6 ms·

San Diego Awarded GE Mass Surveillance Contract Without Oversight

212 points by vinniejames 7y ago

1wheel 7y ago
> The City paid $30 million for the contract. But the larger issue is that General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street. Where are they getting this billion dollars figure from?
radicaldreamer 7y ago
What is the ‘data’ mentioned in the article and related docs? License plate data? Street light efficiency data? It’s not super clear what is being shared or sold in this case
- lainga 7y ago
  https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq Looks like GE advertises that the product can collect traffic, pedestrian and parking location data via Bluetooth and WiFi sniffing.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    All things that have been done for many years. Where do you think the road speed indicators came from on online maps? (Cell phone carrier data sold to state transportation departments) How do you think water and sewer meters are read? (Pole or car mounted RF readers)
    - asdff 7y ago
      I thought google's estimates at least came from tracking android phones and ios users of their ecosystem apps, not from the carrier? I doubt LA at least is advanced enough to have these RF meters in every parcel. Plenty of houses are literally sitting unanchored on a pile of stones/dirt/random 80 year old rotting wood scraps as a foundation and would blow over in the wind or any earthquake. LA metro's timelines for rail projects are regularly dragged out, not by the usual blame of graft and bureaucratic inefficiency, but by the fact that there are so many undisclosed utilities buried under the city in a half-assed, cheap as possible, attempt to fool the building inspector manner for 100 years straight. You hit a 100 year old wooden water main that wasn't on any map while boring and you need to replace the entire pipe as it is due to rot away yesterday. San Diego seems much more like a first world country, though.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        That’s how it works now, but that tech appeared 20 years ago. No idea about LA, but if you have a water meter, they get replaced every 12-15 years. New meters all have remote read because they save a ton of money, and are often cheaper to install.
  - asdff 7y ago
    The iOS 13 upgrade was very telling. Suddenly every app is requesting blutooth access. Why does the reddit app need access to the blutooth radio? Because not doing so is leaving money on the table, and shareholders know it. I'll stick with the mobile website for now.
- 6nf 7y ago
  I understand it to be video and audio feeds from 4000 street locations
basilgohar 7y ago
>>>Now we have learned Elliott owns between $10,000 and $100,000 in GE stock, according to her FPPC Form 700. The city attorney that approved the GE contract owns significant GE stock. This whole thing should be null and void.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  This is proof that government should never get involved in business or the free market. It engenders cronyism and inept government bureaucrats getting rich off of unnecessary regulation.
  - sn41 7y ago
    Most large companies depend on government contracts for a substantial part of their business. The government is after all the single biggest consumer in many markets. This, and revolving doors between businesses and government, probably means that corruption of this kind is hard to eliminate.
  - projektfu 7y ago
    That's, frankly, impossible. This is one of those things that government has to buy -- streetlights and standards for them. Either the government creates government-owned companies for everything public or it participates in the market. If this were just handed to a private contractor, the same problem would be likely to occur, although the private contractor might be smarter about getting their cut of selling surveillance data.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Nobody is getting rich from GE stock. Besides, this article is an manifesto/editorial. Some person running for city attorney did a document dump of mostly irrelevant stuff. Lots of ranting, but very little actual content. What data has been collected from a partially implemented streetlight program in San Diego that was sold to “Wall St” for a billion dollars? Who is “Wall St” exactly? Lighting systems like this are administered by a NOC maintained by the vendor. Is that the data in question There isn’t enough information to form an opinion about the “inept bureaucrats”. City attorneys don’t enter contracts, they advise those who do. It’s fair to critique the terms of the contract, but ignorant to accuse someone of violating the law without any merit.
dogdawg 7y ago
I think sousvailence is the only way to combat mass surveillance. Observe and report all that you hear and see. Let everyone know what's going on in your neck of the woods.
- hatmatrix 7y ago
  Even if you're aware they're recording you, they're still recording you.
sn41 7y ago
A potential fall-out: the travel patterns and occupants of all cars in San Diego is stored in perpetuity, later to be hacked into, so that many common citizens can be later compromised. To the perpetual excuse that I don't have anything to fear, since I am not doing anything wrong - first, any information that you give to someone is potential power they have over you. The apocryphal quote by Cardinal Richelieu on finding enough to hang a man in six innocuous sentences is worthy of keeping in mind. Second, in an era of easily manipulated videos, it is easy to "manufacture" cam footage. If there are no such cams, such fakes have no legal validity. With the proliferation of such cams, there is currently no defense against such an attack.
