The LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks | Hacker News Reader

The LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks

laweekly.com

77 pointswhbk35 comments

No, let's not "forget" about the NSA. Other groups may be doing bad things too, but that doesn't diminish the badness of the bad things done by the NSA (or anyone else).

True but Bruce Scheiers panglosian suggestion of just handing over the internal monitoring to the FBI aka the cops is just going to make things worse.

Remberer what the FBI has done in the past (under hoover) compared to what the NSA has not done.

Some of this is disturbing and some is not. I don't know why the article makes a big deal out of predictive policing and it's roots in counter-insurgency. Putting police officers where crime is likely to happen is just good management. More power to them. I could care less whether the software was developed for Fallujah. Why would you want to put police resources where they're not needed?

Haha, this is funny. I'm one of the co-founders of PredPol, the startup that makes the predictive policing software LA uses. I think it's a stretch to call anything I wrote in my dorm military grade, but I suppose I'll take that as a compliment. For the record, the DoD called us once asking if some of the models we use to predict crime could be used to predict IED locations, but nothing major ever came of it as far as I know. Also, I live in Santa Clara not Fallujah.

P.S. PredPol predicts crime using only the time, place, and type of past crimes using some simple statistical models. All that is public information for municipalities in the US.

Can you back this up with some links please?

And anyway, even if the LAPD may not be using anything more sophisticated than PredPol with growing their CCTV array, they will in the future. Think of it like this: right now the data is stored. In 5-10 years it will be cross correlated and profiles will be built on everybody. Thanks to the efficiency, the definition of crime will be expanded. Look at Singapore's law against gum wrappers. Look at local laws against homeless blankets. More to the point - the sites you surf can be cross correlated with the places you visit to indicate a reasonable belief that you may harm your kids and they will be taken away after you've been aubpoenaed in court.

20-30 years from now: court cases initiated by computer and suggested to the DA, based on cross correlated databases. Theories built and presented against you by the eloquent lawyer, with the jury thinking, "yeah this cant be all a coincidence." And a vastly expanded private prison complex.

All in all maybe not a bad thing, but people arent used to living like robots.

Not only is omarforgotpwd right, but the article is completely wrong with regard to predictive policing. It was invented by the LAPD w/ the help UCLA researchers in 2008. It is not the result of military research, and was not used by the military until recently. LAPD has repeatedly been credited with it since 2008.. and I was not able to find a single link that backed up the article's claim that it came from the military.

And the program is far from futuristic. Basically, if a certain type of crime has happened in an area recently, the LAPD patrols the area more often. Big deal.

Here's a summary from the FBI:

http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforceme...

And here's a longer article about it (including the history) from RAND:

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/243830.pdf

I don't really have much to say about the rest of the article, but just thought it was funny they mentioned my startup and quoted one my cofounders.

I will say though, based on my experience working with the LAPD, that there is significant red tape around everything. For example I know cops have wanted traffic camera footage for a while but are not allowed access.

There are all kinds of horrific things you can do with technology. We just have to make sure nobody builds them. I'll do my part.

Using Baysian type on data is very damaging on society, for those with strong maths:

We'll move from causality( we noticed you are stocking up on baking powder, lets chat) to inference (according to our data there is 85% chance you are not compliant - w/o a cause).

One outcome: The populace will be demotivated to do anything, just to be safe.

It forces people to worry about fitting the profile of someone who would be more likely than others to do something wrong. Maybe because you live in a certain neighborhood, or recently started biking to work, or have parents who are migrants from Eastern Europe, that thing moves the needle from a 4% chance to a 5% mean chance of committing a list of crimes and triggers police interest.

Not doing anything wrong ceases to be good enough.

Maybe they could index the civil liberties in neighborhoods or states by an index like that. Move them from stop-and-frisk through no-knock and so on to martial law.

this is creepy, while stopping at a gas station I have noticed a camera scanning customers and their cars in a very robotic way - possibility being scanning faces and car plates.

Where does it end, when and how? Is it a felony to destroy devices that spy on me for which I didn't authorize the gathering of intelligence on me?

I am sorry but all this is really gets under my skin. my 2c.

>Where does it end, when and how?

It doesn't end. Or it "ends" in a police state, with a-level people living in protected communities and b-level people suffering all kinds of abuse.

And if you feel like it's OK now, sitting in some suburban home, wait until the middle class is not longer sustainable and the majority falls on the "black guy on the street" level. You know, Detroit like.

It might be done incrementally (same way as the middle class is shrinking for decades) or it might be boosted after 1-2 jolts. Could be a war, a major financial hit, an ecologic disaster etc.

Historically, the only way to end such things, is with people participating in politics. Like the unions of the past brough the 8-hour work-week, child-labour laws, and the like.

i think one of our biggest problems in american politics today is that the critical mass of popular support needed to affect policy change is untenably high compared to how easily people are split into partisan factions (or convinced to act against their own interests).

I think the line is usually defined as you have no expectation of privacy in public, at least that was the justification for the CCTV in the UK (and other English Common Law jurisdictions).

I don't think you should destroy anything, there are other ways to go about expressing disdain that don't lead to laws being broken.

It might be cultural but I wouldn't be freaked out by the petrol station camera. If they are scanning faces, then it is only to locate the head of a moving subject, there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from and if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?

For me there is a difference in picking information up (in an automatic fashion) that people throw away willy nilly and getting information that is protected.

> there is no facial DB consisting of every citizen for them to draw from

Yet.

> if they are scanning license plates then there is obviously enough people pulling a runner to justify investment in newer, more expensive tools for an old problem, sounds fair enough to me. Isn't that the point of having a license number? A publicly visible identification number for a specific vehicle?

