Wherein SFPD is still going surveillance-nutty | Hacker News Reader

Wherein SFPD is still going surveillance-nutty

dnalounge.com

238 pointssp33282 comments

"...they tried to get this written into the law back in 2010 and got their asses handed to them, so instead they've just been making it a condition of every new permit ever since. Because they think that they get to just make up laws, all on their own..."

So by making administrative changes to business permits, police get effective warrant-free surveillance?

It continues to amaze me how various government agencies are doing these end-runs around the legislature and voters by fiat.

I got into an interesting debate about nuclear weapons with a person who works on non-proliferation. Nuclear weapons are pretty stupid, especially today, since they do a huge amount of damage and provide limited to negative strategic advantage (if you nuke a city, just clearing the rubble it a 5 or 10 year project before you can even think about having it be functional again, so no advantage gained and a lot of work to have it re-contributing to the nation-state economy)

His point was that nuclear weapons were seductive because they were cheap. And even though they might cost $100M and require $25M/year in maintenance, that was a pittance compared to training, equipping, and deploying a couple of armored divisions which could similarly level a city. So having a "cheap" nuke meant you didn't need a couple of divisions of marines.

Cops have the same problem. There are only so many of them, and yet there is a lot of crime. So the combined forces of budget cuts and crime fighting pull them toward solutions of "efficiency" (which is code for more crime fighting for less money). At a logical (but immoral) extreme, if you have cameras recording everything on every street in a city 24/7 with cameras that can see in all conditions, and a crime occurs, you don't need cops you don't need witnesses, you just rewind the tape to when it happened, see who did it, and go arrest them. A police force of 150 officers reduced to one fat guy [1] sitting in a room full of monitors and recording devices. That is why these guys practically orgasm over things like the DARPA Argus-IS system [2].

Watching re-runs of Starsky and Hutch and Cagney & Lacey vs modern cop shows like Castle or NCIS gives you a good feel for the difference in efficiency that tech has brought into law enforcement.

So the weird thing is that people demand these sorts of capabilities and tools for good reasons (crime mitigation, catching bad guys after the fact) and ignore the potential for abuse (which is more often covered up). When you see editorials that the biggest drug gang in LA used to be based in the Rampart police station you realize that no amount of "good intention" protects you from a few now truly well equipped "bad apples." I've proposed to my representatives a law that would make "violation of the public trust" a capital crime. It is the civil equivalent of treason. Not a lot of traction on that effort though. That is what it will take though to protect yourself from folks who would abuse these toys to do bad things. I can't see trying to deny them the efficiencies as a winning proposition you come out looking guilty.

[1] Its a trope I see all the time, the guy watching the monitors is morbidly obese (always male) and generally portrayed as a loser. Of course their job is redundant so in the "real" world nobody would watch the monitors.

[2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2013/01/29/watch-t...

Here's something that's been bugging me, perhaps you may have an answer:

How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?

If we reward increasing arrest rates (because presumably we're arresting more and more of the criminals) the straightforward solution is to arrest more people, and that would seem to lead to more and more draconian law enforcement to reach quota.

If we reward declining arrest rates (because presumably there are fewer and fewer crimes being committed), then the straightforward solution is to stop making arrests and thus allow real crime to proliferate.

This just seems like a no-win solution for honest departments and civil rights.

"How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?"

A good question, I would not base it on arrests though, that is like measuring developers by bug reports.

Start with the purpose of a police department, law enforcement and in carrying out that duty a mitigation of unlawful activity. So in terms of achieving their goals one would start with comparing unlawful activity in their jurisdiction vs a similar jurisdiction with a different agency. Compare per capita costs (hence the tax burden) and compare customer satisfaction (the citizens).

In a squishy way, do the citizens feel safe? Do they engage in activities that would not be possible if they felt danger? And How much do we spend compared to other cities with similar economic demographics ?