- allovernow 7y ago
  >To the perpetual excuse that I don't have anything to fear, since I am not doing anything wrong If I have access to your daily whereabouts, I have strong priors with which to predict a host otherwise private characteristics and/or affiliations. Frequenting gay bars? Likely homosexual. Church every Sunday and shooting range a few times a year? Good chance you might be a republican. Volunteering at planned Parenthood events? Not a bad bet that you're a liberal. And these are just the obvious patterns - imagine how much you could predict with some basic statistical analysis, or modern ML. This is a very dangerous concentration of power and it's no surprise that people are willing to pay good money for it.
  - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
    What happens if you go to a shooting rage a few times a year and volunteer at Planned Parenthood?
kart23 7y ago
> "General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street" Where does this figure come from? Is it even accurate at all? If this is actually true I'd be interested in seeing what kind of data they sell and who buys it. I'm really questioning the reliability of the article just because of this figure that seemingly just comes from nowhere. Also, I live in San Diego, so I'm a little freaked out. This literally sounds like something out of 1984. edit: I think they might be talking about Current, a GE subsidary that they sold to a wall street firm. Theres no financial figure disclosed. But it seems like they mainly do large-scale energy efficient lighting for commerical purposes. I would not classify that as 'selling data'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(AIP_subsidiary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(AIP_subsidiary)
- hogFeast 7y ago
  This stuff is basically gold for Wall St. I don't do it anymore but when I worked in investment management, people were starting to look at counting footfall manually at scale (in retrospect, the edge ended up being huge). You can get similar data from other sources (e.g. credit card, satellite, etc.) but to be able to automate footfall counts would be pretty special (I know where I am, there were issues with automating this because no-one was interested in selling data and there was a possibility some data could count as non-public/material...a city doing this is pretty unique...that wouldn't happen here, city govt collecting data for HFs, wow).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- texasbigdata 7y ago
  Interesting. Just doing the math let's say whomever bought it assumed they could it roll it out to 20 more cities. And they paid 2x revenue for it. That's 25M of implied revenue out of San Diego. I guess you could divide by resident but multiple firms could purchase the same data, so hard to say how to think about it.
- skwb 7y ago
  A bit dated, but it seems that current has about a $1B total revenue overall (circa 2015). In my very cursorily search, I couldn't find any more specific data, but $1B total revenue from SD resident data seems a bit high to me (kudos to anyone however that can find more current data). Pure speculation, but perhaps the above article was talking about overall revenue and not only SD data revenue? [1]. https://peprofessional.com/2019/04/aip-acquires-current-ge/ https://peprofessional.com/2019/04/aip-acquires-current-ge/ [2]. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/11/06/ge-to-sell-boston-lighting-subsidiary-current-to.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/11/06/ge-to-sel...
hart_russell 7y ago
Maybe it's confirmation bias because I live in San Diego, but it seems like San Diego is 2nd most talked about city on this forum to SF
justinjlynn 7y ago
Well, GE's engineering presentations of full system attestation and integrity analysis/measurement suddenly seem so much more relevant and scary - if those techniques are implemented in these surveillance networks. They presented this in the context of energy infrastructure - but surveillance works too I guess. It seems they've been working on software/hardware to make subverting these things much more difficult in the open for a while now: https://lssna19.sched.com/event/RHar/tutorial-complete-platform-attestation-remotely-verifying-the-authenticity-and-integrity-of-your-platforms-hardware-firmware-and-software-monty-wiseman-avani-dave-general-electric https://lssna19.sched.com/event/RHar/tutorial-complete-platf...
eyegor 7y ago
So this is what stage 2 of privacy erosion looks like. Stage 1 was of course traffic/red light cameras. How they spun installing cameras and microphones (!) with a data sharing agreement as "an energy efficiency upgrade for street lights" is beyond me.
syshum 7y ago
I would be more concerned about how Law Enforcement is using the data. I am also baffled by people not being concerned about Law Enforcement Surveillance but they are always up in arms about "corporations" spying on them. Last time I checked it was only law enforcement that has the power, authority, and legal cover to kill me, or put me in a metal cage. I suppose they believe "I have done nothing wrong so i have nothing to fear" but that has been proven time and time again to be a fallacy of epic proportions
