Atlas of Surveillance: Documenting police tech in our communities | Hacker News Reader

Atlas of Surveillance: Documenting police tech in our communities

atlasofsurveillance.org

183 pointsfreedomben76 comments

If they've decided to classify body cams as "surveillance" --- and, fair enough, I guess --- then really all they're going to need long term is an atlas of every law enforcement agency in the country.

Body cams are qualitatively different in the way they are used. For example if they are used in domestic violence cases, they can be harmful. If cops are not disciplined for turning them off when encountering citizens they are meant to protect, they provide an inaccurate story, usually slanted in cops' favor.

I suppose studies like this need to get finer granularity on bodycams.

Can you clarify how being able to demonstrate the exact circumstances of an event in perpetuity is "harmful?" This seems completely counter intuitive, in fact it's a point of view regarding bodycams I've never encountered.

Most dialogue around bodycams focuses on desires for extreme punishments for police that turn off their bodycams during interactions with civilians.

Bodycams are generally a good thing and more PDs should use them correctly. But they can put domestic violence victims in danger, too:

From https://www.nsvrc.org/sarts/toolkit/5-6

BWCs can record information about a victim's identity and whereabouts, which could potentially jeopardize a victim's safety if the perpetrator views the recording, if recorded data is handled improperly, or if that recording becomes public record. Often sexual assault takes place in areas where the expectation of privacy is high, such as a home or school, and a BWC may be seen as especially invasive in these locations. [72] The impact of BWCs on decisions to report to law enforcement is unknown, [73] but they may affect a victim's ability or willingness to speak to police. It is unknown at this time if BWCs support victims in feeling empowered.

I don't agree with the parent, but they're not wrong either.

A good high-profile example is Alex Skeel, who refused to tell responding officers anything about his ordeal on-camera. Guy was basically Theon Greyjoy living with Ramsay Bolton as his girlfriend. You can't testify against your torturer outside of a courtroom and risk her finding out about it. Calling for help is a big no-no when it comes to hostage-taking.

Cops are not good at discretion when it comes to intelligence. Snitches get outed all the time. While off-camera, you can dismiss anything as hearsay or rumor, but you really, really don't want there to be video evidence of you snitching against someone dangerous.

EFF's Atlas of Surveillance: Documenting Police Tech with Open Source Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26270166 - Feb 2021 (2 comments)

Atlas of Surveillance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23824845 - July 2020 (134 comments)

Contains false negatives, for example only listing a single police department using Clearview (https://atlasofsurveillance.org/search?vendor=Clearview). Likely a limitation of the current data sources.

> If an area has no markers, it may mean it hasn't been researched yet. To help collect more data, visit our Collaborate page.

Interesting.

Austin, TX has a police drone that flies between 8 pm and 3:30 am, and peeps into my apartment (floor-to-ceiling glass) almost every / every other night. I'd like to do something about it because it's violating and wrong.

... Blackout Curtains??

The one that bothers me the most is the Ring integration with police. That's happening in Chicago. The neighbor across the street installs a Ring doorbell because they like gadgety shit or whatever, and suddenly my children's playing is under surveillance.

that ship sailed with Google Streetview, and now sat imagery

look up "privacy" in the Constitution...that's right, you don't have an explicitly spelled out right to privacy in the US (you should though, and we should fix that)

in the US, if you want privacy, go inside and close the blinds...sad but this is pretty much what it has come to

You have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in your back yard. Not in the street.

Presumably that's the aspect that needs fixing.

Not anymore with police drone and helicopter surveillance.

The "reasonable expectation of privacy" is referring to legal arguments which are made about individual privacy in public spaces. I don't study these things so I may simply be naive but I don't think this argument has been made in the context of a drone camera seeing someone commit a crime in their own backyard.

Wrong. As someone else said, the fact that the police could observe you masturbating in your back yard or plotting a crime, for instance, doesn't mean that they could prosecute you for it. Because you have the aforementioned expectation.

For the "plotting" thing they'd need a warrant.

> under the Fourth Amendment, aerial surveillance of an individual’s property does not inherently constitute a search for which law enforcement must obtain a warrant.

> What these cases, among others, underscore is that the aerial surveillance doctrine only provides courts with a blueprint–not a clear, unambiguous pathway–to reach a judgment in Fourth Amendment cases.

> [16 states] have passed laws requiring that law enforcement obtain a search warrant before using drones for surveillance purposes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_surveillance_doctrine

It's not cut-and-dry, depends on the courts whim and your state.

So you may have privacy rights, or not. SCOTUS to rule someday.

The expectation of privacy is changing with technology, and the police are actively pushing these boundaries. For instance, see: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/new-york-police-drones-m...

