This is pretty shocking and should be more widely publicized. A government agency covertly spying on the public with no warrants, no disclosures, and a fundamental lack of accountability rarely ends well. Even worse, both parties and most of the state and federal government bureaucracy are in fundamental agreement about the need for a national security state, only disagreeing about some of the implementation details.
People in tech are in the best position to create some pushback on this, be it through lobbying as stubbornly single-issue voters, or creating some direct (legal) technical counter-measures. It's not that hard to tell which ones are bugged if you inspect the light poles closely, and threatening to imprison people who take pictures of public lightpoles would almost certainly create more backlash than they're willing to risk.
Can someone start an indiegogo to fund an independent photographer to take high-resolution photos of every utility pole in Seattle?? And then crowdsource inspection of them to identify the cameras?? I would surely contribute and participate.
You could prioritize high-crime and high-traffic areas, ignoring most boring residential streets. A bike currier could probably get pictures of 90% of them in a weekend.
Or crowd-sourcing people to contribute photos from their neighbourhood and whenever they're out walking around.
A mobile app which:
a) captures GPS location and a photo upload
b) browse pictures like Tinder (with high-res zoom) and upvoting/commenting on ones you think are likely
c) browse (likely) utility poles near your location
They're not doing anything Google isn't doing. Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police. It's best if that doesn't change.
I also want to say that there was a recent court decision, I don't recall where in the US, that stated law enforcement can't set up camp outside your home and watch your front door without a warrant.
Which is funny to me they try this anyway, how hard is it to get a warrant these days?
(IANAL) The majority opinion in Kyllo seems to have established that external surveillance featuring commercial, off-the-shelf devices did not require a warrant. Anything which features non-commercially available technology does.
Notably, Scalia dissented in his majority as arguing that even commercial availability (which changes as future tech popularizes) was a dangerous precedent to set and the line should be further in favor of home privacy. The dissent argued that the external nature of the surveillance made a warrant unnecessary.
> Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police
With the resources of modern IT, it renders the 4th Amendment almost useless: It only applies in your windowless, lead-lined basement, with communication coming in or out.
But we're not talking about infrared cameras or wall-penetrating radar or even directional antennas... just cameras that have the same limitations as a human standing on the street corner.
That, in itself, does not constitute stalking or invasion of privacy.
If we pass laws saying "No cameras in public," or "No stationary cameras in public," or "No cameras capable of storing more than X megabytes of image data per day in public," or "No public cameras equipped with OCR capability," then we will handicap ourselves far more than we will the police. (Who will, in any event, simply ignore any laws they find inconvenient.)
There are windows, garbage, the very many commercial tracking sensors in your home and your pocket, Internet connection, phone calls (at least metadata), etc. Plus everything you do outside your home. Infrared sensors are only one small possibility.
>Public streets are fair game for anyone with a camera, and that includes the police. It's best if that doesn't change.
While this logic, the "no expectation of privacy" principle, has long been the standard, and is certainly the logic law enforcement and businesses like Google push hard, I think we really do need to have a public discussion and consideration of how technology enabled Emergent Effects, with emphasis, creates new phenomena that are simply completely beyond the realm of human-oriented common sense that was operated under before. Yes, any single human has always in principle been able to happen to see an individual instance of something in view of public property, or follow somebody around, at any point throughout human history. With the advent of the camera, they could even possibly make a clearer, permanent record of that, but that didn't really change much either. Even simple basic video tape was a true shift.
But the ever increasing volume of storage and processing available at ever shrinking cost, combined with similar cost/quality improvements in sensors, objectively changes the situation. Even if it's 100% purely on public property where there is "no expectation of privacy" and involves nothing but video, a ubiquitous surveillance system plugged in to sufficient persistent storage and data processing creates capabilities that are on a different level. It equates to effective location tracking of any individual for a start, but additionally allows inferences to be drawn about everyone they meet with. It becomes possible to start back tracking people's relationship network graphs, and discerning all sorts of higher level private information. The most simple classic example would be knowing John Doe visited a private residence late at night with Jane Doe who is not his wife in a repeated pattern, and boom, blackmail material, but it could easily be used to make high-accuracy judgements on everything from health issues to private interests to overall group memberships.