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  It is because they don't decide with logic or thinking but feelings. They fall for the soldier cult or lies to chhildren quaint notions of friendly local police officer and the generic corporations always bad and you get that moronic result. That or way too much faith in the democratic process without extensive oversight and power. Either way it is the result of taking lies to heart when we are up to our necks in them at best.
reustle 7y ago
Could someone theoretically go around with a high powered laser and burn the sensors of surveillance cameras?
- asdff 7y ago
  Far easier to throw a rock.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    LOL. Yeah, knock out the camera and win the Cy Young award.
electic 7y ago
There is a developers guide that shows all the information that is collected [1]. It doesn't look good. There is also full API documentation here which outlines what data is returned [2]. [1] https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq/developers-guide https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq/developers-guide [2] https://docs.cityiq.io/#05-Media%20Planning%20API/API%20Maps.htm%3FTocPath%3DMedia%2520Planning%2520API%7C_____3 https://docs.cityiq.io/#05-Media%20Planning%20API/API%20Maps...
roenxi 7y ago
Good time for a reminder that the surveillance state isn't going to come in because anyone has bad intentions. It happens because the technology is dirt cheap and will undoubtedly reduce crime. The risk is that as the government gains more control it will go rogue and do real damage. Racial, religious and nationalist panics happen from time to time; sooner or later there will be perfect records of who is going to what Church/Mosque/Synagogue/etc that are going to cause a lot of harm. The debate is going to centre around intentions and the fact that capability is the problem will be ignored. As is customary on issues where it hasn't killed millions of people in this century in this country and the people last century or different countries are different because ... well, something must have changed otherwise all this surveillance would be a concern.
- arminiusreturns 7y ago
  I disagree because intentions and capabilities both play a part, often to different degrees from different parties, and duplicity in both are often hidden, and therefore saying it's just because tech is cheap is a very superficial analysis of the issue at hand. To me that just seems like an easily planned plausible deniability strategy by those involved. Of course hyperfocusing on one isn't the right way, but neither is going the other directional extreme. One of the biggest problems with issues like this is that there would be a mixture of logical methods used to draw conclusions and lots of people forget the difference between inductive and deductive logic. (Intentions being more inductive and capabilities being more deductive)
  - mLuby 7y ago
    The vagueness of your comment makes it difficult to understand what you mean. Can you rephrase with shorter words and sentences?
    - arminiusreturns 7y ago
      Intentions (potentially malicious, etc) matter and play a big part, but are harder to prove. I reject the idea that the deployment of surveillance tech is simply because certain leaders just are convinced it's cheap. Any kind of large city like San Diego has all kinds of military industrial complex actors pushing it in directions for all kinds of obvious reasons that are commonly connected to surveillance. tldr; In general, increases in surveillance are almost always about control, and not protection.
aazaa 7y ago
The rationale for the cameras has been covered before. It appears city leaders were lead to believe the cameras were for energy conservation only: > In December 2016, San Diego’s Environmental Services Department presented the City Council with a way to bring down its energy costs. General Electric had been looking for a place to test out new sensor-controlled technologies that could brighten or dim lights from afar and collect anonymized data, and a pilot program had been initiated in East Village two years prior. The company was now offering to finance the installation of that technology across the city with a $30 million loan that could be paid back over 13 years through its own energy savings. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/public-council-were-in-the-dark-on-police-access-to-smart-streetlights/ https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/public-... Later, law enforcement got its hooks into the new toys: > Since August, the San Diego Police Department has been accessing the raw video footage with permission from City Hall and using its contents in dozens of criminal investigations, as the U-T reported. Some of that footage could appear at a trial scheduled to begin later this month, according to police. The notion that law enforcement will somehow be excluded in any way from the video/audio feeds from these devices strains credulity. If history since 2013 has taught us anything, it's that if you give law enforcement an inch of surveillance, they'll take a yard. On a related note, the idea that these feeds will somehow not end up on some dark market or surveillance capitalism venture business plans is equally ludicrous.
- CapitalistCartr 7y ago
  Modern history seems more "give law enforcement none of surveillance, and they'll take it all anyway." If the surveillance exists they will (ab)use it.
interestica 7y ago
"Oversight" sounds like some sort of dystopian surveillance system.