Your right to privacy is your security against unreasonable search and seizure. Fourth amendment. No wonder it's so easy for the government to infringe our rights - we are not taught we have them!

imho that is a limit on Government power, that particular amendment doesn't clearly speak to an inalienable privacy right for an individual (which requires an entirely new definition in the modern era)

A personal right to privacy and limitations on government actions/inquisitions are different.

For instance, if someone wants to start filming me and following me in public then there's nothing I can do unless they city or state maintains some kind of statute against it (and some do.) A government privacy law would not defend you against that. Even uploading my likeness to YouTube and showing that video to thousands or millions of people is legal. A personal right to privacy would require releases for that kind of content to be made standard. Our current laws hinge heavily on anything in public being public domain which is simultaneously good and problematic.

A right to privacy has to be defined inclusive of "what," and "to whom?" Your right to privacy at an alcoholics anonymous meeting wouldn't extend to other present members for example but it reasonably could extend to nonmembers.

Our right to be secure in our papers and persons was interpreted as including our mail, and our mail (in present form) is being "opened" by the government today. That means we have a right that could be called a right to privacy and is clearly being infringed. I can wish wisdom for the people tasked with determining the exact nature of the rights we have but some current events are beyond the degrees of freedom in that discussion given some precedents as old as our country itself.

That's narrower than a right to "privacy" as most people would understand it.

> look up "privacy" in the Constitution...that's right, you don't have an explicitly spelled out right to privacy in the US

You don't have explicit rights to most things in the US. The Constitution is an explicit grant of powers to the government (reserving anything else to the people), not an explicit grant of rights to the people (letting the government do anything not prohibited).

I think it is reasonable to say that most of the Bill Of Rights is exactly that in both strict reading and principle - rights bequeathed to individuals directly

No, because of the Ninth Amendment. The Bill of Rights is quite explicit that it is not an exhaustive list of rights.

GP didn't say it was an exhaustive list.

You claimed "the Constitution is an explicit grant of powers to the government (reserving anything else to the people), not an explicit grant of rights to the people", to which they responded that a lot of the Bill of Rights is an explicit protection of specific rights to people (such as in the First and Fourth Amendments [among others]; what rights are being granted the government in those amendments?)

I went to a friend's apartment last week and noticed their neighbor across the way has a Ring doorbell. I can understand that, if interested, the police would be able to tail me from my home to my friend's home but it's another matter that it often happens automatically, regardless of individual interest.

Also be aware of a company called FUSUS that's enabling law enforcement agencies to access surveillance feeds from [consenting] businesses:

https://www.fusus.com/blog/real-time-crime-center-in-the-clo...

Not as sketchy or ubiquitous, but worth keeping a close eye on.

That's plenty sketchy. They can track you wherever you go.

Snoop on to them, as they snoop on to us.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

I'll always appreciate a Hackers (greatest movie of all time) quote. :)

Slightly OT, but I've been wondering for a while now if and when license plate scanner camera data will be compared and analyzed for traffic violations, like "you went from Park Ave to Boardwalk in a time frame which would have required you to exceed the posted speed limit, here's your ticket".

If it doesn't catch a picture of the driver it most likely will not valid in court in most states.

Be fun to troll the shit out of politicians/elected officials with this. Have someone monitor them leaving one place, then with another car and a fake plate have them get scanned at another location moments later.

They'll just add an exception to the scanners for their plates. What would stop them? Outrage? Probably not.

Again, politicians and .gov employees being targeted as targets of these scanned plate tickets.

"Police stumped by evidence at least 200 separate vehicles use the same Senator's plate number."

Extremely strict consequences for impersonating the plate will tamp that down real quick.

In my experience the cops using these systems only care about larger crimes. It's way too noisy to monitor every expired tag, for instance. Not many of these companies (if any) do speed monitoring with LPRs.

But what they will do (and have done) is pull over a vehicle that is registered to a person known to have e.g. an expired/suspended license and use whatever excuse they can find to arrest the driver, even if the driver's license is not expired.

The near-real-time cross-referencing is basically a probable-cause factory, and then its on the person getting pulled over to stand up to all the implied threats of violence that the police can bring to bear.

Prior to tools like this, running a dragnet on e.g. invalid licenses was quite a bit more labor intensive, and so there was a built-in grace allowed to people whose only crime was omission of paperwork.

We're still fighting in Taiwan over whether or not average speed cameras are legal in Taiwan.

There's a couple strong, imo, arguments against the legality.

For one, average speed cameras are constant, identified surveillance of everyone that drives passed them (as opposed to CCTV, average speed cameras positively identify every vehicle that passes by). Blanket surveillance is bad and possibly illegal, but also it happens to civilians the State has no reasonable suspicion have committed a crime, which is also bad and possibly illegal. Finally, a ticket gets written for someone breaking the law by driving faster than the speed limit... but in fact, nobody, including surveillance, actually witnesses them breaking the law. They just assume they broke the law because timestamps.