Not specific. Every vehicle. All the vehicles in this place at any time without regard to if they were "pulling a runner". There is a database.

Well I was thinking there is no DB for them to draw from because it was a private run camera, not because the facial recognition DB doesn't exist (because technically it does exist for anyone who has ever got a biometric passport in Europe so you don't have to go through old style passport checks).

Remember, at that "gas station", you were on private property. Do you want the government telling you what cameras you can have on your property? How do you know the other cars around you didn't have dash-cams with OCR?

If I pin a name tag to myself, I won't get all up in arms if someone takes a picture of me and I certainly won't make the distinction if their camera is equipped with OCR software or not. If I don't want that information out there, I won't put it out there. If I am regulated to put it out there, then that's that really.

There may have been someone writing everyone license plate down too, I wouldn't care (but that's me). If I saw them trying to break into my car to get my license or registration, then that is a different matter altogether.

Yeah I don't want the government telling me who I can't rob, rape, and murder on my own private property either.

Well that's tough titties, because they have told you who you can't rob or murder on your private property.... anyone and everyone.

If your license plate was protected, it wouldn't be stuck on the outside of your car in high contrast letters made specifically to be captured by automated means. At least that's how it seems to me.

Nice slope you're standing on.

There are already ways to track every car and person in a city: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-survei...

It will only become better and more accessible to organizations. Deal with it... by starting your own companies and making sure things go in a good direction. Maybe educate lawmakers on the potential dangers.

But banning technology isnt going to work.

I own some restaurants. We have cameras, too. No, they don't scan customers and cars in any way. You're implying those cameras are owned by the police. You're making stuff up.

Your cameras might not be part of the pool of cameras monitored by civilian volunteers, but there are a great many other cameras that are. My family visited the local station for a tour when they were having a sort of community day. Our young boys wanted to see what a police station was like.

Part of the tour included a visit to their video surveillance room. There were at least a dozen LCDs each with 4 camera feeds displayed, and two volunteers watching the cameras. The majority of the cameras were security cameras installed by business owners and home owners, and they shared the feed (and often pan/tilt control) with the police.

There might not be automated scanning yet, but everything they did was recorded. Automating this in a central location (county, or state) would be relatively trivial within the next few years.

To say the police own the cameras is incorrect, but it is absolutely true to say the police HAVE ACCESS TO the cameras, and often DO CONTROL them.

I've seen steerable cameras in shopping mall parking lots follow shapely, fashionably dressed young women. Also, some cities have deals where the police (or "Public Safety") department monitors cameras that private sector entities buy and install.

I believe that person, in short.

And, despite that (if it were true), most do not. Crossing the line of using police in private sector situations is possible because the private company asked them to, such as in large shopping malls.

In any case, it still does not mean it's every camera system throughout the world which would, again, be a false statement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6DsPea_p6M&feature=share&lis...

What does that prove? The post I replied to was an answer to the implication that all cameras everywhere I used by the police (NSA and any government org). I never said there are no cameras.

And the post you replied to never stated nor implied what you claim. Straw troll is made of straw.

A bit of a linkbait, since the NSA surveillance covers probably 3 billion people at all times and the LAPD covers L.A. with maybe 5 million people.

So the capabilities of the NSA are around 1,000 times bigger than the capabilities of the LAPD.

Capabilities of LAPD are probably a subset of NSA's - the latter can probably pull up on demand every information the former gathered.

> LAPD's mild-sounding "predictive policing" technique, introduced by former Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. military, based on "insurgent" activity in Iraq and civilian casualty patterns in Afghanistan.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein

"Hackers of the world, unite".

Seriously, it's time the resistance starts to coalesce a bit, and hackers get to work mitigating the damage that this stuff does. Hack the facial recognition cameras and scramble the data so they don't recognize a damn thing... hack the license plate database and and change every recognized plate number out for a random number.

Better yet, let's develop technological means to counter this crap. Treat it as damage and route around it, to use an analogy. Let's create wearable devices that blur your face out of video feeds, or a license plate frame that can keep your tag from being read, etc.

The political system has failed us and it's now a technological arms race. And while the NSA may hoover up a lot of the best mathematicians, I'd still wager that there are more smart hackers who don't work for the govt. than ones who do.

"Forget the NSA" is taking it a bit far, but I think we should not forget that there are other threats to our privacy. In particular we should not obsess about whether software is "NSA-proof", or imagine that the problem would go away if the NSA's activities were somehow curtailed.

Let's skip 10-20 years ahead, ok? The march of technology cannot be stopped. I've always said that terrorism is a problem of technology. Now we see the surveillance state is as well.

The truth is that vast troves of data on people are any organization's crack, whether that organization is an a corporation, a government agency, or a local law enforcement agency.

Good luck taking the crack away. If you think the war on drugs has been ineffective, wait until you try making organizations quit as others are smoking up.

Look around, Hacker News. Embrace the inexorable march of technology. It is our time to disrupt these products with new ones and turn it for good, but wishing it would all stop is more suited to luddites.

This reminds me (and I apologize for the OT), I know Singapore also relies heavily on camera surveillance, but is it known whether they then process the data in a similar (i.e. harvest as much as they can) way to LAPD? Are there any known incidents of abuse of that system? Again, sorry about the OT, but the city state intrigues me greatly.

How much of this and the NSA are due to the "gee whiz" effect as I call it? These organizations have cool new technology so they want to use it for no other reason than that.

It's like the HTML blink tag it was annoying and pretty much useless but just because it existed people used it.

Read this scholarly work for an ever more disturbing description of changes and trends in LA:

http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-Angeles/...

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