9 ms·

BART killing exposes security gap – many train cameras are decoys

81 points by johnhenry 11y ago

mynewtb 11y ago
Surveillance is not security, surveillance is surveillance. I an glad to hear that not all cameras monitor our every step.
- lowmagnet 11y ago
  Dummy cameras feel like 'Security Theater' to me.
  - ramy_d 11y ago
    I wouldn't quite say that. Dummy cameras give petty criminals a risk they hedge their actions against. Security theater would be telling people they can feel safe from personal injury because of said cameras. Someone else put it succinctly: Surveillance is not Security.
    - lowmagnet 11y ago
      You don't have to tell someone that something exists for their safety for it to qualify as theater. I agree that criminals hedge a petty crime vs. getting caught. I now think of this as a sub-type of theater, one that both fakes security and deters incidents via placebo in equal fashion. You've changed my mind.
  - sveiss 11y ago
    But unlike, say, extensive airport screening procedures, it's fairly easy to test if dummy CCTV cameras have an impact on crime rates. I don't know if such a study has been done, but if it works and impacts the intended endpoints, it isn't really theatre.
    - lowmagnet 11y ago
      I agree with you that there may be a placebo effect. Perhaps I could call them part of the "set" on which the theater conducts its act.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    More panopticon, maybe?
    - lowmagnet 11y ago
      I assume in a panopticon the guards watch the prisoners. I don't think I can assume that about a dummy camera.
      - sliverstorm 11y ago
        In the panopticon, you could be being watched at any moment. If you don't know which cameras are dummies...
  - archgoon 11y ago
    No, 'Security Theater' is for when you perform a bunch of actions to make people 'feel' safer without actually making them safer. We accuse airport security screening of being security theater because it is unlikely to be effective against a targeted attack, the very failure mode that the policies were instituted to prevent. In this case, however, the intended targets are presumably crimes of opportunity, not exhaustively preplanned crimes. For these, the threat of "you're being watched, and if you do something, we'll see it" is probably sufficient. Also they provide low grade confrontation situations to be defused by someone pointing to the camera and saying "There's a camera monitoring this".
    - lowmagnet 11y ago
      Putting up a dummy camera sure seems like one action taken to make people feel safer to me. It isn't the whole theater, just part of it. Public transportation of the terrestrial variety has very little theater, and very little security anyway. Even the cameras that do work probably exist for the playback, not for the live "surveillance". I just don't think they're watching closely enough.
- analyst74 11y ago
  How do you propose improving security in this case?
  - ryanlol 11y ago
    Does the security need improving?
  - oxide 11y ago
    What about paying people to provide security services? Eyewitnesses might not be foolproof, but they're better than a cost effective dummy camera after a murder has taken place. I don't think the murderer in this case was deterred at all, perhaps an intimidating rent-a-cop would have allowed the murder to occur near a working security camera where the police could have gathered useful information about the crime.
- meowface 11y ago
  There's a big difference between surveillance in public spaces, and private surveillance (effectively unwarranted search & seizure) of citizens. Why would I care if a camera is monitoring me in a public train? Surveillance can absolutely add security.
mjmj 11y ago
I feel for the family that lost a loved one and it's unfortunate they don't have more information about this suspect.
JoblessWonder 11y ago
Same principal we had for cameras in our school buses. Only some of them actually had cameras in them but we were scared of all of them. If the goal is to deter low-level crime like vandalism, I would think they probably worked, at least temporarily. Although part of me can't imagine thinking someone is watching 4 cameras on every car on every train at all times.
- DanBC 11y ago
  In england you know they're really cameras because the feed displays on a screen and it flicks through all of them. (I'll take some photos tomorrow.)
  - jheriko 11y ago
    really? i'm pretty sure i live there and this is the exception rather than the case. particularly on public transport i have never seen this... although i've seen it in restaurants and shops quite a few times, but certainly much less frequently than i have seen cameras, or things that look like them.
    - roywiggins 11y ago
      They seem pretty common on London buses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTHFSuPirXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTHFSuPirXY
      - jheriko 11y ago
        never noticed it on them... at least the only one i regularly take.
  - JoblessWonder 11y ago
    Yeah. I would imagine that if you had real cameras, it would make sense to publicize that fact. Partially to let people know they shouldn't expect any implication of privacy and partially to let people know the cameras aren't decoys. The cost/size requirements have come down so much in the past 20 years that it makes a lot more sense to actually install cameras and record locally to a DVR/NVR in the bus.
ryanlol 11y ago
I'm really curious as to how cameras are supposed to prevent a person from killing someone, unless they're doing it in some extremely impractical manner of course.
jheriko 11y ago
many cameras /everywhere/ are 'decoys' although often through lack of maintenance and being broken rather than intentionally. as much as they are being a security hole, they are also a cheap deterrent. i'd rather we have them than not. most criminals are smart enough to not want to be seen... despite the misconception that many criminals are stupid, desperate or somehow abnormal people who do not behave like 'the rest of us'. in the cases where people are genuinely out of their minds it won't make a difference. in that case its much sadder that there is no possible deterrant imo, than that we can not then track down the perpetrator of the crime.
- iolothebard 11y ago
  Here's the photos. Just because a few weren't working (or real) doesn't mean they have no footage: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Photos-released-of-suspect-in-killing-on-BART-6757070.php#photo-9246649 http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Photos-released-of-suspec...