I know it sounds silly but it really is a pretty big legal leap to "assume" someone broke a law without actually witnessing the crime itself. You might suggest the timestamps are strong evidence of the crime being committed, and sure, you're right, but then we're back to the blanket surveillance issue. Furthermore, there are actual ways to pass two average speed cameras within a time frame that would "require" speeding, such as by taking a route unaccounted for in the camera's design.

Though in the end the cameras are pretty useless because they put them in the best fast riding zones in the mountains so we just zip back and forth between two cameras practicing the same route a couple times at 3 or 4 times the speed limit and by the time we go past the second camera our average speed is like 20km/h lol. Whereas regular actual speed cameras at the entrance and exit of small towns actually force you to slow down for pedestrian-heavy or dangerous areas.

I've had an argument with some police politician about this, about how putting the cameras in the good riding areas is pushing people away from the safest riding spots in Taiwan with wide shoulders, double lanes, and barriers between oncoming (SO COMMON for cars to violate the double yellow here!!) and into the single lane unlit nightmare roads alongside the big good road, which are impossible to get speed camera infrastructure to (without great cost anyway). Which is driving up deaths so really defeating the purpose.

Or... roads are a community utility, not your personal playground.

Or, roads are a community utility and a community playground? I don't understand why one usecase is automatically more valid than another. We're discussing the old mountain roads. People trying to get between Yilan and Taipei quickly do it through the new tunnel which takes less than half the time. Basically the only people on the roads I'm describing right now are enthusiast motorcyclists, scooters, and sports cars.

Iirc, this currently happens in China.

It happens in EU, UK, Norway, Switzerland too. As long as the operator pretends to "securely" delete dates of non offenders it's legal.

On a trip from Kristiansand to Oslo in 2011, I noted to the driver of the vehicle in which I was traveling how unusual it seemed to me that no one on the highway was being impatient or aggressive. How remarkable, I proposed, that even the impatience of motorists could be tamed by Norwegian social norms? He chuckled and explained section speed control to me: https://www.vegvesen.no/en/fag/fokusomrader/trafikksikkerhet...

Norway has the lowest per-capita traffic deaths of any European country. Check out the US's traffic death statistics if you need another reason to be disappointed in the outcomes of our domestic policy.

It's called Section Control.

There's a whole lot of:

> The $LOCAL_CITY Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance equipment company, Ring, in $RECENT_YEAR to gain special access to the company's Neighbors app.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

It’s strange I don’t see Flock or Redflex. They are both widely used in my area.

You can't walk more than a couple miles before getting facially scanned in Michigan. Oof!

ALPRs are totally fair play IMO -- if that's their only function. I'd rather have a robot triage criminal activity than a biased human. Facial recognition, however, is 100% the wrong move.

I think it depends very much on how they're used. If they're set up to flag stolen vehicles and vehicles owned by fugitives and don't store irrelevant license plate numbers long-term, I have no complaints.

I think in practice they often record every plate and store the data long-term, which can be used to track people who are not active targets of an investigation.

My company has a strict 30-day policy, irrelevant plates are never recorded either. But yeah I agree, some of the bigger players are pretty loosey goosey with their privacy policies.

If someone is breaking into houses in my neighborhood and a ring camera is able to identify and help apprehend the person, I would want that to happen.

That's fine if it's your property and camera.

But if somebody breaks into your neighbors place... You're really ok with police asking Amazon (without your knowledge, consent, or a warrant) for footage?

(Edit: Removed "the last few weeks of footage" from the last statement, which was correctly pointed out to be exaggeration.)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/ring-reveals-they-give...

>You ok with police subpoenaing Amazon

With a subpoena, absolutely, those need to be signed off by a judge. Warrantless, depends on the circumstance. If someone broke in between 2am and 4am, I'm fine with them requesting ring footage, explicitly for that timeframe, explicitly for the purpose of apprehending the perpetrator.

I don't agree with police using it to surveil areas without a specific person and crime in mind. I'm not sure that's happening or not.

>for the last few weeks of footage

I don't see in the article where it says they typically request weeks of footage. Are you exaggerating to strengthen your point?

> The “emergency” exception to this process allows police to request video directly from Amazon, and without a warrant. But there are insufficient safeguards to protect civil liberties in this process. For example, there is no process for a judge or the device owner to determine whether there actually was an emergency. This could easily lead to police abuse: there will always be temptation for police to use it for increasingly less urgent situations.

> Warrantless, depends on the circumstance.

Wow, that's a very different mindset than my own. Fascinating!

How about if your neighbor suspected their spouse was cheating and had a private investigator request footage from Amazon? Assuming the request was made in good faith, with a limited timeframe, and an explicit purpose?

> I'm not sure that's happening or not.

