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Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
- eanzenberg 6y agoGood experiment to see if this causes crime to increase.
- LinuxBender 6y agoMost criminals didn't know these existed. For that matter, neither did most citizens know that cameras were peering into their backyards and microphones doing machine learning on what people were saying. Sorry I don't have the links to the tech specs handy.
- sitkack 6y agoA system like this could be used as a massive phased array microphone to literally listen to anyone between 2 or more poles.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoCrime has continued unabated in parts of Chicago that have remote sensing platforms for law enforcement's use. https://home.chicagopolice.org/information/police-observation-device-pod-cameras/ https://home.chicagopolice.org/information/police-observatio... https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-history-of-chicago-homicides-htmlstory.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-history-of-c...
- krageon 6y agoWhy do you think this is a good experiment?
- tolbish 6y agoWasn't one of the two San Diego mayoral candidates, Todd Gloria, on city council when they passed the resolution to install these? Why is there no scrutiny of his part in all of this?
- tomc1985 6y agoThis isn't an excuse, but IIRC they were sold to the city as simple sensor boxes. GE (or whoever it was that made/sold these) added the surveillance capabilities later, ostensibly for internal use but easily receivable via police action
- rbecker 6y agoI'm sorry, what? Doesn't a "sensor box" by definition have surveillance capabilities? The only way that sentence makes sense is if you're using some ridiculously narrow definition of "surveillance". Edit: Fair enough. But in this case, cameras and microphones were included, were they not?
- DanBC 6y agoIf it only senses light or dark it's difficult to see how that would count as surveillance.
- tolbish 6y agoThe city council was informed of their likelihood for abuse, so no that's not an excuse.
- tomc1985 6y agoAh, I wasn't aware of that bit.
- loteck 6y agoThe camera surveillance was there from the outset, SDPD just didn't realize it or start accessing the camera footage until about a year after the nodes went up.
- loteck 6y ago2 sitting councilmembers were also present for the vote to approve. All of them expressed that they had no idea the system would turn into a law enforcement surveillance network. They were sold to us as data gathering devices to improve transit & gather data for climate action. Whether you believe them that they didnt know is up to you. We've done the public records work & the results aren't 100% clear. FYI, Mr. Gloria recently voiced his support for my group's effort to get these shut down. "Smart city" solutions are being sold to governments all over the US this way, many of them having a nexus with mass surveillance.
- tomc1985 6y agoGood, that these were even allowed to be installed is a travesty
- loteck 6y agoHi all, I've been answering questions about this effort over on Reddit [0], but happy to chat on questions about how this is going down here as well. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/ipyei8/san_diegos_smart_streetlights_have_been_shut_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sandiego/comments/ipyei8/san_diegos...
- gummybuns 6y ago> The surprise announcement came days after the city floated a plan to hand over the camera management and access exclusively to police How do I stay up to date on information like this? What can I do as a resident to help the cause?
- loteck 6y agoEmail me please, it's in my profile. You can absolutely help.
- ciarannolan 6y agoCan you just share publicly what people can do to help?
- loteck 6y agoI would love to do that! For our effort in SD specifically, we need to add more help and voices to get 2 ordinances passed, to establish oversight of existing & future surveillance technology. Once we are successful at that, we will have a huge amount of work ahead of us to process San Diego's existing inventory of surveillance tech. We need volunteers to help do that work. We need a lot of them, to help keep the workload manageable. For other cities, you need to get started by challenging an existing surveillance tech & assembling a coalition. Then you can work to establish local oversight of your local surveillance tech.
- everybodyknows 6y agoIn the Reddit thread 's3thcom' writes: >Surveillance ordinance that will put in stronger rules for how the city acquires and operates this tech ... Eager to hear how this might shape up. Especially how to break the spyware-vendor/police cabal, and move authority back to local residents and shopowners, and their elected representatives.
- everybodyknows 6y agoAlso this, same day, same newspaper: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2020-09-09/san-diego-moving-toward-repeal-of-seditious-language-ban-police-have-used-during-protests https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/202... >San Diego moves toward repeal of ‘seditious language’ ban police have used during protests >Rule against anti-authority speech ...
- 1f60c 6y agoIs that a bad thing?
- munk-a 6y agoYea it is - the US has a pretty clear and sane definition of what speech should be protected at a national level. Cities and states have no business trying to muddle the line of what speech should be protected.
- DangerousPie 6y agoSo repealing that would be a good thing, wouldn't it?!
- munk-a 6y agoAbsolutely yea - I guess the comment I replied to could be read as either in favor of the ban or in favor of the repeal of the ban. I read it the former manner but maybe it was intended in the latter manner.
- slg 6y ago>the US has a... sane definition of what speech should be protected at a national level The US has a more extreme view of protected speech than almost all of our peer nations. Whether that is "sane" or not is a matter of opinion. Many Europeans would scoff at our campaign finance laws for example.
- chundicus 6y ago$30 million dollars? Feel like we could have used that money in many better ways...