So we reward arrests that accurately convict the perpetrator responsible in as short as time as possible. Always finding your crook, but taking on average 14 - 18 months to do so, not good. Solving 90% of your caseload in under a week is good; Having more than a 1% false positive rate is bad. Citizens trusting/partnering with the police is good, people who can't trust their police is bad.

That's one of the reasons I have pushed for the 'civil treason' sort of crime for violating the public trust. In order to trust the integrity of a police officer, I need to know that the risk they would face of violating that integrity is so high they don't do it. Life in prison for a police officer that commits perjury for example. Not regular citizens, but someone entrusted with enforcing the law. Similarly for judges that take bribes. In order for democracy to work you need a justice system that is harder on itself than it is on criminals.

I would be more comfortable with the surveillance request if I knew that if the officers were lying about the need for it they could be sentenced to life in prison. That makes them less likely to lie.

"This just seems like a no-win solution for honest departments and civil rights."

My thesis is that the root of the problem is that its a "no lose" solution. There isn't any penalty for being a bad cop, you might get a reprimand for misstating that surveillance was the law but that's it. If the penalty, the 'lose' part, was there, then the conversation changes.

Life in prison for a police officer who commits perjury might carry a risk of convincing the honest potential police officers who don't quite trust the system to not become police officers, while not deterring those who have no long term fear of consequences.

That's an interesting point. Such a law would require reviewing past cases for some 10+ years to clean the system out.

"How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?"

The number of crimes committed in an area is often used. If the number goes down, the police are doing a good job of discouraging crime.

This results in in things like absurdly dysfunctional web forms for reporting crimes. People just give up on reporting their car being broken into rather than waste an hour figuring out why their report keeps getting rejected.

Thus there is less reported crime, and the police pat themselves on the back.

Re " How the hell do we measure a police department's effectiveness?"

I don't think it's that hard. There are a set of crimes, like burglary, mugging, and armed robbery that are at the core of the quality of life in a city. Clearance rates for those crimes, plus a survey that measures reporting rates, should give a pretty good measure of a police force.

Arrest rates, unless they are in these categories, tell us very little.

Because citizens accept that you need a government license to... do virtually anything of significance. And unlike laws passed by legislative bodies, nobody ever looks at these closely and checks what's in there, and since onerous license conditions are not considered rights violations, basically anything can be there unless somebody gets pissed enough to go to the court and lucky enough get a court ruling on a specific thing. Since most people don't have time/money to do this while trying to start a business, not surprising what happens there.

I do wish we had an organization protecting the 4th & 5th amendments that was as aggressive and successful as the NRA is at protecting the 2nd.

Because its hard to fight against the general public's view that the police should do anything in their power to fight violence and drug dealers. Who cares if "criminals" rights to unreasonable searches is violated? They're "criminals"

Watch any cop show. The "rogue" cop goes after the violent criminal despite being suspended from the force and valiantly captures the mob boss. Public generally finds it okay as long as the bad guy gets caught (nevermind if the bad guy is just some non-criminal average joe)

PS I have nothing against cops in general, but the cops should be protecting _all_ citizens, especially against things like this.

> NRA is at protecting the 2nd

NRA refused to argue cases on second amendment grounds until very recently. They strongly opposed taking Heller to court. Second amendment has been tremendously eroded. Heller was fought by a group of non-NRA affiliated lawyers.

NRA works through campaigning and lobbying. They aren't as good at second amendment litigation (although they've been successful in litigating against bad gun laws using other constitutional amendments as well as the state constitutions -- which usually have stronger provisions for the right to bear arms than the US constitution).

EFF and ACLU, on the other hand, work through litigation. They are not nearly as well funded. NRA is not just a political organization, they are also effectively a AAA for firearm owners: they provide safety training (they're famous for having coined the "3 rules of gun safety"), sell targets, provide discounts on everything from wine to hotels, etc...

