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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.
as someone who works in the entertainment industry, i have to say this is more about keeping the populace paranoid than preventing terrorism.
most of the audio they are liable to pick up will be garbage. directional mikes can only pick up so much legible speech before being overrun by ambient noise.
there is a reason we use body mikes: because without them we get nothing but unintelligible noise.
Looks like it is time for widespread counter-actions, while we are still able to do so.
Microphones need wires leading to them, which means they will absorb/attenuate nearby EM fields. That means you can sweep for them with a fairly low tech detector. If they are not wired, they will actively emit a signal, which likewise can be detected.
Once you find them, pour superglue into them. Document their presence and location on your social media platform of choice, so that others can quickly sabotage similarly placed microphones.
Dutiful denial of service will make this too costly for the orwelian surveillance state to maintain.
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 shit isn't necessary, and even the people installing it don't think so as the equipment is sitting there unused. Use the money for better teachers, enabling the poor, etc but not for useless expensive contracts that ultimately don't even have a clear goal or function.
Twinstiq, game news
Where does "private" end, and "public" begin?
Is it in your home? Maybe not with all those smart TVs and the 3rd party doctrine.
Unless there is outrage, the line will vanish, and there wont be a private.
it is commonplace for cities/regions to have audio and video recording on public transit, the Twin Cities has had audio for over a decade on its buses and added video at least as long ago.. it's used in accident and violence investigations. they have never sent goons on the bus to club a slob who drops orange peels and potato chips all over the bus.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Nice gadgets they have and little respect for the constitution, too. They have not up to this day demonstrated that these intrusive mass spying mechanisms and continuous and ever more severe invasion of privacy has brought any real results. It's as if they're just gathering information of every individual citizen for possible later use. Be it for prosecution of inconvenient individuals at a later time or for the purpose of creating a paper trail in a totally unrelated case.
Absolutely nothing will change until there is a third party that gets some meaningful proportion of power and influence to disrupt the crony capitalists infesting the Democrat and Republican parties. It never seizes to amaze me how the US has come to this. Torture and massive domestic spying apparatuses are the new norm accepted by the majority of people.
-SR
Shill.
Surveillance does not prevent crime or terrorism. It records it. Recording it doesn't prevent it from happening next time either, because it will be a different guy next time with a different set of reasons for the stupid shit he's about to do.
I don't expect privacy in public either, but that doesn't mean I want the eyes of Big Brother to be upon me from the time I leave my house to the time I return.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
After you are barometrically identified by the cameras...
Aaaah, finally an algorithm for uniquely identifying people by the pressure they are under.
Real lawyers write in C++
Good lord.
Does this have to be spelled out for you in black and white?
1) the DHS and its cronies want to have massive collection capabilities.
2) They want to deny all FOIA attempts and subpoenas against their archival audio recordings.
3) they behave as an unaccountable agency, that can do no wrong.
Taken together, they can straight up fabricate that you said something, you cannot challenge it in court, and unless you can prove a negative, you will go to jail.
So, yes-- it matters.
whenever youre on public transportation, dont forget to mention how "this weather is the bomb!" and "ISIS was an Egyptian god before AL QUEDA got hold of it"
Look for ways to insert world-war-terror phrases into every conversation.
Now we can just bitch and moan about how the service sucks and someone will actually listen to it...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You have no idea how the court system (or government in general) works, do you?
If the prosecutor can't establish where evidence came from, it's not admissible. Yes, it can be challenged by the defense, and those challenges have to be addressed. If the prosecutor can't provide a trail for the evidence from collection to the courtroom, it gets removed from the trial. If that was the prosecution's key evidence against you, you walk free.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Big Brother hears you. :(
This is why I avoid using public transport. I started avoiding it when they installed those video surveillance systems. Including audio surveillance just makes using it that much more objectionable.
If the prosecutor can't establish where evidence came from, it's not admissible.
That's why prosecutors obfuscate where evidence comes from through the miscarriage of justice that is known as "parallel construction." That way, they can use the evidence without the legal risk of it being excluded.
"The prosecution are unable to declare how the evidence was gathered due to reasons of national security"
Judge: "oh, that's all right then. Objection denied"
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
I would much prefer to live free in a dangerous world than to live safely in an unfree world.
There could have been 10,000,000 arrests, the number is immaterial. What matters is how many of the arrests ended with a conviction that shows the advantages of this surveillance without oversight. And if those convictions had no influence from parallel construction just so a prosecutor could make a name for themselves.
Given the amount of "there is danger of imminent attack" proclamations 100 arrests seems an insignificantly small number.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
They've got to do something to justify their phony baloney jobs.
You consented when you got on the bus.
