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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly; a person expects to been seen in public, not to be stalked.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
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.