This is a huge amount of potential power, and it's objectively something very very different from having a single warrant for an individual and having some investigators try to follow them around. Resource usage matters: in the end, all security is fundamentally an economic equation. If an adversary, or even an agency that nominally is supposed to be on "our side" can suddenly do a technique 100000x cheaper and more effectively then it cannot necessarily be judged by old standards. Emergent effects or properties that do not exist in a lesser collection of individual parts are a huge deal in all parts of our world, and they're becoming a big deal for information now too.
We really should not just allow "well, the police/military intel/investigators/big data corp are only doing what any individual could except a billion times more" to go unchallenged, because that "except a billion times more" is a huge deal. No, an individual human could never do that sort of thing themselves, or even with a huge group. Even the biggest, best funded police states of a half century ago, using far more intrusive techniques, couldn't manage the kind of efficient ubiquitous population categorization, information gathering and tracking now becoming possible "merely" through what's available from the sight of public roads. Don't dismiss what a change omniscience makes. I really hope the courts start to recognize that at some point what government is asking for is not a simple extension of what they've always had, it's something entirely new.
Yeah, in cases like these we immediately jump to the legality argument, whereupon the question swings on the reasonable expectation of privacy.
But, for me, there is something beyond strict legality. It's a question of what kind of society we want, and what kind of relationship the government should have with its people.
That's true, but the courts should make decisions based on what is legal currently. And unfortunately the Constitution doesn't give any right to privacy. Only a right to not have yourself or your possessions be subject to unreasonable physical searches by the government.
While not comparing to Google, this has been supported in the courts when license plate readers were challenged. even when private companies kept the data.
While I agree what happens on public streets should be open to the public there should however be privacy rules and such when the actor is government or a private entity operating on the behalf or working with the government
"If the public knows X, we won't be able to use X without the public's knowledge. Further, the public might demand we get a warrant to use X, making using X without a warrant more difficult."
Well then... I guess everything the FBI does should be withheld from public scrutiny because national security.
Clearly there needs to be Yellow "FBI Surveillance" stickers you can put on utility poles. Put the stickers on all the poles and note the ones the FBI takes off, build your geo database and add it to OpenStreetMap!
That is exactly what I'm suggesting, and don't put it past the FBI to not think things through. If it was too obvious if all the poles got tagged you could do them slowly over time.
Right, just keep hitting them at random, and see which ones disappear the fastest. But you'd need to crowd-source it, and build an app so people could quickly geo-tag as they apply them.
I can't imagine that putting stickers on utility poles is illegal ;)
Exactly, they might take them all down, but more likely would ignore them when they are everywhere, since they would then signify nothing, and be costly to have removed.
If these cameras had a warrant attached to them, there would be no question that the locations should remain secret - I fail to understand why its so hard to get a warrant for this kind of surveillance - but I am at least somewhat understanding (its kind of obvious) why the camera locations should remain a secret.
I'd rather see my government operating above the board (even if the records are sealed until trial) rather than casting a wide net and throwing back what they ought not have caught later.
In the "boy who killed parents pleads for mercy as an orphan" department:
> Winn, meanwhile, wrote to Judge Jones that the location information about the disguised surveillance cams should be withheld because the public might think they are an "invasion of privacy."
It's the year 2034, the FBI just killed 168 unarmed Americans. It claims that disclosing the reason why they were killed may scare off similar targets. A warrant to do the killings was avoided due to similar concerns.
You know we've gone off the rails a bit when the authorities feel they have to automate 24x7 surveillance to watch for things that the neighbors otherwise don't give one rat shit about. (nobody is complaining about anything, but we're still looking for a way to take down "those people", for a given unpopular group of the day)
E.g. - the War on Drugs going from somehow (merely) "keeping the peace" to Zero Tolerance and zero sense.
What do you expect? It's the push from the "never again" crowd. Sandy hook, Boston marathon, San Bernardino, and Orlando to name a few. People are so scared of the big bad terrorist that they are more than happy to be watched 24/7. If you have nothing to hide then what's the problem?
I really have no problem with this -- provided the FBI goes in front of a judge with probable cause and gets a warrant. This is secret and that's what really bothers me.
I'm interested to see how the British handle this. There are certainly lots of cameras in London, but I believe they are rather conspicuous. Perhaps this is more about protecting technology than knowledge? Like, it's not about location, it's about the method.
As others have pointed out, most CCTV in the UK is private, and very little of it is networked, so they are rarely accessed.
Even so, if you capture the public (you run a shop or other venue that invites the public in, or you have a camera capturing areas beyond your property), you need to label your cameras, and you will be subject to the Data Protection Act (and in a wider context, this is an implementation of the EU Data Protection Directive, so similar laws apply in all EU countries, though details may vary).