That's kinda the point, right? Police and Amazon have defined their own terms for sharing footage with no accountability to the user, and they've proven they're willing to do so.

"Without a warrant" really just means "on a whim."

> I don't see in the article where it says they typically request weeks of footage. Are you exaggerating to strengthen your point?

Whoops. Misremembered, so I suppose so. I'll edit.

>had a private investigator request footage from Amazon?

Not sequitur, PI's aren't police and don't have arrest or prosecution power. The concern in the article is about police. I would be against Amazon allowing just anyone to just browse Ring cameras.

>That's kinda the point, right? Police and Amazon have defined their own terms for sharing footage with no accountability to the user, and they've proven they're willing to do so.

Is there evidence that the police are mass surveilling people using Amazon/Ring without investigating a specific crime and/or a specific person? Please show me. If that's actually the case and not just speculation, I'm not for it.

>Whoops. Misremembered, so I suppose so. I'll edit.

No worries, I do that sometimes too; it wasn't in bad faith.

Believe me, I think police powers need some serious checks and balances and there are many examples where they go over their legal boundaries. I also think without police, there would be rampant crime, which is just as bad. My position is to get rid of bad police and keep the good ones.

> Is there evidence that the police are mass surveilling people using Amazon/Ring without investigating a specific crime and/or a specific person? Please show me. If that's actually the case and not just speculation, I'm not for it.

Oh, this is entirely speculation. I doubt it's happened, but I don't think there's anything in place to stop it, and I'm unwilling to believe in the infinite goodwill of Amazon and the police.

This is mostly a personal thing. I don't even think Amazon and the police are doing anything particularly wrong (if it's documented), I'm just not comfortable putting a surveillance device on my home. Unfortunately for me, a lot of people are...

> I'm unwilling to believe in the infinite goodwill of Amazon and the police.

Really the only thing to deter it would be the fruit of the poisonous tree metaphor. A bad cop probably wouldn't know what that is, but the prosecutor would. Fortunately it would come out in court and be public record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree

This is interesting. Is there anything similar for Europe?

They don't include street cameras in their data.

Why US-only?

This can and will be used by criminals to target communities that have less tech or tech that is exploitable/circumventable. Yes I am aware that security through obscurity is not the answer.

> This can and will be used by criminals to target communities that have less tech or tech that is exploitable/circumventable.

No it won't!

I think this makes some pretty strong assumptions about the purpose and effectiveness of at least some of the relevant technology.

What assumptions do you believe I am making about the purpose and effectiveness of at least some of the relevant technology?

Your statement presumes that such a list gives new, actionable information of benefit to criminals. This also implies that existence (or lack) of technology is a good proxy for effectiveness of policing in a locale, which in turn implies that the technology was purchased to improve said effectiveness. Neither of those things are obviously true in general, or even on average.

I can see how collating such information might make things easier for some outliers, but it's hard to imagine this making much difference one way or another - the criminals who really care already have much better information sources, and the ones who don't aren't likely to do much research, or act effectively on it, anyway.

News stories can and do reveal where rich people live for targeting, reveal security weaknesses at businesses, and encourage copy-cat crimes.

Public security vulnerability releases can and do lead to slow-patchers being targeted by criminals.

Hell, having been involved in physical security leads to me amusing myself while waiting at businesses by analyzing their camera lines of sight and speculating about other measures. (It is usually pretty easy to tell who installed their own systems.)

This makes some assumptions about both how effective any of this is in practice, and how criminals operate, and I’m pretty sure none of those assumptions are true.

It doesn't make assumptions at all. You assume I haven't been around criminals in my lifetime. You also assume criminals aren't intelligent, and that my opinion is an assumption. I'm sorry to burst your bubble but criminals are opportunists and they are intelligent and if they are given an opportunity to assess security they certainly will. My opinion isn't an assumption it's from experience.

Ok, let me step back and add some nuance, because you’re right: some subset of criminals might care. The kind who commit crimes for which the cops bother to use any of this stuff to investigate crimes and catch criminals. At that point the dubious efficacy of most of this comes into play, but sure, certain tech or programs might actually matter.

The other 95+% of criminals needn’t trouble themselves, because the cops won’t investigate their crimes. They’ll only get picked up if they’re caught in the act. It’s not that they don’t care because they’re dumb, but because the cops are lazy as fuck and aren’t investigating most crimes, no matter how many solid leads they’ve got. Unless it’s a murder or (especially) smells like they might be able to confiscate six figures or more of something to sell at auction and/or brag about, they’re not gonna bother. They routinely ignore e.g. extensive video evidence of four and five-figure theft and property crime—not like they’re suddenly gonna get more diligent because the source of their good leads & evidence is slightly different.

But you are correct that there exists a set of criminals to whom this stuff might matter. I was too general in my dismissal.

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