That argument is right up there with "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
Freedom of movement is a basic necessity of a civilised society. By attaching riders -- sure, you have freedom of movement, but only if you consent at metaphorical and/or literal gunpoint to some other undesired behaviour -- you are undermining that freedom as surely as if you just locked someone up in the first place.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Did you literally only read the words "it doesn't matter" before embarking on your rant?
I said "it doesn't matter which car you're in," referring only to the somewhat nonsensical quip about the quiet car in the summary.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
That's not how parallel construction works, either.
Parallel construction is where an investigator gets a tip from another agency (like the DEA or NSA) that indicated how to find evidence. Legally, it's no different from an anonymous tip, or a confidential informant. The investigators then get an appropriate warrant to gather that evidence, and that starts the chain of custody. Nothing is ever fabricated or obfuscated, except the source of the original tip.
In preservation of the accused's fourth-amendment rights, however, the evidence that led to the original tip (NSA surveillance, DEA agents, etc) are all inadmissible in court.
For example, an undercover DEA agent could watch a drug dealer kill someone and bury the body, then pass on the tip of where the body's buried to another agency. That agency could recover the body and begin following forensic evidence to connect the body to the dealer. While that would mean the prosecution's case would be weaker than if they had his eyewitness testimony, the DEA agent would not be a part of the trial, would not be called as a witness, and would not need to be revealed to the defense. The dealer's associates would have no indication of the agent's involvement, allowing further investigation of the distribution network.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Can someone explain this one to me?
You might be interested Liberty's video on communications surveillance. It shows, quite effectively IMHO, that once normal people are actually aware of intrusive surveillance, they really aren't happy about it at all. You could make very similar arguments about AV surveillance and recording in public spaces.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The cameras and microphones are not what actually matters, so much as the objectives of the controlling entity.
The trouble is, it's remarkably difficult to identify all possible future objectives of anyone controlling data, and at the risk of Godwinning the thread albeit on an entirely legitimate basis, we know all too well what can happen when the objectives change over time.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's a very limited (bi-polar) expectation of privacy. In fact, reasonable expectation of privacy is a continuum. If I am sitting in a little box on the south pole and know there is no human being within a few hundred miles, I have a huge expectation of privacy. If I am on stage in the spotlight surrounded by microphones, I have none.
If I am ion public, I certainly have no absolute expectation of privacy, but I do have the expectation that I am lost in the crowd. The people surrounding me are unlikely to care what I am mumbling about and are likely single chance encounters. Someone following me around in secret aiming a highly directional microphone at me is a violation of my expectation of privacy in a public place.
Likewise, I cannot reasonably expect that I won't end up in some tourist's snapshot, but I do have an expectation that I won't be followed around and star in someone's documentary movie.
Likewise, I have no expectation that I won't be identified by a random acquaintance that I meet by chance, but I do have an expectation that I won';t be videoed and then have my image compared against a multi-terabyte database in a sophisticated system to identify exactly who I am and where I go.
"I don't mind paying taxes", claim the Statists. With them, they say, "we are buying civilization". How about it? Civilized yet?
Me? I just try to ensure, my daughters grow up with good enough knowledge of Ukrainian to be able to hold a conversation in a language bound to remain unparsable by such equipment for decades to come... Celebrate diversity.
What's your plan?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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?
The best alternative, IMHO, is a combination of principled leadership and education.
We could start by not doing the bad guys' job for them, for example by using scary words like "terrorist" to describe these people. Just call them what they are: murderers, cowards, bullies who think might means right. Every school child used to know that these things are unacceptable, and that the way to beat cowards and bullies is to stand up to them. When did our political leaders and influential media commentators and, for that matter, teachers forget that?
Likewise, you don't beat someone who wants to change your way of life through force or the threat of force by... changing your way of life. Every time someone gets delayed at airport security or monitored online or stopped and searched by a police officer in the street, every drop of taxpayers' money that funds those activities, every law that enables them, is one more feather in the cap of the people who want to change our way of life for their own purposes. Yes, some pragmatism is needed because we live in the real world, but we should never give up those freedoms lightly and never more than is demonstrably justified.
We could also try putting terrorism in perspective through better public education. As a matter of fact, the worst terrorist incident in recent history was 9/11 in the US, killing nearly 3,000 people and of course injuring many more and causing massive damage to property. That was 15 years ago. All the "terrorist attacks" since then combined still don't reach the same total. Meanwhile, almost as many people die on US roads every month as died due to the 9/11 attacks. There are more than 10,000 homicides using guns alone in the US each year. If you look at a much more damaging cause of death, say cancer, that claims around half a million people too early in the US alone each year, and of course has profound impacts on their lives and those of their friends and families and carers until that point. In the big picture, terrorism simply isn't that big a danger, and there is little indication that it ever was or is likely to become so any time soon.
