Slashdot Mirror
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.
Why aren't these systems running afoul of both state and federal wiretapping laws?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
This is heading into speculation territory, but I suspect both.
If I were designing such a system, I'd keep a month of raw audio on hand. That fits on a cheap 80GB hard drive. If an event gets reported, a day's recording could be pulled off for professional cleaning and analysis, to make something humans could understand. Keeping a full month provides enough time for the report to cycle through the various authorities and bureaucracies to actually get retrieved before being cycled out.
I'd also expect that the DHS would have some real-time analysis software, but its status as "magical" is certainly debatable. I'd expect it could detect gunshots, explosions, loud arguments, and maybe a few distinctive words, but I doubt it's capable of tracking and understanding multiple conversations in real time in a noisy environment.
In both cases, I think the value would be a modern equivalent to the Zapruder film. There would be many errors in an automatic analysis, but the recording would provide contributing details to reconstruct an event for detailed manual analysis after an event. That in turn can either support or disprove a theory, ultimately revealing a story closer to the truth.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
How else do you expect to run a public transit system? Run trains completely without any supervision 24/7? Hire more people to patrol the cars constantly? Who is going to pay for that, given that public transit systems already require massive subsidies for their operations?
Come on you folks who advocate public transit: what is your solution?