As much as it hurts for me to say, most people don't care about civil liberties. They want civil liberties for them: they want to carry a gun, they want to be able choose when to have or not to have a child, etc... Yet when it comes to more core liberties -- and despite being a strong 2A supporter and a gun owner, I think 1A and 4A are far more crucial than 2A today -- there's very little personal motive. People are very willing to give away their privacy to receive a discount at Safeway:

http://reason.com/blog/2010/02/23/judge-alex-kozinski-the-fo...

Is there a silver lining? Actually, yes! I think the rise of Internet will make privacy a more paramount concern that everyone will take to heart. Consider, for example this email subject from ACLU (about CISSPA) that I received and that literally (and likely deliberately and by design) made me quickly jump out of my seat:

  68359   + Mar 06 Anthony D. Rome ( 270) Your last Amazon.com order

In short, people who are _not_ civil libertarians (unlike myself, who is an ACLU and EFF member -- along with a donor to NRA-ILA and SAF) need a personal stake in core civil liberties in order to care about them. Fortunately, the Internet will give them just that stake.

ACLU, EFF to name a couple.

And the 2nd has been eroded tremendously, maybe not as much as 4th, but plenty still.

The ACLU and EFF are no where near as effective as the NRA. The NRA has a recent win in front of the Supreme Court that secured the 2nd on a state level, the EFF doesn't seem to do well in front of the Supreme Court. The ACLU protects part of the 1st and not much more.

By recent win, are you talking about McDonald v. Chicago? That's actually Alan Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also responsible for Heller v. DC, which the NRA tried to interfere with. In fact, most of the recent 2nd amendment successes have been Gura's work, not the NRA's.

The NRA is pro-hunting instead of being pro-second-amendment. Sometimes the two interests intersect, but not always.

SAF (guns) and MAPS+LEAP (drugs) are my favorite 501c3s.

That's probably because freedom of speech and freedom from unlawful search are perceived as rights that can wax and wane, but can always be restored.

The loss of the right to bare arms is perceived as an end-game. Once disarmed, there's no going back.

The same can be said about any policy -- verification is very easy with the 2nd Amendment because it's clear and obvious to consumers on a personal level however censorship and surveillance are difficult to measure and quantify.

I agree. That's why I carefully used the word "perceived."

"The loss of the right to bare arms"- I really hope they don't ban t-shirts!

Haha. Forgive my spelling.

The NRA only protects hunter's rights (sometimes at the expense of non-hunting gun owners). The most recent victories in the supreme court were by the Second Amendment Foundation, and think-tanks like the Cato institute have done much more for the second amendment than the NRA.

While the last decade or so has been good for supporter of gun rights, the entire 20th century was not. A lot of what gun rights activists are trying to do now is gain back some of the rights they lost in the 20th century.

As a side note, I think it is interesting is that 3D printer and other consumer-level CAD technology may be for the Second Amendment what the internet was for the First: a way to bypass government regulations altogether.

Please do not mistake my post for an endorsement of pro- or anti-gun viewpoints, I just want to clarify that the NRA isn't actually all that great for gun rights, and gun rights activists haven't been all that successful until recently.

The NRA has played a pretty big roll in passing "shall issue" concealed carry laws in most US states. I think saying they only focus on hunter's right is inaccurate, although the NRA does spend a lot of time on that as well.

In all fairness, all the other Bill of Rights amendments were already applied to the states.

The ACLU pretty regularly takes 4th and 5th Amendment cases.

Yep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_Ri... the second amendment was incorporated in 2010, but most of the others were incorporated decades ago. By that data, if anything, the NRA is protecting the second amendment worse than all the other amendments have been protected.

I'm pretty sure they were waiting until the Supreme Court composition favored them before bringing a case. Heller was a 5-4 decision, filing when the court was more left/liberal could have had resulted in a devastating judicial precedent for gun owners.