212 points by vinniejames 7y ago

> The City paid $30 million for the contract. But the larger issue is that General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street. Where are they getting this billion dollars figure from?

radicaldreamer 7y ago

What is the ‘data’ mentioned in the article and related docs? License plate data? Street light efficiency data? It’s not super clear what is being shared or sold in this case

lainga 7y ago
https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq Looks like GE advertises that the product can collect traffic, pedestrian and parking location data via Bluetooth and WiFi sniffing.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  All things that have been done for many years. Where do you think the road speed indicators came from on online maps? (Cell phone carrier data sold to state transportation departments) How do you think water and sewer meters are read? (Pole or car mounted RF readers)
  - asdff 7y ago
    I thought google's estimates at least came from tracking android phones and ios users of their ecosystem apps, not from the carrier? I doubt LA at least is advanced enough to have these RF meters in every parcel. Plenty of houses are literally sitting unanchored on a pile of stones/dirt/random 80 year old rotting wood scraps as a foundation and would blow over in the wind or any earthquake. LA metro's timelines for rail projects are regularly dragged out, not by the usual blame of graft and bureaucratic inefficiency, but by the fact that there are so many undisclosed utilities buried under the city in a half-assed, cheap as possible, attempt to fool the building inspector manner for 100 years straight. You hit a 100 year old wooden water main that wasn't on any map while boring and you need to replace the entire pipe as it is due to rot away yesterday. San Diego seems much more like a first world country, though.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      That’s how it works now, but that tech appeared 20 years ago. No idea about LA, but if you have a water meter, they get replaced every 12-15 years. New meters all have remote read because they save a ton of money, and are often cheaper to install.
- asdff 7y ago
  The iOS 13 upgrade was very telling. Suddenly every app is requesting blutooth access. Why does the reddit app need access to the blutooth radio? Because not doing so is leaving money on the table, and shareholders know it. I'll stick with the mobile website for now.
6nf 7y ago
I understand it to be video and audio feeds from 4000 street locations

basilgohar 7y ago

>>>Now we have learned Elliott owns between $10,000 and $100,000 in GE stock, according to her FPPC Form 700. The city attorney that approved the GE contract owns significant GE stock. This whole thing should be null and void.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
This is proof that government should never get involved in business or the free market. It engenders cronyism and inept government bureaucrats getting rich off of unnecessary regulation.
- sn41 7y ago
  Most large companies depend on government contracts for a substantial part of their business. The government is after all the single biggest consumer in many markets. This, and revolving doors between businesses and government, probably means that corruption of this kind is hard to eliminate.
- projektfu 7y ago
  That's, frankly, impossible. This is one of those things that government has to buy -- streetlights and standards for them. Either the government creates government-owned companies for everything public or it participates in the market. If this were just handed to a private contractor, the same problem would be likely to occur, although the private contractor might be smarter about getting their cut of selling surveillance data.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Nobody is getting rich from GE stock. Besides, this article is an manifesto/editorial. Some person running for city attorney did a document dump of mostly irrelevant stuff. Lots of ranting, but very little actual content. What data has been collected from a partially implemented streetlight program in San Diego that was sold to “Wall St” for a billion dollars? Who is “Wall St” exactly? Lighting systems like this are administered by a NOC maintained by the vendor. Is that the data in question There isn’t enough information to form an opinion about the “inept bureaucrats”. City attorneys don’t enter contracts, they advise those who do. It’s fair to critique the terms of the contract, but ignorant to accuse someone of violating the law without any merit.

dogdawg 7y ago

I think sousvailence is the only way to combat mass surveillance. Observe and report all that you hear and see. Let everyone know what's going on in your neck of the woods.

hatmatrix 7y ago
Even if you're aware they're recording you, they're still recording you.

sn41 7y ago

A potential fall-out: the travel patterns and occupants of all cars in San Diego is stored in perpetuity, later to be hacked into, so that many common citizens can be later compromised. To the perpetual excuse that I don't have anything to fear, since I am not doing anything wrong - first, any information that you give to someone is potential power they have over you. The apocryphal quote by Cardinal Richelieu on finding enough to hang a man in six innocuous sentences is worthy of keeping in mind. Second, in an era of easily manipulated videos, it is easy to "manufacture" cam footage. If there are no such cams, such fakes have no legal validity. With the proliferation of such cams, there is currently no defense against such an attack.