  - jheriko 11y ago
    sure, they mention in the article that they have photos, but the message i got from the article is that having the cameras be real would somehow be of benefit because they help you track down the criminals. to me, it seems very doubtful that the argument presented has any merit. they are described as a 'security gap' in the title and repeatedly in the article, but the evidence supporting that viewpoint is entirely absent. (i should clarify that its not a worthless argument, just the example used to present it contains evidence only for the counter-argument as far as i can see)
  - some-guy 11y ago
    That wasn't taken from a train camera however. I ride BART every day and have always wondered if the train cameras are even in use most of the time. I suspected not, and this news story confirms my suspicion.
- realusername 11y ago
  Indeed... cameras need to be maintained when they are broken, the video quality of cameras is not really good for space reason so the footage is not usable all the time, the videos need to be stored somewhere with a good backup system and must obey local laws about data retention, different cameras are managed by different people so you need some paperwork to access everything which might be needed, they need to be checked regularly to see if they still work fine... Putting all of this in place is not really cheap and easy to maintain all the time, that's why not everything works 100% of the time.
niels_olson 11y ago
This argument leads to the idea that all decoys are security gaps. Yet it's quite the opposite. No matter how many cameras you have, it's not a gap to have decoys. Because decoys are always cheaper than adding cameras, and security is always resource-constrained.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 11y ago
Another problem with "dummy cameras" for PUBLIC institutions is that they are basically lying to the taxpayer about what level of security is being funded and provided. What would you say about a municipality where half the circulating police-cars were secretly fakes "to deter crime", and which would not respond to any emergency? P.S.: I think as time goes people will be less-accepting of fake-cameras, because they'll assume the operator has a social or legal obligation to provide footage in certain circumstances. For example, to see the license-plates of a hit-and-run in the company parking-lot, or the face of the guy who stole a purse at a restaurant.
- michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  This is an actual thing: "ghost units" - empty police cars placed around to stop people from speeding. http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130730/ARTICLES/130739950 http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130730/ARTICLES/13073995...
  - spike021 11y ago
    The sad thing is I've seen plenty of patrol cars _with_ actual officers in them seemingly not taking breaks per se, but still ignoring blatant traffic law-breaking happening all around them.
    - malandrew 11y ago
      Like the corner of Van Ness at Market Street where, during rush hour, a car goes straight through a red light about once every 5 to 10 minutes. I used to cross that intersection everyday and there was typically an officer standing on the southwest corner. I twice told the officer standing there about how frequently cars blow through that intersection and they both admitted it was a problem but had a "nothing we can do about it" attitude. I was flabbergasted. Some pedestrian is going to die there one day.
      - maxerickson 11y ago
        Several deaths within a couple of blocks: http://sfgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/basicviewer/index.html?appid=7382117f2b5f440e8e183f30cf2c6d57 http://sfgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/basicviewer/index....
puppetmaster3 11y ago
As supplement to right to defend self, maybe, but to replace right to defend self: no.
thrownaway2424 11y ago
Three people were shot in cars on I-80 in Richmond on the same day that this person was shot on a BART train. There are as far as we have been made aware no photos or videos of the event or the perpetrator. Strangely the press is ignoring this other "security gap".
mschuster91 11y ago
Doesn't surprise me. Getting stuff certified for trains, cars or planes is expensive. The less of the stuff you have to install, the better, from a financial POV.
ck2 11y ago
High quality dashcam with a month long of looping storage would cost about $50-100 each - locked inside that security department. Time for them to make them all real cameras.
jcrawfordor 11y ago
I've always suspected this. It's very unlikely that video would cross cars, there are already enough pins on the couplers and I believe this would invoke FRA requirements on the engineering. I'm not sure when the cameras were installed, but the solid-state DVRs usually used on vehicles probably weren't available yet, given the age of the BART rolling stock. Tape-loop recorders would have been very high maintenance. My suspicion is that some or all BART cars actually are equipped with tape-loop recorders, and what they call 'dummy cameras' are simply recorders which are broken or without tape because of lack of maintenance. The replacement tapes are also getting hard to obtain. There are several good commercial options for vehicle surveillance now (Safety Vision being a prominent one), but across BART's ~650 cars this would easily turn into a several million dollar project. Let's just keep holding out for the new rolling stock...
CodeWriter23 11y ago
When purchasing a camera system in NYC for my mom's shop, the tech at the surveillance shop told me that any camera with a red light on it is a fake.
a3n 11y ago
Let's hope that those cameras were supposed to be fake, rather than invoiced and paid for as real cameras but fake ones installed.
dawnbreez 11y ago
The grocery store I work at has dummy cameras. I suspect this is because the construction crew broke the security camera system, and nobody is willing to pay for fixing it. A lady's purse was stolen, and we couldn't do a thing. I'm still pissed, months after the fact. The manager didn't tell the lady that our cameras are broken, and he only told the officer once the customer was out of earshot (if at all), so the poor lady's probably not aware of the real problem. She could probably sue.