The NRA has the advantage that it is aligned with the interests of a major domestic industry and everyone who works in it. The ACLU and EFF don't really have that kind of alignment, which one would assume makes it harder to raise funds, etc.

I think part of the issue is that the 4th and 5th generally are seen as protecting "bad" people who have already hurt "good people" and make it harder for other "good" people to do their jobs.

Guns are pretty benign when they're just sitting there, and there are plenty of existing laws to criminalize bad things done with guns. The arguments for restricting the 2nd are mainly about preventing bad people from acquiring guns from good people, which is only an indirect thing.

So, even an organization as effective as NRA/SAF/GOA would have a hard time being as effective in protecting the 4th/5th as they have been in protecting the 2nd.

(of course, IANAL, and I assume someone like rayiner will say something much more intelligent here)

Unfortunately, there are not many companies that make a living from the 4th & 5th. The gun companies stand to lose a good bit on 2nd amendment issues so they help fund the NRA.

The 2010 article linked to by jwz is about a proposed alcohol tax being defeated. I'm guessing that the opposition to it was mainly about the tax and the surveillance cameras were collateral damage. If you proposed merely that bars have surveillance cameras which the police can access, I'm sure it would be widely supported by both the voters and the board of supervisors.

What the government agencies are doing an end-run around is the Constitution and sadly the voters and legislature are complicit. We have to change the average person's attitude about this sort of thing before we have any hope of meaningful change.

Does anybody have a link to the San Francisco study referred to below by Cory Doctorow?

"It's about the total failure of CCTV to deter people from committing crimes in the first place. After all, that's how we were sold on CCTV – not mere forensics after the fact, but deterrence. And although study after study has concluded that CCTVs don't deter most crime (a famous San Francisco study showed that, at best, street crime shifted a few metres down the pavement when the CCTV went up), we've been told for years that we must all submit to being photographed all the time because it would keep the people around us from beating us, robbing us, burning our buildings and burglarising our homes."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/17/why-cctv-do...

“Rather than being a tool, [CCTV] has in a lot of cases become a substitute for policing. So people very rarely see a bobby on the beat [a police officer patrolling the streets], but they do see CCTV cameras,” said Pickles. “The danger is that there is almost an acceptance that crime is going to happen. So rather than trying to prevent crime you just focus on making sure you have video footage of it when it happens.”

http://www.dw.de/doubts-as-to-cctv-efficacy-in-big-brother-b...

I believe this is the study: http://www.library.ca.gov/crb/08/08-007.pdf

Summary of results:

• Neither cameras in Jordan Downs nor Hollywood Boulevard had any significant effect in reducing violent or property crime rates within the target areas;

• The monthly rate of violent crimes fell in both the Jordan Downs and Hollywood target areas; however, the Nickerson Gardens control site and the Hollywood Box matched pair experienced similar reductions and the results were not statistically significant;

• The monthly rate of property crimes decreased in Hollywood, and increased in Jordan Downs, but the results were not statistically significant in either case;

• The evidence on the displacement of crime is mixed; in both locations, some crimes increased at a faster rate in the adjacent areas, indicating that CCTV may displace crime, while other types of crimes decreased relatively more in the buffer areas, though results were not statistically significant;

• CCTV had no statistically significant effect on arrest rates for misdemeanor quality-of-life infractions in Jordan Downs or on Hollywood Boulevard

Thanks. That's not actually it but there was a reference to the SF study and from that it was possible to find the actual report.

Researchers: http://citris-uc.org/news/2009/04/14/citris_helps_city_san_f...

PDF: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/CITRIS_SF_CSC_Study_Fi...

SF Chronicle TLDR: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Crime-cameras-not-capt...

"San Francisco's 68 controversial anti-crime cameras haven't deterred criminals from committing assaults, sex offenses or robberies - and they've only moved homicides down the block, according to a new report from UC Berkeley.

Researchers found that nonviolent thefts dropped by 22 percent within 100 feet of the cameras, but the devices had no effect on burglaries or car theft. And they've had no effect on violent crime.

