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The DEA and ICE Are Hiding Surveillance Cameras In Streetlights (qz.com)
According to federal contracting documents, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have hidden an undisclosed number of covert surveillance cameras inside streetlights around the country. Quartz reports: According to government procurement data, the DEA has paid a Houston, Texas company called Cowboy Streetlight Concealments LLC roughly $22,000 since June 2018 for "video recording and reproducing equipment." ICE paid out about $28,000 to Cowboy Streetlight Concealments over the same period of time. It's unclear where the DEA and ICE streetlight cameras have been installed, or where the next deployments will take place. ICE offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio have provided funding for recent acquisitions from Cowboy Streetlight Concealments; the DEA's most recent purchases were funded by the agency's Office of Investigative Technology, which is located in Lorton, Virginia. "We do streetlight concealments and camera enclosures," Christie Crawford, who owns Cowboy Streetlight Concealments with her husband, told Quartz. "Basically, there's businesses out there that will build concealments for the government and that's what we do. They specify what's best for them, and we make it. And that's about all I can probably say."
The local governors recently put up multiple $44,000 streetlight fixtures near interstate intersections, apparently without the Cowboy Neil? Streetlight Concealments... I wonder just exactly how many fixtures, retailing at $22k and $28K, could've been purchased for this insidious TLA deployment?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And that's why the cameras are concealed: so that the city/county/state doesn't notice them.
Parallel construction solves the problem for the DEA bringing a case to court. The ICE doesn't even need to worry about that.
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Do they have public surveillance in Crete? No.
Oh really? https://www.researchgate.net/p...
Do they even have good cell phone access in Crete? No.
Crete is actually rather small and has cell phone coverage everywhere.
If you can manage to comprehend the story, this is being done by Fucking Texans!
Texans? What a bunch of cretins.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Move to London then. They've got cameras all over. Doesn't seem to have done much about the crime though. Turns out that criminals can just cover their faces.
I can't for the life of me imagine why people will gladly run to totalitarian solutions with arms wide open just because they think it will solve some other problem. It won't, but now you've just given the government more power and more control, and good luck clawing that back.
It really doesn't take much effort to make a "good enough" concealment. Basically, the higher off the ground, the easier. Make them look like they're part of the utility infrastructure, and you're home free. The hard part is weatherproofing and hot days in the sun with no wind. For being rain-proof you want no holes, yet to cool down you do, since heat sinks are hard to hide.
We primarily made concealments containing steerable high-zoom video cameras, the same ones used in high-end security systems, mounted to extremely accurate miniature PTZ bases. The cameras had internal image stabilization, but we also added external stabilization. Then we added automatic subject tracking, so no remote operator on a joystick was needed.
They were bought by TLAs (Three Letter Agencies), and generally needed a warrant to be mounted and activated.
When the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, we were asked to modify our technology to provide 360-degree surveillance for forward fire bases, who never had enough soldiers to use as sentries 24/7. Our systems turned out so good that we next had to integrate them with C4I systems, just as was done with the video from Predator drones. We initially built the systems into concealments, but soon found that beige paint was good enough, and we simply used sturdy tripods.
When Somali pirates became a problem, we modified our systems so they could be mounted to ships to again provide 360 degree surveillance.
We were riding high, a small company (well under 100 employees) who was by far the largest provider in a specialty market. Then the Budget Sequestration of 2011 hit, and all of our government customers not only became unable to buy our new products, they couldn't even fund support contracts or repairs. The guillotine fell, but fortunately we had already started a pivot toward vertical integration, to provide the communication systems needed to relay the surveillance video.
We entered that market in the right way at the right time, and soon had a long list of prospective customers. But our reduced income caused us to burn through our cash stockpile, and then the banks to stop lending to us: The company folded just as our new products were ready to go into production. That really hurt.
Looking back, my favorite product was the firebase surveillance system. We were told it had helped prevent countless sneak attacks.
Until the lamp goes out or the city/county/state sends Bubba up with his ladder truck to do periodic maintenance.
"Aw sheeeit! Must be all these extra gol durn wires that messed up the light."
Takes side cutters, removes all the crap he doesn't recognize and re-lamps the fixture. Fixed. I've worked in the utility biz. Their database of who owns what is atrocious. They just go out and fix lights that the public report as being out. No sense risking complaints because "our records don't show who is responsible for that hardware."
Have gnu, will travel.