And yet, we don't see the time and money and political resources diverted to researching improved cancer treatments, or safer road designs, or identifying those who need psychiatric help before they hit breaking point, that we see diverted to the so-called war on terror, despite the dramatically better results we might reasonably expect to achieve in terms of saving lives, improving quality of life, and keeping property safe. IMHO, that is a failure of leadership, pure and simple.
In short, I think the best alternative is very clear: stop the political and media fear-mongering around terrorism and the hypothetical bogeyman, stop all the intrusions and harassment and day-to-day costs of ineffective or excessive security, divert all that attention and all those resources to more constructive purposes like improving education or healthcare or infrastructure instead, and make sure the resulting benefits are visible for all to see.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Half-wit.
It's not the threat of punishment that matters, but the higher likelihood of being caught that has actually been shown to deter crime. Having more and better evidence from recordings improves that chance.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
your stupidity predates everything you say
This is what I think every time I see an ape talk. Even the smart ones, most of what they say is total crap.
Where does "private" end, and "public" begin?
Where the judge rules it begins and ends, and it will weighed on a case-by-case basis. Same as what every other law means.
Most of the evidence shows that arresting and prosecuting people doesn't have a significant deterrent effect. Most of the deterrent only applies to people with a normal sense of risk aversion; just having fingers pointed at them and being accused of Something Bad is enough to deter them from crime. People willing to commit crimes in the first place are not using the sort of long-term thinking implied by the concept of "deterrent." For example, it has been shown that long and short prison sentences have the same deterrent effect. Criminal focus is on not getting caught, rather than minimizing the legal expose if caught. People who are risk-averse enough to care about that stuff are already not breaking major laws. All that sending people to prison does is punish them, and remove them from society.
The deterrent is caused by the presence of the camera, which means they might get caught very quickly and not have a chance to enjoy the fruits of their effort. The camera deters; the threat of arrest is a greater deterrent than the conviction and sentencing of past perpetrators.
While I agree with this generally, and I'd rather a terrorist attack now and then to nonsense like the TSA security theatre, or Russian-style surveillance...
In this case I don't really see what "freedom" is lost. I was already in public on the bus. Having a camera on the bus seems a lot more like having a camera in the bank, or at the front counter in a restaurant. I'm clearly getting increased safety in a real way. What freedom does this actually reduce?
Much like the airport, free speech will go right out the window and it will be illegal to say much of anything that might be taken out of context. This isn't about terrorism, it's about control.
Yes, yes, " Fire " in a movie theater and all that. Toss in the " No expectation of privacy in a public place " BS while we're at it. Doesn't mean I want a camera and / or microphone recording every moment of my life for me, looking for any excuse at all to arrest me. Seems to fall under the " We'll just grab everything " mentality the government is fond of these days. Courts aren't fond of that when it comes to electronic communications, though the government doesn't seem to give a shit.
Imagine becoming a person of interest and investigation for saying silly things like:
Bomb, Allah, ( hell anything that isn't English ) terror{ist}{ism}, any name of any known terror group, and eventually, vocalizing your displeasure towards City, State, Federal governments or any elected official with power to make your life a living hell.
We all know the government is far too honorable to ever worry about them abusing this ability right ? :|
Would you be ok with a mandated video and audio device you must carry with you at all times just to make sure you'll never say anything that is questionable ?
Your cellphone notwithstanding . . .
Exactly; a person expects to been seen in public, not to be stalked.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
However, I can never understand the concern about video/audio surveillance of public places. When you're in a public place you can have no expectations of privacy to begin with because you're generally surrounded by people.
Public and private are mutually exclusive, so you cannot expect privacy in a public place. I therefore don't understand the outrage.
Can someone explain this one to me?
It isn't about one bus or one street as it is about canvassing everything everywhere and employing computer algorithms to automatically stitch and compile government stalking files on everyone.
If someone sat 24x7 parked in front of your home waiting for you to leave, tailed you everywhere you went, followed you to every "public" place and recorded all of your "public" conversations. If when you left they got up and followed you to your car parked just in front of their stalker mobile and followed you to your next destination... I think you would begin to understand the limits of the "public" excuse. Very few people would put up with this type of behavior. Just because you can't see the stalker creep tailing you doesn't make it any more ok.
The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered "irrelevant." They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find *you*
I wish that were true, but based on the figures I'm familiar with in the UK, I fear you're being optimistic.
For example, the government health R&D budget here in the UK is around 1.5B pounds per annum. As another relevant figure, Cancer Research UK had an income of just over half a billion pounds last year; CRUK is our main umbrella body for cancer research today, which in turn funds university research projects and so on.
I don't know exactly how much we spend on all the questionable security and "anti-terrorism" activities, because of course the government doesn't disclose exactly what they are or how they're funded. However, to pick an example we do know about, the cost for implementing the Internet monitoring required for the "Snooper's Charter" has been estimated at around 1B pounds, and IIRC that was primarily for the equipment over an initial ten-year period and doesn't include the running costs. So, that measure alone probably costs a significant fraction of the total cancer R&D budget.