This means that you need to regularly assess whether there is an objective need for the camera, and register your data controller with the Information Commissioners Office. You'll need to have clear procedures for how you handle the data to ensure compliance. You need to ensure the data is stored securely.
You need to ensure the public can't see monitors showing the camera feeds unless the cameras are placed in public in the immediate vincinity (e.g. store cameras with visible monitors are fine; visible monitors with camera feeds from elsewhere is not without ensuring people are not recognisable)
You also need to deal with Subject Access Requests - basically anyone can file a request with you to obtain copies of footage of themselves, with minor restrictions, within 40 days, and charging no more than 10 pounds.
Public authorities are further subject to Freedom of Information requests.
And you need to ensure retention is as short as possible for your intended use.
So while we're filmed a lot, there are lots of safeguards and a lot of the restrictions are aimed at making it beneficial to retain as little as possible for as short as possible (e.g. if you only have a 24h loop you save yourself the hassle of anyone filing a subject access notice more than 24h after they believe they were filmed)
Doesn't mean I like it, but most of the time when the high amount of UK CCTV is brought up, people have a very skewed idea of the actual impact it has because it seems people have this idea of widespread networked government monitored cameras, while most of them are only rarely ever looked after a crime has occurred.
From hacker news stories I've now seen that FBI has shell company planes flying over major cities, cameras on the utility poles and wants root un-encrypted access to our phones. Scary.
I actually support the surveillance planes. It seems much less invasive than the public surveillance cameras that are becoming ubiquitous. They can't identify faces or cars, just see where people move to after a crime.
I'd like some protections on it though. Like deleting the data after 5 days, or requiring a warrant to look at it. No one should look at live. And the cameras shouldn't be better than what google maps or a person in a low flying plane could see.
It makes it possible to solve a huge number of crimes much easier. People spend so much energy living in fear of crime. Kids aren't allowed outside anymore, housing is segregated, etc. Irrational or not, anything that decreases people's fear without being too invasive is a huge positive.
Violent crime in the U.S. may be like Lisa Simpson's "bear rock". The if-it-bleeds-it-leads media makes crime appear to be more common than it actually is. The public then ask for law enforcement to protect them from this threat. When they see the low rates of violent crime around them, they assume it's a result of the increased policing.
We can't ban the government from doing what private businesses and people can already do. Otherwise they can simply buy the data off private companies who have cameras on private buildings.
Many times with businesses they just ask nicely, and to maintain good relationships they just hand it over (because they are not the topic of the investigation.)
The thing is, they mostly dont keep months of footage, its too expensive to store that much.
But those cameras are FBI agents, and now you're pointing a weapon at a federal officer. If you think courts would never declare an inanimate object to be an FBI agent, then you'd probably also be shocked to hear there was a court case titled "United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls".
I'm not advocating destruction of federal property or assaulting an agent, don't get me wrong. I'm merely pointing out that this is one situation where the right to bear arms is lopsided in the favor of the people. You couldn't go toe-to-toe with the US Army, but you could cover a camera with a paintball pretty easily. The founding fathers would be proud.
of course not. it's mildly satirical. but for the record, I didn't say they were the same, I just implied that, clearly, bizarre legal theories about the personhood of objects are not off the table.
> A paintball could cover the camera lens pretty nicely.
Surely that is illegal (destruction of property or something, with no reference to the fact that it is an FBI camera), whereas preventing the disclosure of something that you won't even acknowledge exists is probably harder to prosecute.
since they're biodegradable, and water soluble, this wouldn't work all that well... unless of course you're constantly coating it with them. Also they travel at a pretty high velocity, and would probably just damage the camera itself.
I would hope since they're outside, the lens cover would be durable. Otherwise a stone kicked up from a car would destroy it. But the paint being able to be washed away isn't really a problem if you're just trying to temporarily disrupt the camera's operations. If you destroyed it or permanently disabled it, they would probably very quickly replace it. But if you're about to do something you don't want the FBI to see, popping it with a paintball then later washing the lens cover would lend you a pretty reasonable amount of privacy.
People in tech are in the best position to create some pushback on this, be it through lobbying as stubbornly single-issue voters, or creating some direct (legal) technical counter-measures. It's not that hard to tell which ones are bugged if you inspect the light poles closely, and threatening to imprison people who take pictures of public lightpoles would almost certainly create more backlash than they're willing to risk.