(1) Their methodology is about to be debunked, or;
(2) It's about to be revealed that they were working with police to allow them to manufacture reasons to arrest people.
3) They don't want their "secret sauce" made publicly available.
That would both open them up to commercial competition, and make their product less reliable in court, as anti-Shotspotter experts would start figuring out how to effectively argue against the product's methodology.
In general I think technology like this should have to be fully transparent if it is used as the basis for public entities' decisions, but so far the arguments against that practice seem to have won out. For example, good luck getting source code or design documents to contest an automated red light or speeding ticket.
I sincerely doubt there's any secret sauce to protect when they have "analysts" sitting around regularly "correcting" evidence.
In general though, I think there are legitimate reasons for manual analysis. Any machine learning approach to a problem like this is going to have to balance false positives and false negatives, and there is necessarily going to be a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Detecting bang-like noises in a large city is likely going to have a pretty conservative cutoff to avoid DDOSing the police with calls. For example say the company sets their cutoff for automatic reporting at 90% confidence, but when the police ask them to review a specific time period, it turns out there was a shot detected with 89% confidence, and manual analysis indicates a false negative. That is probably still useful information, and it would definitely be useful to include this data point with the correct classification in future iterations of the model.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_component_analys...
Plus basic triangulation logic synced across a bunch of microphones?
Heck, a truly calibrated surround sound system requires using a microphone to measure the volume in place.
Now that's a lot of work.
And how often would it have to be repeated?
I doubt they've solved (or even have non trivial mitigations for) any of those subproblems, based on stories of how often they apply human "corrections". The portion they've implemented may be very easy to replicate.
You can’t make rulers while also trying to keep the definition of an inch secret.
I don't really care about a red light camera (as the image shows the license plate and the red light at the same time), but there are tons of other technical solutions that need to be examined.
The actual technology is not all that complex. Transient detection and triangulation by decorrelation from a microphone (edit: not microwave!) array. You could probably prototype it in a week if you leaned on an established FFT library. Obviously they would not want to reveal their source code and so on, but if you know digital audio you know this isn't that hard.
I think what they really want to conceal is not the technology but its use in operation. I don't know what Chicago pays for the service, but Sacramento CA spends about $1m a year on it and Sac is a fairly small city. https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article231997777.html
Wouldn't "red teaming" ShotSpotter solve for this to see how accurate they are? A team would perform controlled firings in known locations under various auditory scenes with the city's approval, and then request the data from ShotSpotter to see how accurate they are (without revealing you are performing an exercise). ShotSpotter then doesn't have to reveal their methodology, as their data provided from a blind test will reveal the accuracy regardless of how they arrive at conclusions. The system is either accurate or it isn't (with a measured level of confidence), and this can be tested for without ShotSpotter's consent (as long as they continue to provide data to the customer per their contract).
A bigger problem is that this doesnt approach any of the process problems with the human moderated parts of the system. For that you would need cooperation from the law enforcement customer. The customer would need to make a request like "are you sure you didnt find any gun shots around this time and place?" and see how the company responds.
I think the most reasonable inference is that they are outright trying to hide. And probably because the truth is totally damning.
If their methodology has weaknesses which allow those arguments, then its kind of a travesty of justice not to allow them.
Waving a scientific magic wand from a crony-connected company is a great asset to would-be abusers in the justice system.
I was on a jury where we were forced to acquit a guy of vehicular manslaughter because a vendor representative couldn’t properly explain how NTP works on a red light camera under cross examination. It was gross.
I am not versed in Illinois contempt law, but judges have very broad constitutional authority to sanction people or companies for intentional failure to comply with a lawful order. In this case, you could expect the judge to do something like order the company to pay five thousand dollars per day until they disclose the records.
There could be an argument that the judge could legally order the sheriff to seize their servers or throw the CEO in jail until the company complies, but for some reason stuff like that doesn't seem to ever happen in the corporate context.
It's a thing
https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.idc.law/resource/resmgr/quarterly_...
> This procedure is often called “friendly contempt,” a recognition that the contemnor has not acted “with contumacious disregard for the court’s authority,” but requires a contempt finding and sanction for the purpose of obtaining appellate review. See Klaine v. S. Ill. Hosp. Servs., 2016 IL 118217, ¶ 6; Zagorski v. Allstate Ins. Co., 2016 IL App (5th) 140056, ¶¶ 16-17. In many cases, the contemnor has even requested the finding and sanction for that purpose. See Ctr. Partners, Ltd. v. Growth Head GP, LLC, 2012 IL 113107, ¶ 20.
So this is the lawyer asking to appeal the original judge's order of disclosure, and this is the obscure process that makes that happen.
Maybe a night in jail isn't all that common though. Sure seems reasonable and effective.
I can't think of any off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are a few where the evil journalist or priest is held in contempt hindering finding the bad guy.
It's pretty different from "Let's just search everyone's houses. Probably someone is committing a crime."