62 25 c2 d2 f4 c7 e4 7a ad 2d lb a6 00 b7 36
1f ca 1c 43 cf 5f c3 5b 7d 3f da 2a 41 6f 6b fb 05 ed ff cc
Putting it into a frequency analysis tool [0] doesn't give any special patterns either. 8 bytes are present 3 times, 25 bytes 2 times, and 86 bytes 1 time (total 160 bytes). I inputted a 160 long sequence from hexdumping urandom and I got 5 bytes present 3 times, 27 bytes 2 times, 91 bytes 1 time. Not a statistician but it seems pretty close.
Also yea - it's probably not going to text decode trivially since there are random null bits in the middle. My guess is that it's some random data from an image off the camera - but it could also be a snippet of environmental information.
However, they also allow very effective privacy violations of course.
Because of this there's no perfect outcome (and opinions across the board).
I know proposing it is political suicide there, but when I see what BLM have accomplished in awareness I did think some spontaneous movement like that would happen too in the gun debate, after the xx'th senseless mass shooting.
Also, the other obvious thing (also starting to bite Europe in the backside in all fairness), is the huge income equality leading to crime life.
"They hailed the cameras as a game-changer, and said the images helped to identify the suspected gunman who shot three employees, killing one, last year at an Otay Mesa Church’s Chicken"
Data from the UK disagrees with this hypothesis.
They found that CCTV camera usage had no correlation with crime reduction.
So, we can go ahead and drop the whole Smart Streetlight charade now and just call them surveillance cameras now.
Edit: Fair enough. But in this case, cameras and microphones were included, were they not?
FYI, Mr. Gloria recently voiced his support for my group's effort to get these shut down.
"Smart city" solutions are being sold to governments all over the US this way, many of them having a nexus with mass surveillance.
Do you mean to say that anyone believes even for a second that a politician (by no means a lowest common denominator) didn't see it coming that a centralised system full of cameras could be used for surveillance? It's just completely mystifying what sort of results need to become clear here. Good faith is impossible in this case.
I'm not defending them, just telling you what we've found. Back room conversations may have occured.
"I forgot to ask that question, see it's here in my notes"
(Likely, this phenomenon has already been described, but I'm not sure how to google it...)
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/east-county...
Now the snoopy old lady across the road can actually follow you around town at all hours.
[1] https://www.edn.com/weighing-the-costs-of-led-street-lights/
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/infrastructure/streetligh...
In this case the cost seemed to apply in part to 3,000 cameras. But solely based on the article, it's hard for me to tell what portion of that $30 million went to upgrades/maintenance and what portion went to the cameras. However it does clearly say it would be another $7 million to maintain the cameras over the next four years.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/202...
>San Diego moves toward repeal of ‘seditious language’ ban police have used during protests
>Rule against anti-authority speech ...
The US has a more extreme view of protected speech than almost all of our peer nations. Whether that is "sane" or not is a matter of opinion. Many Europeans would scoff at our campaign finance laws for example.
Compared to Europe, we don't have any hate speech laws that risk make criminals out of people because of public whim. I will not scoff at that though, because hate speech is only a necessary evil. Do you real feel the range of opinions you can express here is less than what you could express in your average European country?
I think the original definition of protected speech, namely that is inalienable, is the only sane one. How flawed the implementation of that definition is (and truthfully it was flawed from the start) is definitely a problem of course. Any other guarantee would be worthless because very few people will suffer somebody spewing what they view as or want to be lies if they don't have to.
It corrupts our democracy. A democracy should be one person, one voice, one vote. In our democracy the people with money have an outsized voice and therefore an outsized influence which leads to a government that is more concerned with appeasing the wealthy class minority than the majority of the rest of us.
>Do you real feel the range of opinions you can express here is less than what you could express in your average European country?
No, the point is the reverse. We can express ourselves here more than they can in Europe. Even still, I don't think you will find a huge percentage of Europeans who feel they can't legally express themselves. That is because most of the things that are protected here and not in Europe are a net negative on society. I also fail to see how outlawing something like Holocaust denial is a slippery slope to authoritarianism. Why do we need to protect speech that is objectively and inarguably incorrect? Defaming a individual person in the US is illegal. Why should defaming an entire class of people through hate speech be legal?
Plus the US doesn't even have universally protected speech anyway. We outlaw plenty of speech from our meager campaign finance laws to threats of violence. There is no binary choice between free speech and no free speech. We are just debating where the line is and the US isn't drawing the line where most other countries are drawing it.
Why should someone get to increase their voting power simply by producing more children to indoctrinate?
In Europe it's illegal to criticize the crimes of religious figures. That's horrific.
Are you serious with that one? There are much quicker, cheaper, and more effective ways to enact political change than spending 18 years and the literally hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to raise a child in order to get one more vote.
>In Europe it's illegal to criticize the crimes of religious figures. That's horrific.
I agree. I didn't say other countries were perfect. However many countries do recognize that blasphemy laws are unjust are have repealed or have started debated repealing them. Ireland is one notable example of a country that amended their constitution recently to remove them. And even in the countries who still have those laws on the books, it is extremely rare for them to be prosecuted.
> GOP congressman spent $70K in campaign cash on meals, in 370 food-related expenditures
Once a politician gets used to living fat, off of campaign "contributions", they rather start to enjoy that lifestyle and will bend their morals to keep it.
https://home.chicagopolice.org/information/police-observatio...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-history-of-c...