The cameras have been installed in phases on some of the city's roughest streets since 2005 with large concentrations of them in the Western Addition and Mission District and others in the lower Haight, the Tenderloin and near Coit Tower.

The cameras have contributed to only one arrest nearly two years ago in a city that saw 98 homicides last year, a 12-year high. The video is choppy, and police aren't allowed to watch video in real-time or maneuver the cameras to get a better view of potential crimes."

When page four of the study tells us that "CCTV had no statistically significant effect on arrest rates ..." we learn that the study failed.

Perhaps CCTV reduced arrest rates. Perhaps CCTV didn't reduce arrest rates. The lack of statistical significance means that the people doing the study failed to find out which it was.

Notice that if CCTV is super-duper effective, then it should be fairly easy to get a statistically significant result. This is well known; so the executive summary on page four is an example of weasel-wording. The authors insinuate that CCTV wasn't super-duper effective, heck, it didn't do much of anything. But they weasel out of talking about the power of the study.

If you don't expect CCTV to be super-duper effective, you might still be interested in whether it was a little bit effective. CCTV can be a lot cheaper than foot patrols. It might be disappointing, yet still earn its keep.

We return to the question of the statistical power of the study. A powerful study, that fails to get a statistically significant result, puts a tight upper bound on the usefulness of CCTV. If that is less than what CCTV cost we know to spend our money on something else. A weak study puts a slack upper bound on the usefulness of CCTV. If it fails to get a statistically significant result, then we learn that CCTV isn't super-duper effective, but since neither pro- nor anti- were claiming that, their quarrel continues as before.

I'm giving up, having skimmed to page 15 of the PDF, because, well you can read page 15 yourself and see why I think that it reveals the authors to be completely clueless about statistics.

CCTV is a waste because effective police know who the criminals are anyway.

Every city police department has org charts for gangs and drug dealing orgs, and they know where people fence stolen property.

Best case, CCTV makes prosecution easier. Worst case, it makes it easier for the cops to justify harassing every black kid with a hoodie based on a grainy picture.

CCTV is quite good at helping to mitigate public order offences. For example, here in London (with possibly the most cameras per person in the world - hard to get a reliable figure) one of the few genuinely useful examples of CCTV is to enable fast response on Friday/Saturday nights. For example, a fight breaking out outside a pub.

It is not totally unusual to see mobile CCTV units (vans with telescopic cameras on the roof) on the streets of London for this purpose. But yes, in terms of intelligence gathering or crime prevention outside of drunk and disorderly, CCTV is not very useful. A few years ago, the Met Police reckoned that in London one crime was solved for every thousand cameras[1]. Not really an endorsement to shout from the rooftops about.

[1]:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/cctv-in-the-spotl...

It may be that only one crime was solved for every thousand cameras, but there are several houses and politicians bought with each contract.

The mobile CCTV units with the periscope cameras are mostly for parking enforcement.

This is going to get downvoted but...

...welcome to the liberal utopia. Where the 'experts' tell you how to run your business and your live your life. Public servants now think they have the right to violate our rights and freedoms because they know better. Whether its surveillance or the size of a soda can. It's as though we are living in an Orwellian novel. Why can't we just let people live their own lives as long as they don't hurt anyone else.

1) 100% agreed

2) What I find amusing about jwz's blog is that every time he has to interact with government he gets screwed - massively massively screwed - yet he still thinks that anyone proposing less government is self-obviously a nut case.

There are literally millions of people thinking the same. Of course getting business permit is costly, onerous, full of meaningless bureaucracy and nonsensical rules and power grabs, and sucks the life out of anybody for months - but if you think it can be done otherwise, you're a nut. How one could just come and start a business without some very smart and knowledge people in the government validating him? Then we'd have businesses which aren't perfect!

jwz probably does not bother to blog about all the times he interacts with the government and doesn't get screwed.