81 points by johnhenry 11y ago

Surveillance is not security, surveillance is surveillance. I an glad to hear that not all cameras monitor our every step.

lowmagnet 11y ago
Dummy cameras feel like 'Security Theater' to me.
- ramy_d 11y ago
  I wouldn't quite say that. Dummy cameras give petty criminals a risk they hedge their actions against. Security theater would be telling people they can feel safe from personal injury because of said cameras. Someone else put it succinctly: Surveillance is not Security.
  - lowmagnet 11y ago
    You don't have to tell someone that something exists for their safety for it to qualify as theater. I agree that criminals hedge a petty crime vs. getting caught. I now think of this as a sub-type of theater, one that both fakes security and deters incidents via placebo in equal fashion. You've changed my mind.
- sveiss 11y ago
  But unlike, say, extensive airport screening procedures, it's fairly easy to test if dummy CCTV cameras have an impact on crime rates. I don't know if such a study has been done, but if it works and impacts the intended endpoints, it isn't really theatre.
  - lowmagnet 11y ago
    I agree with you that there may be a placebo effect. Perhaps I could call them part of the "set" on which the theater conducts its act.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  More panopticon, maybe?
  - lowmagnet 11y ago
    I assume in a panopticon the guards watch the prisoners. I don't think I can assume that about a dummy camera.
    - sliverstorm 11y ago
      In the panopticon, you could be being watched at any moment. If you don't know which cameras are dummies...
- archgoon 11y ago
  No, 'Security Theater' is for when you perform a bunch of actions to make people 'feel' safer without actually making them safer. We accuse airport security screening of being security theater because it is unlikely to be effective against a targeted attack, the very failure mode that the policies were instituted to prevent. In this case, however, the intended targets are presumably crimes of opportunity, not exhaustively preplanned crimes. For these, the threat of "you're being watched, and if you do something, we'll see it" is probably sufficient. Also they provide low grade confrontation situations to be defused by someone pointing to the camera and saying "There's a camera monitoring this".
  - lowmagnet 11y ago
    Putting up a dummy camera sure seems like one action taken to make people feel safer to me. It isn't the whole theater, just part of it. Public transportation of the terrestrial variety has very little theater, and very little security anyway. Even the cameras that do work probably exist for the playback, not for the live "surveillance". I just don't think they're watching closely enough.
analyst74 11y ago
How do you propose improving security in this case?
- ryanlol 11y ago
  Does the security need improving?
- oxide 11y ago
  What about paying people to provide security services? Eyewitnesses might not be foolproof, but they're better than a cost effective dummy camera after a murder has taken place. I don't think the murderer in this case was deterred at all, perhaps an intimidating rent-a-cop would have allowed the murder to occur near a working security camera where the police could have gathered useful information about the crime.
meowface 11y ago
There's a big difference between surveillance in public spaces, and private surveillance (effectively unwarranted search & seizure) of citizens. Why would I care if a camera is monitoring me in a public train? Surveillance can absolutely add security.