- makecheck 6y agoLights aren’t exactly cheap either way; even years ago they would be about $100 a pole just for the light, modern LED ones are about that [1] and cities can have thousands of them [2]. For example, the 250,000 lights in NYC at $125 per light (without even considering installation) would get you about $30M. [1] https://www.edn.com/weighing-the-costs-of-led-street-lights/ https://www.edn.com/weighing-the-costs-of-led-street-lights/ [2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/infrastructure/streetlights.shtml https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/infrastructure/streetligh...
- chundicus 6y agoInteresting! I guess that makes sense but I definitely would have underestimated that cost. In this case the cost seemed to apply in part to 3,000 cameras. But solely based on the article, it's hard for me to tell what portion of that $30 million went to upgrades/maintenance and what portion went to the cameras. However it does clearly say it would be another $7 million to maintain the cameras over the next four years.
- Stupulous 6y agoFor anyone who doesn't want to do the math, that's $10,000/installation and $600/light/year maintenance.
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoEarthworks / installation costs are probably higher than material costs.
- pkamb 6y ago> Smart Streetlight cameras
- loteck 6y agoYour point is valid. In fact, after San Diego missed its last payment, Ubicquia shut down all access to the "smart" data sensors & kept only the cameras running, for police use. So, we can go ahead and drop the whole Smart Streetlight charade now and just call them surveillance cameras now.
- slg 6y agoHow are these "Smart Streetlights" and not standard CCTV cameras that governments and private entities have been installing for decades? Is this just clever marketing to reduce public outrage?
- loteck 6y agothey have sensors on them that collect environmental data. In fact, the cameras by default are used to generate pedestrian and vehicle data. You have to specifically add the vendor's "situational awareness" module to get a console for viewing raw video footage. But you're right, Smart city technology is always wrapped up in marketing lingo to obfuscate its surveillance properties.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago"Smart City" sounds a lot cooler than "1984-style surveillance state". Add some light artwork, upbeat music and some stock photos of happy people and you get the population rooting for you. Just like Apple, Google and Amazon do. Yes Apple is better than the other two, no they're not angels. And really, the safety aspect is easily circumvented for the bad guys. Take a standard corona mask, hoodie and some sunglasses and you're done. For the rest of us it means living even more in a panopticon than ever before.
- 01100011 6y agoWeren't the cameras in 1984 in private locations as well? I don't think you can argue that cameras in public are tantamount to a 1984 style police state.
- jedberg 6y agoThey have more than just cameras. They have atmospheric sensors and microphones too. I think some of them also have compute modules to do local inference in the images collected. In theory they're supposed to be for things like real time pollution monitoring and real time traffic so they can change light timings, that kind of thing.
- eggsby 6y agoAt the same time, the city government is adding explicit surveillance feeds for law enforcement. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/east-county/lemon-grove/story/2020-09-08/lemon-grove-sheriffs-ready-roll-out-camera-coverage-of-city https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/communities/east-county...
- loteck 6y agoLemon Grove is a different city from San Diego, but youre right that we have a problem at the county level as well.
- themark 6y agoIf you are looking for some entertainment, read the City Attorney's attempt to explain the data that was being collected: https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/streetlights.pdf https://timesofsandiego.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/stree...
- munk-a 6y agoI particularly like the "What does processed data look like" and they just have a picture of some random hexadecimal digits which is accurate I guess, but that's what all data looks like if expressed in hex.
- est31 6y agoWhich now makes me wonder what the data behind the hex is. 09 00 ba 8a b6 f7 42 c8 8f d0 aa 8e bf f5 99 b6 5a f2 42 26 Oc 92 25 4a 14 2f 6d fc ee e7 c3 f3 e7 19 82 a0 14 6f dc 7b Oc b8 0e 11 e7 5d c5 0d a0 19 bb 97 32 79 13 11 d2 af 8e fc Oc ee 29 af c6 8d 3c 59 9f 73 23 ab f6 58 22 ae aa fd 30 c5 0e f5 fO d1 1f 31 00 ec 6d e6 7d 53 a9 36 2a 8d Of 46 8e 48 10 76 20 ee ac 87 af 7b 2a ec 85 f8 b9 88 43 60 78 6S a6 ea 13 b8 b8 93 d8 62 25 c2 d2 f4 c7 e4 7a ad 2d lb a6 00 b7 36 1f ca 1c 43 cf 5f c3 5b 7d 3f da 2a 41 6f 6b fb 05 ed ff cc Putting it into hex to ascii converters doesn't yield anything useful. Putting it into a frequency analysis tool [0] doesn't give any special patterns either. 8 bytes are present 3 times, 25 bytes 2 times, and 86 bytes 1 time (total 160 bytes). I inputted a 160 long sequence from hexdumping urandom and I got 5 bytes present 3 times, 27 bytes 2 times, 91 bytes 1 time. Not a statistician but it seems pretty close. [0]: https://www.dcode.fr/frequency-analysis https://www.dcode.fr/frequency-analysis
- munk-a 6y agoIt's way too little data to get anything useful out of unless it was intentionally seeded. I am a bit sad it didn't decode as "Yea we know this is just hex but it looks fancy" since that would've been a pretty good get from whoever prepared images for the document. Also yea - it's probably not going to text decode trivially since there are random null bits in the middle. My guess is that it's some random data from an image off the camera - but it could also be a snippet of environmental information.