So you think if someone is beaten by police and complains, he should also not all the times he wasn't beaten by the police in order to have balance? This is not the case for balance - not being screwed is normal state and you don't need to do anything to not be screwed. It is the cases which one gets screwed which need change and thus need to be brought to everybody's attention. You can't say "the system works" because not everybody gets screwed every time, but you can say it does not when one gets screwed frequently.

Having a reason to criticize aspects of government has nothing to do with following a small-government philosophy. You may be projecting your own preferences onto his reactions.

You're assuming that with less government he wouldn't get screwed as much. However, you've provided no reason to assume that with less government, he wouldn't get massively, massively, massively screwed++ by what remains of the government.

The issue as you frame it is not a liberal/conservative issue. It's an authoritarian/libertarian issue. It seems to me that most of jwz's problems are to do with people who are relatively conservative and authoritarian.

I agree with everything you say except "liberal utopia". Why was that necessary, exactly? Do you think it's a good idea to alienate me from your ideas just because I happen to identify with some liberal ideas?

At their extremes the modern version of the word liberal and conservative are pretty frightening. Both want to be deeply involved in aspects of your life because they can "make it better". Which aspects depend on right / left bent. The modern liberal is the CA government and Mayor Bloomberg, and this does fit under their purview of things they like to control.

I would imagine when you think liberal (could be wrong), you are thinking freedom of thought and action. That meaning of the word is so long gone (much as "conservative" doesn't mean what it used to).

Freedom of thought and action, yes, but also a solid social safety net and things like universal health care.

I agree about the extremes, but you didn't specify that before, which made it pretty alienating.

I wasn't the original poster, sorry.

Having lived under US government-provided health care, I'll skip it and try something else. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsf9QvZD1Ic

Apologies for the identity mixup. I've lived under socialized health care elsewhere and it was fine. The US government seems to take the attitude of, "Government doesn't work, let us demonstrate." I think it ends up as a self-perpetuating cycle, rather than anything that's inherent to the idea itself.

Because... because... because of THE CHILDREN!

Don't you realize? The children, think of the children!

> This is going to get downvoted but...

FYI, I stopped reading and downvoted at that point.

I've been reading his blog for a while, and I have no idea why (other than love) you would be an entertainment venue in SF. The amount of money and harassment is beyond belief. The authorities there act like warlords rather than public servants.

Here's what he said 15 years ago:

In 1998, it seemed like every band that I wanted to see was playing at one particular venue, a terrible place to see live shows. I rarely went to shows there, because I disliked the space so much. And I whined about it, a lot. I bemoaned the fact that there were so few venues that could do justice to a live show, and even fewer that were booking the kind of music I like.

Finally, one of my friends said, ``why don't you stop complaining about it and do something about it.'' It hadn't occurred to me that, in fact, I could just go and do that. I knew it wouldn't be easy: I was well aware of the fact that the reason that there were fewer clubs was the current political climate in San Francisco had a decidedly anti-club slant. But someone had to fight the fight, and it might as well be me!

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html

In private employment, when an employee "just can't take no for an answer", this can eventually lead to dismissal.

The voting public needs to make such part of public employment, including particularly the election of politicians.

It's the only mechanism I see within our current governance structures for putting curbs on "undead initiatives".

In the larger ecosphere, this would apply to, for example, these endless rounds of international "trade agreements" that seek to legislate, via this back door, ever more draconian IP rights to private parties. (ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, TPP, the North American European one...)

So... inefficient and ineffective as this may be, note who's pushing this policy, and who supports them, politically. Tell them it will influence your vote.

Let the relevant union, if any, know that defending such proponents is or would tarnish their reputation.

And support your local news... Local, where your influence is relatively large and immediate.

