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.

Comments

Hello Orwell.

[wierd_w]

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.

Wiretapping laws

[Scutter]

Why aren't these systems running afoul of both state and federal wiretapping laws?

Re: Wiretapping laws

[Anonymous Coward]

You're wrong, and what's worse you're parroting what the government wants you to believe. It's like the 'driving is a privilege' idiots. The government has no constitutional authority to grant 'privileges' other than letters of marque and reprisal. Period. I have no problem with driving having skills based regulation, but letting them call it a privilege diminishes all of us and empowers bureaucrats.

This is similar. I can't go out in public and not be seen. If someone knows me then they'll recognize me. If someone is looking for me and they happen to be where I am they'll find me. If not, and I do nothing unusual they"ll forget me shortly. I can't speak above a whisper and not be heard by people near me. THAT is the 'no expectation of privacy' I have in public. Using that to justify electronic surveillance and recording is twisted and wrong, and way too many people around here are not doing what needs to be done and challenge the underlying assumption.

This is wrong because it is wrong, not because it is now public knowledge. It needs to end not because some politician gets embarrassed at being found out--it needs to end because some lines should never be crossed and the people who cross them have no place in governing or enforcing our laws. We can do just fine without all of them. Anyone who would justify this needs to be removed from public office, and the private sector people who make the equipment and software for this purpose and profit from the same are scum beyond belief and traitors to their neighbors and should also be exposed for all to see and judge.

Re: Wiretapping laws

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

We really need to stop and question what privacy actually means in the 21st century, with the capabilities of modern technology. We should be asking why what we used to call privacy was important, and what the modern equivalent is, and how and why we might want to protect it for the same reasons.

Otherwise, you get people who can't see a difference between someone just passing someone else anonymously in the street for a few seconds and someone being monitored 24/7 whenever they are on any public street, identified by correlating the video feed with other biometric data sources, recorded in a readily searchable format for further correlation with other data sources, so that the resulting data may be analysed by unknown parties for unknown purposes at any future time, without any meaningful form of accountability or regulation applying to the much larger and more powerful organisation(s) doing the monitoring.

I just got back from visiting Germany, and I promise you there are still plenty of people there and throughout Europe who are acutely aware of the difference between those two scenarios. Unfortunately, the generations with living memory of the potential results are leaving us all too quickly, and the younger generations are in danger of not learning from history and being doomed to repeat it.

Re:be afraid

[wierd_w]

That assumes only single microphones per car/train/etc.

Placement, and quantity can make up for ambient noise, and also permits big brother to know where exactly on said train you were standing when you discussed your seditious materials.

Small mics places every 3 feet would probably be sufficient to get most conversations.

Stop wasting tax money

[HalAtWork]

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.

Re:be afraid

[Sarten-X]

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.

Barometric Identification

[SeattleLawGuy]

After you are barometrically identified by the cameras...

Aaaah, finally an algorithm for uniquely identifying people by the pressure they are under.

Re:Can't Expect Privacy In Public

[sjames]

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.

Re:Tweak The Topic

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.