allovernow 7y ago
>To the perpetual excuse that I don't have anything to fear, since I am not doing anything wrong If I have access to your daily whereabouts, I have strong priors with which to predict a host otherwise private characteristics and/or affiliations. Frequenting gay bars? Likely homosexual. Church every Sunday and shooting range a few times a year? Good chance you might be a republican. Volunteering at planned Parenthood events? Not a bad bet that you're a liberal. And these are just the obvious patterns - imagine how much you could predict with some basic statistical analysis, or modern ML. This is a very dangerous concentration of power and it's no surprise that people are willing to pay good money for it.
- CompanionCuuube 7y ago
  What happens if you go to a shooting rage a few times a year and volunteer at Planned Parenthood?

kart23 7y ago

> "General Electric has already made more than $1 billion dollars selling San Diego residents’ data to Wall Street" Where does this figure come from? Is it even accurate at all? If this is actually true I'd be interested in seeing what kind of data they sell and who buys it. I'm really questioning the reliability of the article just because of this figure that seemingly just comes from nowhere. Also, I live in San Diego, so I'm a little freaked out. This literally sounds like something out of 1984. edit: I think they might be talking about Current, a GE subsidary that they sold to a wall street firm. Theres no financial figure disclosed. But it seems like they mainly do large-scale energy efficient lighting for commerical purposes. I would not classify that as 'selling data'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(AIP_subsidiary) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_(AIP_subsidiary)

hogFeast 7y ago
This stuff is basically gold for Wall St. I don't do it anymore but when I worked in investment management, people were starting to look at counting footfall manually at scale (in retrospect, the edge ended up being huge). You can get similar data from other sources (e.g. credit card, satellite, etc.) but to be able to automate footfall counts would be pretty special (I know where I am, there were issues with automating this because no-one was interested in selling data and there was a possibility some data could count as non-public/material...a city doing this is pretty unique...that wouldn't happen here, city govt collecting data for HFs, wow).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
texasbigdata 7y ago
Interesting. Just doing the math let's say whomever bought it assumed they could it roll it out to 20 more cities. And they paid 2x revenue for it. That's 25M of implied revenue out of San Diego. I guess you could divide by resident but multiple firms could purchase the same data, so hard to say how to think about it.
skwb 7y ago
A bit dated, but it seems that current has about a $1B total revenue overall (circa 2015). In my very cursorily search, I couldn't find any more specific data, but $1B total revenue from SD resident data seems a bit high to me (kudos to anyone however that can find more current data). Pure speculation, but perhaps the above article was talking about overall revenue and not only SD data revenue? [1]. https://peprofessional.com/2019/04/aip-acquires-current-ge/ https://peprofessional.com/2019/04/aip-acquires-current-ge/ [2]. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/11/06/ge-to-sell-boston-lighting-subsidiary-current-to.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2018/11/06/ge-to-sel...

hart_russell 7y ago

Maybe it's confirmation bias because I live in San Diego, but it seems like San Diego is 2nd most talked about city on this forum to SF

justinjlynn 7y ago

Well, GE's engineering presentations of full system attestation and integrity analysis/measurement suddenly seem so much more relevant and scary - if those techniques are implemented in these surveillance networks. They presented this in the context of energy infrastructure - but surveillance works too I guess. It seems they've been working on software/hardware to make subverting these things much more difficult in the open for a while now: https://lssna19.sched.com/event/RHar/tutorial-complete-platform-attestation-remotely-verifying-the-authenticity-and-integrity-of-your-platforms-hardware-firmware-and-software-monty-wiseman-avani-dave-general-electric https://lssna19.sched.com/event/RHar/tutorial-complete-platf...

eyegor 7y ago

So this is what stage 2 of privacy erosion looks like. Stage 1 was of course traffic/red light cameras. How they spun installing cameras and microphones (!) with a data sharing agreement as "an energy efficiency upgrade for street lights" is beyond me.

syshum 7y ago

I would be more concerned about how Law Enforcement is using the data. I am also baffled by people not being concerned about Law Enforcement Surveillance but they are always up in arms about "corporations" spying on them. Last time I checked it was only law enforcement that has the power, authority, and legal cover to kill me, or put me in a metal cage. I suppose they believe "I have done nothing wrong so i have nothing to fear" but that has been proven time and time again to be a fallacy of epic proportions