Meanwhile the NSA is spying on the entire world's Internet communications, including those of all US citizens, without warrant:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_Wind_(code_name)

Funny enough, I was reading about this last night. There are so many extraordinary claims in the Wired article [1], that I found it all hard to believe. It'd require sci-fi technology to actively mine and decrypt every electronic transaction around the world. Imagine decrypting just all of the weakly-encrypted data --- sure, one communication stream is trivial. Billions at once? That's insane -- I'm not sure if there is enough energy on this planet.

I also don't understand the cost-benefit ratio associated with actively spying on every transaction in the US. The vast majority of adversaries are outside the US, clustered in a handful of countries. I know that the US ran massive domestic anti-communism operations during the Cold War, but that would have been far cheaper than setting up a data center capable of capturing, storing, and processing every electronic transaction. (And even those Cold War operations didn't focus on every American.)

It reminds me of clients who think I can predict basically anything if I have enough data and computational power. Most of them seem to think that I can automate the process, that they don't need to be involved, that it doesn't take weeks of gut feeling analysis, and that it'll basically give them God-like omniscience.

I spend a lot of time educating customers about the limits of "big data". If the federal government is running such a program, they need to hire a consultant for education's sake.

Edit: Also, reading the post about NSL's [2], I get the impression that the NSA is still at the same level of tech as the general public. Why wouldn't they just use Stellar Wind?

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

[2] https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...

Their goal is to collect and archive the data, much of which is plaintext anyway.

With plans to archive it for 100 years, they can just simply wait until vulnerabilities in block ciphers are discovered (possibly by the NSA) and hold on to the data until then and decrypt it.

I'm sure they're decrypting everything they know how, but for everything else, it's just archival.

I've always assumed that they have backdoors into all of the publicly common crytography protocols so they are effectively violating Moore's law (by not having to brute-force).

Remember, it was the NSA that designed most of them to begin with and still hires the best of the best to continue the work. It's also probably a lot easier to just tap into everything and record it for later decryption if necessary than try to target various networks or systems individually.

Well it depends on what you mean by backdoor. Just to pick one... let's take AES. There are a lot of open-source implementations, depending on your platform. Almost all of them are open-source [0]. Furthermore, AES is based on the Rijndael cipher [1], which is simply a mathematical process that an undergrad could understand and implement. Ignoring the fact that the major implementations have been poured over and audited by many researchers (and that you could do the same), it'd be just too risky to put a backdoor into an open implementation.

It might be possible that the NSA has discovered some side-channel attack [2]. If that's what you mean by backdoor, then I suppose you could be right. (Perhaps every CPU has been manufactured so as to facilitate timing attacks.) I still think that the probabilities combine to some astronomically low number because those attacks still take time, and I don't think they have the computational ability to simultaneously run attacks against any very large subset of the US population.

I don't trust secret, unaccountable organizations... but it just seems too extraordinary to imagine that any organization could actively monitor billions (millions, even) of communication streams at a time.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/archive/aes/rijndael/Rijndael-ammended....

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attacks

For DES, NSA proposed new S-box values that turned out to be better at resisting differential cryptoanalysis -- and differential cryptanalysis would not be discovered by people outside the NSA for years.

Maybe this is just how masterfully deceitful they are.

Having video surveillance in your bar as an owner isn't a bad idea. It is useful to monitor your bar remotely to ensure that customers are being taken care of and no one is stealing even when you're not there.

Giving those tapes without a warrant to the police though seems utterly ridiculous.

"Having video surveillance in your [office] as an owner isn't a bad idea. It is useful to monitor your [programmers] remotely to ensure that [they are busy writing software] and no one is [reading Hacker News] even when you're not there."

No. Just no.

I'm sorry, but there is zero equivalence between a bar and offices.

Bars lose about 24-26% of their gross revenue to theft [1]. Further, bars are about customer service and every bar has a GM or owner who is there most of the time monitoring their employees. Adding cameras only allows them to do it remotely, it doesn't change the fact that they are watching.

