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American Cities Are Installing DHS-Funded Audio Surveillance (csoonline.com)
"Audio surveillance is increasingly being used on parts of urban mass transit systems," reports the Christian Science Monitor. Slashdot reader itwbennett writes "It was first reported in April that New Jersey had been using audio surveillance on some of its light rail lines, raising questions of privacy. This week, New Jersey Transit ended the program following revelations that the agency 'didn't have policies governing storage and who had access to data.'" From the article:
New Jersey isn't the only state where you now have even more reason to want to ride in the quiet car. The Baltimore Sun reported in March that the Maryland Transit Administration has used audio recording on some of its mass transit vehicles since 2012. It is now used on 65 percent of buses, and 82 percent of subway trains have audio recording capability, but don't use it yet, according to the Sun. And cities in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, Oregon and California have either installed systems or moved to procure them, in many cases with funding from the federal Department of Homeland Security.
Because the States and the Feds are the ones doing it. As we've all learned from HRC, it's only wrong when the little people do it.
As someone who also worked in the entertainment industry, I'd say you ought to reconsider what skilled audio engineers can do.
When we had a case of equipment get delayed, I've had to use the wrong mics and set up recording without a soundcheck. The raw recording was noisy and inconsistent, and the actors' speech was practically unintelligible. However, with a few minutes at a workstation, I was able to smooth out most of the inconsistency, and even out the noise floor. It was still unintelligible, but that cleared up after some vary careful noise filters were applied. The end result wasn't stellar, but it was passable.
The goal here isn't to have an entertaining immersive audio experience, though. The goal of audio recording on public transit is to provide evidence in a court case. A precise count of gunshots or a noisy recording of an argument are useful things in a courtroom, even without an engineer cleaning up the clip. If cleaner results are needed, an audio engineer can work his magic, and extract the evidence from the noise.
Unfortunately, that's precisely where the privacy concerns come from, as well. If a skilled editor wants to extract speech from a recording, he can probably do it. If the subject happened to sit near a microphone, it makes the job easier. There must be clear rules in place for who can have access to the recordings and under what authorization, and that hasn't happened in many places that have implemented audio recordings.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"If the president does it, it's not illegal" - That predates HRC by a long shot.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”