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Comment by tolbish | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't one of the two San Diego mayoral candidates, Todd Gloria, on city council when they passed the resolution to install these? Why is there no scrutiny of his part in all of this?

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2 sitting councilmembers were also present for the vote to approve. All of them expressed that they had no idea the system would turn into a law enforcement surveillance network. They were sold to us as data gathering devices to improve transit & gather data for climate action. Whether you believe them that they didnt know is up to you. We've done the public records work & the results aren't 100% clear.

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.

Don't believe for a second that they had no idea of its potential for law enforcement surveillance; I was one of the people who voiced my concern to them before it was passed.

Would love to get in touch with you, as this work is still ongoing. Email is in my profile.

Great, emailing you now.

My email is my username here at gmail

You have to put it in the 'about' section. The email that displays to you isn't visible to anyone else

thank you, I fixed it. (And I feel dumb)

> the results aren't 100% clear.

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.

the public hearings on this tech were entirely focused on city planning and climate action. We don't find anything on the historic record where anyone at any committee or council session even asked a question about the situational awareness module.

I'm not defending them, just telling you what we've found. Back room conversations may have occured.

Money probably exchanged hands.

"I forgot to ask that question, see it's here in my notes"

I propose a new "law" to add to the ranks of Murphy's, Moore's, and others: "Any technology that can be used for surveillance will be used for surveillance."

(Likely, this phenomenon has already been described, but I'm not sure how to google it...)

If it doesn't exist, we can call it Orwell's Law - Whatever Big Brother is capable of seeing, it is seeing.

This isn't an excuse, but IIRC they were sold to the city as simple sensor boxes. GE (or whoever it was that made/sold these) added the surveillance capabilities later, ostensibly for internal use but easily receivable via police action

I'm sorry, what? Doesn't a "sensor box" by definition have surveillance capabilities? The only way that sentence makes sense is if you're using some ridiculously narrow definition of "surveillance".

Edit: Fair enough. But in this case, cameras and microphones were included, were they not?

If it only senses light or dark it's difficult to see how that would count as surveillance.

The city council was informed of their likelihood for abuse, so no that's not an excuse.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that bit.

The camera surveillance was there from the outset, SDPD just didn't realize it or start accessing the camera footage until about a year after the nodes went up.

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