- s1mon 6y agoThe article title is missing the key word "camera". "Smart Streetlights" just sound like they intelligently control when the lights turn on and off, and saying that they would be turned off sounds like San Diego would be plunged into darkness at night.
- loteck 6y agoMy original title was "orders city's surveillance camera network shut down." HN likes to defer to original headlines, which is understandable.
- JamesSwift 6y agoThats understandable, but the edit also left out the 'surveillance' bit from the original
- supercanuck 6y ago> But the Smart Streetlights were more than lights. They included streetlight-mounted cameras and technologically advanced sensors with the ability to turn video images of cars and people into valuable data the city could use — thus the “smart” in Smart Streetlights.
- dang 6y agoOk, we put the cameras back in the title above.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago> while it was not part of the initial plan, police later began to review the raw camera footage to help solve serious or violent crime Once the technological hurdles are overcome, the social barriers are more a matter of "when" not "if". Having dumb streetlights is much more of a protection against surveillance, and less of a temptation, than having streetlights capable of it, but guarantees "that we don't intend surveillance". It's a lot harder to sneak $30 million dollar expenditures through a city budget than a memo in the police department about fully using capabilities that already existed anyways...
- the8472 6y agoA german saying that translates to "where there's a trough, the pigs will gather" is sometimes is more apt than "build it and they will come".
- zobzu 6y agoI always find these stories interesting, because, frankly, these cameras I'm sure DO help catch criminals very effectively. However, they also allow very effective privacy violations of course. Because of this there's no perfect outcome (and opinions across the board).
- fiter 6y agoI'm surprised that the powers-that-be are greedy enough to not involve the judicial branch. Lock the video away until there is a warrant! It's not like your right to privacy in your home or phone calls extends past a warrant.
- sudosysgen 6y agoThere are much better ways to reduce criminality that don't violate our privacy. As long as those solutions haven't been tried seriously, as they have worked in other countries, then there is no justification for this.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoMaybe start with that obvious little thing.. People not having guns means people not being shot at chicken restaurants, hence less crimes to solve. It does really work here in Europe even though it's not perfect - yes some criminals still have guns. But the big effect is someone being spotted on the street with a gun = insta-arrest + jail time for possession. I know proposing it is political suicide there, but when I see what BLM have accomplished in awareness I did think some spontaneous movement like that would happen too in the gun debate, after the xx'th senseless mass shooting. Also, the other obvious thing (also starting to bite Europe in the backside in all fairness), is the huge income equality leading to crime life.
- kyleee 6y agowhat prompted the chicken restaurant bit of your comment?
- 6y ago
- MurMan 6y agoI'm a San Diego resident that was falsely accused of a serious offense a few years ago. Surveillance footage from a restaurant saved me from prosecution. I know that this is a minority opinion, but I'm in favor of cameras in public places. There will always be the potential for abuse even with strong restrictions, but I think the benefits are worth it.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoI assume I’m always on camera, as car dash cams and house doorbell cameras become more and more common.
- tolbish 6y agoThe idea that more authoritarianism will keep us safe is an enticing idea. After all, if you have nothing to hide, why should you care? As mentioned elsewhere, there are better ways to reduce criminality than a "guilty until proven innocent" view that comes with rising mass surveillance and authoritarianism.
- fiter 6y agoI agree with you. If we could have this technology in the same context as warrants, I'd be happy.
- brandmeyer 6y agoUnfortunately, warrants aren't a sufficient safeguard against abuse of technology. Law enforcement is well known to use evidence laundering techniques to work around procedural safeguards.
- fiter 6y agoI imagine we could come up with some way to handle this. For example, put the storage as a responsibility in the judicial branch.
- sneak 6y agoI offer that if you believe this, perhaps you haven’t read many search warrant applications.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoJust need to add face recognition and you basically have China's playbook... Scary.
- Animats 6y agoHow about making them all accessible to the public? Maybe with a 12 hour delay.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoGreat idea! Now the snoopy old lady across the road can actually follow you around town at all hours.
- throwawaysea 6y agoI don’t get why people are against cameras. We have limited police resources and need to enable them to locate wanted criminals easily. Betting on police randomly spotting a suspect with their eyes while on patrol is a bad bet. We can do better and this technology is the way.
- la6471 6y agoI don’t see what is the problem if the footage from this camera is made available to the general public all the time including law enforcement authorities. Open access to information is better and can have a positive impact.
- r00fus 6y agoAre cameras like this open-access for anyone? In that case, great data source for image analytics AI startup.
- jxramos 6y agoI wonder how these sorts of decisions would stand up if put to a ballot initiative. Has there ever been an instance of the public voting on cameras and surveillance technology in their towns?