Another telling example is our road safety funding, which is only a few million pounds per year. That is a drop in the ocean compared to funding on security matters, even though we lose thousands of people every year on our roads and many of the deaths and injuries are avoidable.
I don't know exactly what the analogous figures are for other places such as the US, but looking at the general pattern it still seems fair to say that disproportionate amounts of time and money are being spent on the "war on terror" that could surely be put to more constructive uses elsewhere.
Perhaps the most important thing, though, isn't the time and money spent by governments on these different issues. The government speaks with the loudest voice in any country, and when political leaders and the associated media commentators speak, they can shift public attention. If our leaders used that influence to direct more mind share to positive issues and wasted less precious public attention on fear-mongering, I think we'd be a lot better off in many ways.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I assume my state is not alone in banning the recording of voice without a warrant. Even security systems in stores are not allowed to record audio. So if this is being done by a bunch of agencies will that make it legal for the public to record each other? The day voice recording is allowed in businesses the public will learn just how widespread corruption is in business. Everything from sexual harassment to business owners trying to hire a killer to wipe out an enemy will be shockingly commonplace. If we eliminate crime in business there may be nothing left. Often business leaders are not even aware that they are committing serious crimes as what they do has been considered standard practic for centuries such as wage fixing and price fixing arrangements.
Bullshit. "Fruit of the poisoned tree". It still means something in spite of SCOTUS' recent attempts to eviscerate it.
It was easier in the past, and there weren't more of them then. Terrorism isn't cosmic inflation; it doesn't just spring magically from the laws of physics.
I could as easily argue that you create more terrorists by alienating people with heavy handed policing (why not?).
What does that have to do with anything? Decent people get caught up in all kinds of bad things. A lot of terrorists are probably decent in the same sense, just brainwashed about something they think is More Important(TM).
That's what makes them dangerous. The fact that they have enormous resources and public support is what makes them more dangerous than terrorists.
Tell the idiots to suck it up and get over it.
You're right. That would leave the present abuses untouched. We need to roll back about the last 17 years of this BS.
I'm clearly getting increased safety in a real way.
That's not as clear to me as it is to you, but regardless...
What freedom does this actually reduce?
Personally, I think that the freedom to act without being spied on counts as a real freedom.
I feel like, if somebody proposes a freedom that doesn't exist, then balancing it with other freedoms will reduce the freedoms I'm actually supposed to have.
How would important freedoms like the right to take photographs in public places survive your additional "right?" I don't think it is obvious at all that you would be able to add that right without taking away real rights that already exist.
It certainly isn't a right that comes from the Constitution, though the ones it would have to push aside certainly do.
I said nothing that implied removing any rights from anyone. I'm talking about restricting government action.
You did, you just didn't think it through far enough to see that as a consequence.
I replied 2 days later. You replied to my reply within a minute or two. Maybe you have email notification turned on and were just a bit too quick to give an insta-reply? This isn't twitter, maybe think about it for a few minutes next time, at least long enough to comprehend what was said.
You didn't understand me, as shown by your reply, so how can you disagree? You can't!
It would be more productive if you actually explained your thought process rather than just imply that I'm an idiot. How can I learn what I have wrong if you're unwilling to teach me?
I did, above, in the comment you replied to without reading.
You didn't even read my criticism carefully enough to find out that I accused of having not put any effort into understanding what I said, as evidenced by the very, very short time frame between my response, and your counter-response. To put it in perspective, I spent more time composing the comment than you spent with both reading it and replying to it. And so it is no surprise that you didn't understand it. If that makes you an idiot or not is up to you, I don't have a stake in it. But I'm not going to re-explain that which is still available above for perusal. It was explained the first time, and it is a mainstream point when discussing freedoms; many freedoms have to balanced against opposing freedoms. Where does the imagined freedom "not being spied upon" end and "you can record whatever you want in public" begin? All of that is clear in the first place. I even used public photography as an example, which pulls all those implications in if you're paying attention. If you got an email notification of a response on slashdot and came running in the door banging on a keyboard as fast as you can to reply, then it makes sense you would miss... whatever detail was in the comment.
You didn't even read my criticism carefully enough to find out that I accused of having not put any effort into understanding what I said
Of course I did. Stop being silly.
Where does the imagined freedom "not being spied upon" end and "you can record whatever you want in public" begin?
You see, was that so hard? Now I'll provide the response that I already provided: this isn't about balancing the freedoms between citizens. This is about the limits of governmental power.
That just shows you don't what know what rights are, or where they come from. You just know you dislike the gubermint, whatever that is.