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

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: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.