
San Diego Awarded GE Mass Surveillance Contract Without Oversight - vinniejames
https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/city-of-san-diego-awarded-ge-mass-surveillance-contract-without-oversight/
======
kart23
> "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_\(AIP_subsidiary\))

~~~
biophetik
I also live in San Diego and see these cameras everywhere. I understand the
reason for "safety" and other tech related improvements (I think they mention
real time parking availability), but at what cost to private data. What I
really want is data to back up all these claims.

~~~
asdff
Observation is useless if police aren't keen to taking effective action in the
first place.

1 in a million crimes it is probably super useful, but for the 999,999 other
times some people get into a fight, something gets stolen, two people get
stabbed in a grocery store with many cameras and security guards and dozens of
witnesses (using an example from my neighborhood in LA this past September),
nothing happens because the perpetrators are long gone and will never be found
by the time the cops show up, if they do at all. You can't effectively keep
500 square miles safe with only 9000 cops.

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roenxi
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
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
The vagueness of your comment makes it difficult to understand what you mean.
Can you rephrase with shorter words and sentences?

~~~
arminiusreturns
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.

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sn41
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
>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
What happens if you go to a shooting rage a few times a year and volunteer at
Planned Parenthood?

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basilgohar
>>>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.

~~~
PeterisP
As the law quoted in the original article says, it's not considered
significant amount if:

> The ownership of less than 3 percent of the shares of a corporation for
> profit, provided that the total annual income to him or her from dividends,
> including the value of stock dividends, from the corporation does not exceed
> 5 percent of his or her total annual income, and any other payments made to
> him or her by the corporation do not exceed 5 percent of his or her total
> annual income.

It's quite plausible that $10k-$100k does not meet that criteria.

~~~
bdowling
> It's quite plausible that $10k-$100k does not meet that criteria.

GE's dividend yield is currently about 0.34% [0], which means that an
investment of $100k would pay about $340 annually.

[0] [https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ge/dividend-
hi...](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ge/dividend-history)

~~~
sk5t
Note that GE used to pay a solid, dependable ~4% dividend--prior to the
stock's contemporaneous slide from ~$30 to ~$10.

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aazaa
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-...](https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/public-
safety/public-council-were-in-the-dark-on-police-access-to-smart-
streetlights/)

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
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.

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electic
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...](https://docs.cityiq.io/#05-Media%20Planning%20API/API%20Maps.htm%3FTocPath%3DMedia%2520Planning%2520API%7C_____3)

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syshum
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
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.

------
1wheel
> 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
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
[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
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
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
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.

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justinjlynn
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-
platf...](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)

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

~~~
asdff
Far easier to throw a rock.

~~~
CamperBob2
LOL. Yeah, knock out the camera _and_ win the Cy Young award.

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eyegor
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.

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dogdawg
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
Even if you're aware they're recording you, they're still recording you.

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

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hart_russell
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