Nasrudith 7y ago
It is because they don't decide with logic or thinking but feelings. They fall for the soldier cult or lies to chhildren quaint notions of friendly local police officer and the generic corporations always bad and you get that moronic result. That or way too much faith in the democratic process without extensive oversight and power. Either way it is the result of taking lies to heart when we are up to our necks in them at best.

reustle 7y ago

Could someone theoretically go around with a high powered laser and burn the sensors of surveillance cameras?

asdff 7y ago
Far easier to throw a rock.
- CamperBob2 7y ago
  LOL. Yeah, knock out the camera and win the Cy Young award.

electic 7y ago

There is a developers guide that shows all the information that is collected [1]. It doesn't look good. There is also full API documentation here which outlines what data is returned [2]. [1] https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq/developers-guide https://developer.gecurrent.com/cityiq/developers-guide [2] https://docs.cityiq.io/#05-Media%20Planning%20API/API%20Maps.htm%3FTocPath%3DMedia%2520Planning%2520API%7C_____3 https://docs.cityiq.io/#05-Media%20Planning%20API/API%20Maps...

roenxi 7y ago

Good time for a reminder that the surveillance state isn't going to come in because anyone has bad intentions. It happens because the technology is dirt cheap and will undoubtedly reduce crime. The risk is that as the government gains more control it will go rogue and do real damage. Racial, religious and nationalist panics happen from time to time; sooner or later there will be perfect records of who is going to what Church/Mosque/Synagogue/etc that are going to cause a lot of harm. The debate is going to centre around intentions and the fact that capability is the problem will be ignored. As is customary on issues where it hasn't killed millions of people in this century in this country and the people last century or different countries are different because ... well, something must have changed otherwise all this surveillance would be a concern.

arminiusreturns 7y ago
I disagree because intentions and capabilities both play a part, often to different degrees from different parties, and duplicity in both are often hidden, and therefore saying it's just because tech is cheap is a very superficial analysis of the issue at hand. To me that just seems like an easily planned plausible deniability strategy by those involved. Of course hyperfocusing on one isn't the right way, but neither is going the other directional extreme. One of the biggest problems with issues like this is that there would be a mixture of logical methods used to draw conclusions and lots of people forget the difference between inductive and deductive logic. (Intentions being more inductive and capabilities being more deductive)
- mLuby 7y ago
  The vagueness of your comment makes it difficult to understand what you mean. Can you rephrase with shorter words and sentences?
  - arminiusreturns 7y ago
    Intentions (potentially malicious, etc) matter and play a big part, but are harder to prove. I reject the idea that the deployment of surveillance tech is simply because certain leaders just are convinced it's cheap. Any kind of large city like San Diego has all kinds of military industrial complex actors pushing it in directions for all kinds of obvious reasons that are commonly connected to surveillance. tldr; In general, increases in surveillance are almost always about control, and not protection.

aazaa 7y ago

The rationale for the cameras has been covered before. It appears city leaders were lead to believe the cameras were for energy conservation only: > In December 2016, San Diego’s Environmental Services Department presented the City Council with a way to bring down its energy costs. General Electric had been looking for a place to test out new sensor-controlled technologies that could brighten or dim lights from afar and collect anonymized data, and a pilot program had been initiated in East Village two years prior. The company was now offering to finance the installation of that technology across the city with a $30 million loan that could be paid back over 13 years through its own energy savings. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/public-council-were-in-the-dark-on-police-access-to-smart-streetlights/ https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-safety/public-... Later, law enforcement got its hooks into the new toys: > Since August, the San Diego Police Department has been accessing the raw video footage with permission from City Hall and using its contents in dozens of criminal investigations, as the U-T reported. Some of that footage could appear at a trial scheduled to begin later this month, according to police. The notion that law enforcement will somehow be excluded in any way from the video/audio feeds from these devices strains credulity. If history since 2013 has taught us anything, it's that if you give law enforcement an inch of surveillance, they'll take a yard. On a related note, the idea that these feeds will somehow not end up on some dark market or surveillance capitalism venture business plans is equally ludicrous.

CapitalistCartr 7y ago
Modern history seems more "give law enforcement none of surveillance, and they'll take it all anyway." If the surveillance exists they will (ab)use it.

interestica 7y ago

"Oversight" sounds like some sort of dystopian surveillance system.