The fact is that bartenders are mostly paid in tips and handle a lot of cash (some bars can pull in $60K/week gross). Not only is there a lot of opportunity, but frankly, most bartenders aren't paid very well. Combine this with lax monitoring and you are asking for theft.

Show me an office that has that kind of theft and I'll happily recommend monitoring there too.

[1] According to Bevinco (they do auditing of bars/nightclubs by doing things like weighing bottles at the end of the night and comparing it against the POS) - http://www.nightclub.com/bar-management/employee-theft/thwar...

> Bars lose about 24-26% of their gross revenue to theft

Internal theft. Shrink.

Do what minimarts do and mount a camera pointed down at the till, but don't bother with entrances and exits. It's not a casino.

The theft is not as clear cut as someone pulling money out of the till. Often it involves say, double collecting money from two patrons and only entering in one order or charging a patron for a premium spirit, filling out an order for a cheaper one and then pocketing the difference. Then there is the ever constant overpouring or simply giving away free drinks. With nightclubs there can be all sorts of theft and graft at the door when collecting covers.

Even in bars that don't have cameras, don't believe for a second you aren't being watched just to ensure you're getting your drink quickly or you're not being too aggressive or any number of things that happen when liquor and people mix.

I'm not saying it is right, but it is reality.

> Show me an office that has that kind of theft and I'll happily recommend monitoring there too.

Wouldn't be hard to find a lot of white collar workers who steal 20% of their employers time 'screwing around on the internet'.

And wouldn't the analogy be monitoring internet usage, rather than video surveillance? Something that is extremely common at most major corporations?

Sure, I'm just contradicting the idea that "there is zero equivalence between a bar and offices". Actually there's no difference, if you have a niggling point of view.

This takes huge cojones on jwz's part. He already lost his liquor license once for hosting gay-friendly events.

This seems highly surprising in a neighborhood that hosts - a few blocks away - the Folsom Street Fair and the even raunchier Up Your Alley. Can we have a link?

Remember that liquor licenses are controlled by the ABC, which is a statewide bureaucracy based out of Sacramento. Sometimes the enforcement policies of the SF authorities and the ABC diverge.

If the ABC wants to punish you, they send their own undercover agents into your bar until they see something they can write a citation for. In the case of DNA's license suspension a few years back they found some allegedly-too-raunchy patron behavior at a gay event. So it's probably not accurate to say that the ABC was punishing them for doing gay events, but they may use those events as opportunities for selective enforcement. The SFPD probably wouldn't risk the local firestorm by doing that. The ABC doesn't have to care.

This isn't relavent to the issue at hand because we're not talking about {California, ABC, Liquor License} this is {San Francisco, SFPD, Entertainment Permit}. Different set of people, different priorities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_Lounge

This is, of course, outrageous. Contact the Mayor of San Francisco, Edwin Lee, and get him to do something about it. mayoredwinlee@sfgov.org

Sucks so bad because no logic matters in situations like these. The police can just say "its for your safety", and that is that, everyone has to agree. :(

The ICO in the UK has issued guidance specifically on this topic, saying that licensing shouldn't be tied to use of CCTV without due cause.

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/topi...

Is it a requirement that every club even HAVE CCTV? I figure it's a great crime and safety tool but is it a requirement?

As jwz has explained, the requirement to have CCTV and make CCTV recordings was put as a default-clause in the permits club owners have to get. jwz fought against it and had the clause remove from his single permit, but no other club or bar owner apparently did the same. (I reckon "Barry" quoted in the linked blog-post is his lawyer).

"Barry" is Barry Synoground, general manager of DNA Lounge.

It's an odd choice that they have to make, to press this or just install a video surveillance system and malfunction it, saying "oops" if the police ever come by for footage.

I'm cynical enough to think that if they press it, they will be denied permits on other grounds or be retaliated against in some other way.

That's incredibly passive-aggressive! And it would do nothing to inform other venues in the area that they are being abused and don't have to put up with it.

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