mjmj 11y ago

I feel for the family that lost a loved one and it's unfortunate they don't have more information about this suspect.

JoblessWonder 11y ago

Same principal we had for cameras in our school buses. Only some of them actually had cameras in them but we were scared of all of them. If the goal is to deter low-level crime like vandalism, I would think they probably worked, at least temporarily. Although part of me can't imagine thinking someone is watching 4 cameras on every car on every train at all times.

DanBC 11y ago
In england you know they're really cameras because the feed displays on a screen and it flicks through all of them. (I'll take some photos tomorrow.)
- jheriko 11y ago
  really? i'm pretty sure i live there and this is the exception rather than the case. particularly on public transport i have never seen this... although i've seen it in restaurants and shops quite a few times, but certainly much less frequently than i have seen cameras, or things that look like them.
  - roywiggins 11y ago
    They seem pretty common on London buses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTHFSuPirXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTHFSuPirXY
    - jheriko 11y ago
      never noticed it on them... at least the only one i regularly take.
- JoblessWonder 11y ago
  Yeah. I would imagine that if you had real cameras, it would make sense to publicize that fact. Partially to let people know they shouldn't expect any implication of privacy and partially to let people know the cameras aren't decoys. The cost/size requirements have come down so much in the past 20 years that it makes a lot more sense to actually install cameras and record locally to a DVR/NVR in the bus.

ryanlol 11y ago

I'm really curious as to how cameras are supposed to prevent a person from killing someone, unless they're doing it in some extremely impractical manner of course.

jheriko 11y ago

many cameras /everywhere/ are 'decoys' although often through lack of maintenance and being broken rather than intentionally. as much as they are being a security hole, they are also a cheap deterrent. i'd rather we have them than not. most criminals are smart enough to not want to be seen... despite the misconception that many criminals are stupid, desperate or somehow abnormal people who do not behave like 'the rest of us'. in the cases where people are genuinely out of their minds it won't make a difference. in that case its much sadder that there is no possible deterrant imo, than that we can not then track down the perpetrator of the crime.

iolothebard 11y ago
Here's the photos. Just because a few weren't working (or real) doesn't mean they have no footage: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Photos-released-of-suspect-in-killing-on-BART-6757070.php#photo-9246649 http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Photos-released-of-suspec...
- jheriko 11y ago
  sure, they mention in the article that they have photos, but the message i got from the article is that having the cameras be real would somehow be of benefit because they help you track down the criminals. to me, it seems very doubtful that the argument presented has any merit. they are described as a 'security gap' in the title and repeatedly in the article, but the evidence supporting that viewpoint is entirely absent. (i should clarify that its not a worthless argument, just the example used to present it contains evidence only for the counter-argument as far as i can see)
- some-guy 11y ago
  That wasn't taken from a train camera however. I ride BART every day and have always wondered if the train cameras are even in use most of the time. I suspected not, and this news story confirms my suspicion.
realusername 11y ago
Indeed... cameras need to be maintained when they are broken, the video quality of cameras is not really good for space reason so the footage is not usable all the time, the videos need to be stored somewhere with a good backup system and must obey local laws about data retention, different cameras are managed by different people so you need some paperwork to access everything which might be needed, they need to be checked regularly to see if they still work fine... Putting all of this in place is not really cheap and easy to maintain all the time, that's why not everything works 100% of the time.

niels_olson 11y ago

This argument leads to the idea that all decoys are security gaps. Yet it's quite the opposite. No matter how many cameras you have, it's not a gap to have decoys. Because decoys are always cheaper than adding cameras, and security is always resource-constrained.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 11y ago

Another problem with "dummy cameras" for PUBLIC institutions is that they are basically lying to the taxpayer about what level of security is being funded and provided. What would you say about a municipality where half the circulating police-cars were secretly fakes "to deter crime", and which would not respond to any emergency? P.S.: I think as time goes people will be less-accepting of fake-cameras, because they'll assume the operator has a social or legal obligation to provide footage in certain circumstances. For example, to see the license-plates of a hit-and-run in the company parking-lot, or the face of the guy who stole a purse at a restaurant.

michaelbuckbee 11y ago
This is an actual thing: "ghost units" - empty police cars placed around to stop people from speeding. http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130730/ARTICLES/130739950 http://www.dailycomet.com/article/20130730/ARTICLES/13073995...
- spike021 11y ago
  The sad thing is I've seen plenty of patrol cars _with_ actual officers in them seemingly not taking breaks per se, but still ignoring blatant traffic law-breaking happening all around them.
  - malandrew 11y ago
    Like the corner of Van Ness at Market Street where, during rush hour, a car goes straight through a red light about once every 5 to 10 minutes. I used to cross that intersection everyday and there was typically an officer standing on the southwest corner. I twice told the officer standing there about how frequently cars blow through that intersection and they both admitted it was a problem but had a "nothing we can do about it" attitude. I was flabbergasted. Some pedestrian is going to die there one day.
    - maxerickson 11y ago
      Several deaths within a couple of blocks: http://sfgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/basicviewer/index.html?appid=7382117f2b5f440e8e183f30cf2c6d57 http://sfgov.maps.arcgis.com/apps/OnePane/basicviewer/index....

puppetmaster3 11y ago

As supplement to right to defend self, maybe, but to replace right to defend self: no.

thrownaway2424 11y ago

Three people were shot in cars on I-80 in Richmond on the same day that this person was shot on a BART train. There are as far as we have been made aware no photos or videos of the event or the perpetrator. Strangely the press is ignoring this other "security gap".

mschuster91 11y ago

Doesn't surprise me. Getting stuff certified for trains, cars or planes is expensive. The less of the stuff you have to install, the better, from a financial POV.

ck2 11y ago

High quality dashcam with a month long of looping storage would cost about $50-100 each - locked inside that security department. Time for them to make them all real cameras.

jcrawfordor 11y ago

I've always suspected this. It's very unlikely that video would cross cars, there are already enough pins on the couplers and I believe this would invoke FRA requirements on the engineering. I'm not sure when the cameras were installed, but the solid-state DVRs usually used on vehicles probably weren't available yet, given the age of the BART rolling stock. Tape-loop recorders would have been very high maintenance. My suspicion is that some or all BART cars actually are equipped with tape-loop recorders, and what they call 'dummy cameras' are simply recorders which are broken or without tape because of lack of maintenance. The replacement tapes are also getting hard to obtain. There are several good commercial options for vehicle surveillance now (Safety Vision being a prominent one), but across BART's ~650 cars this would easily turn into a several million dollar project. Let's just keep holding out for the new rolling stock...

CodeWriter23 11y ago

When purchasing a camera system in NYC for my mom's shop, the tech at the surveillance shop told me that any camera with a red light on it is a fake.

a3n 11y ago

Let's hope that those cameras were supposed to be fake, rather than invoiced and paid for as real cameras but fake ones installed.

dawnbreez 11y ago

The grocery store I work at has dummy cameras. I suspect this is because the construction crew broke the security camera system, and nobody is willing to pay for fixing it. A lady's purse was stolen, and we couldn't do a thing. I'm still pissed, months after the fact. The manager didn't tell the lady that our cameras are broken, and he only told the officer once the customer was out of earshot (if at all), so the poor lady's probably not aware of the real problem. She could probably sue.