
Gunshot detection system transforms and raises issues  - mindblink
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/us/shots-heard-pinpointed-and-argued-over.html?pagewanted=all
======
tptacek
Reading this feels like accidental time travel. When did this start happening?

$40,000-$60,000/sqmile/year is an extremely reasonable number. Chicago has 50+
officers per square mile, implying tens of _patrolling_ officers per square
mile; the fully loaded cost of a single police officer is six figures, with
potentially explosive defined-benefit pensions and benefits just to make
things fun.

Moreover, like in many big cities (read Peter Moskos _Cop In The Hood_ for
details), the squad car patrol tactics used in Chicago do a _terrible_ job of
suppressing gun crime. Over a 24 hour period this holiday weekend, we had 25
gunshot _injuries_ (god knows how many illegal firearms were discharged above
and beyond that). The police can't be everywhere, and the patrol process keeps
them mostly in rolling squad cars.

And obviously, the overwhelming majority of gun crime in the city of Chicago
are concentrated in a small percentage of our square miles: Austin, Garfield
Park, and (particularly) Englewood and Chatham. Which makes systems like this
cost-effective to roll out, and, particularly, easy to pilot.

~~~
moldbug
One little bird (presumably a Chicago cop):

 _By my totals 17 shot on Sunday, 7 of them in 011. With 11 more starting at
midnight to 0800 monday morning. The blackberry was ringing all night. 2 of
the "victims" dead so far._

[http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-
shooting-s...](http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/not-one-shooting-
sunday.html#5081118908871824492)

Note the scare quotes on "victims." Our informant continues:

 _The city should embrace all the violence and make it a tourist attraction.
See if you can come to Chicago and make it out alive! Have tour buses go
through the ghetto and stop at all the crime scenes. Get your picture with the
body! Only 20 bucks. Better make it 30, 10 goes to the alderman of the ward
the body is in. That way the visitors can get a small taste of how business is
conducted in Chicago. As a special treat you may also get robbed at gun point
during your tour. And if you want to see the indigenous population acting
normally in its own habitat start using your Iphones where you can be seen.
But you will be charged extra if you get apple picked! End the tour with
specially trade marked Chalkie shirts with all proceed going to hire some real
leadership at the FOP so we don't get screwed on our contracts. And give one
buck from each tour to a special fund for the kids. ITS FOR THE CHILDREN!!!_

God I love the Internets...

~~~
tptacek
My 25 came from the same source: Second City Cop blog. They're a collection of
anonymous Chicago police.

The scare quotes refer to gang shootings.

SCC tends strongly towards alarmism and, often, hyperbole. Your odds of
getting shot in Chicago, even if you go to Woodlawn for Lem's barbeque, is
extremely low. Unfortunately, your odds of getting shot if you're a kid living
24/7 in Englewood or Humboldt Park are unacceptably high. Also: lots of racist
cops. Blue collar job.

~~~
moldbug
Well! If you know SCC, you must love the Box Chevy Phantom! And Chalkie! And
I'm sure you've seen the famous Cabrini-Green thread:

[http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-
gre...](http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-cabrini-green.html)

And you must have loved this discussion of "Jared," "Brent," and their fellow
Occupy bombers:

[http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/bombers-
pussies.ht...](http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2012/05/bombers-pussies.html)

Extremely low? Compared to what? What it should be? What should be your odds
of being shot in a major city, anyway? San Francisco is extremely safer than
Englewood, and earlier this year my wife and kids still found themselves in
the middle of some kind of Norteno-Sureno shootout. They didn't get hit,
though! So no harm, no foul.

Alarmist, certainly. Certainly alarmist compared to your normal Chicago
sources of information, which as I recall insisted that the beaches on a
certain day last summer were closed due to "temperatures in the '90s:"

[http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2011/06/wall-of-lies-
crumb...](http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com/2011/06/wall-of-lies-
crumbles.html)

It's a fact that I'm not a blue-collar fellow and I don't have a blue-collar
job or a blue-collar family. And no, I don't think that if I were posting
comments on SCC, I'd be quite as cavalier in referring to "the animal,"
"mutts," etc. It does get the point across, however.

------
ChuckMcM
I've seen this in action and it is pretty impressive. I expect the next step
will be that a quad-copter UAV will 'nest' on top of a ShotSpotter pole where
is will stay charged. And when an alert comes in, if it is closest, it will
launch and give the HQ a video feed of the scene in 15 - 20 seconds after the
event.

I do have concerns about the use of conversations the microphones overhear but
I know that in many neighborhoods events are _not_ called in because the
neighbor doesn't want the repercussions of turning in the local gang lord or
his troops.

~~~
politician
Prediction: When the system goes to dispatch the closest UAV to the
disturbance, the launch system will return "500 - Destroyed".

EDIT: C'mon, downvotes? You do realize that vandalism will be a serious
problem for this system.

~~~
Jach
I think you need to make a convincing argument that vandalism will be a
problem. Paraphrasing from _The Information_ , pg 144, there was also that
concern when Morse and Vail set up their wires wrapped in yarn on 20-foot
posts. Morse told Congress they could transmit 30 characters per minute and he
also told them that the lines had "remained undisturbed from the wantonness or
evil disposition of any one." There is even more ample opportunity for
domestic terrorism and destruction of things in the US today yet things seem
okay.

Of course if the UAVs did start getting destroyed, it's not a stretch of
imagination to think about how they could be protected...

~~~
jlarocco
Drug dealers and gangbangers aren't stupid. If they see the cops installing
these things it's only a matter of time before they'll find out what they are
and start vandalizing or destroying them.

From the sound of it, if there's enough crime for these things to be cost
effective then there are enough criminals around for somebody to get rid of
the shot detectors.

I don't think the comparison to telegraph lines really makes sense. If
telegram lines were used solely for reporting crime it would be a better
analogy.

~~~
tptacek
Every high-crime neighborhood in Chicago is studded with cameras with flashing
blue lights. The enclosures are hardened. Destruction of CPD cameras has not
been a major issue in the city. If the city can keep cameras operational, they
can keep acoustic sensors (smaller, no line-of-sight requirements) secure as
well.

My guess (just a guess) is that the "criminals will destroy the sensors"
concern is totally overblown.

~~~
mahyarm
I heard about pissed of people in the UK putting a tire over a speed / red
light camera post and lighting it on fire. Tires are harder to extinguish than
your typical fire and it's usually too late before it can be put out.
Eventually it becomes unprofitable for the third party contractor to stay
there and they start going away.

~~~
regularfry
You can put a tire over a speed camera without your picture being taken by it
and instantly transmitted off-site.

------
kijin
> _the system was not intended to record anything except gunshots_

So, they could record conversations, but they won't for the time being. A
classic example of using software to temporarily cripple the true capabilities
of a computing device.

In the hands of DRM-wielding corporations, "defective by design" results in
inconvenience and loss of users' freedom. In the hands of the surveillance
state, the same technique results in a situation where citizens must simply
trust the authorities to exercise restraint. Because the police could flip a
switch at any time and record all sorts of conversations. Somehow I don't
trust that the switch will remain un-flipped for long. And when it does get
flipped, as it did in New Bedford, everyone will say it was just an accident.

Maybe, just maybe, we should accept systems like this as a necessary evil in
certain cities where there's a lot of gun violence. Still, I don't like this.
When it comes to the government, I'd much rather give them hardware that can't
be unlocked "by accident" because there's nothing to unlock. The thing is,
it's unrealistic to do that in all cases, and we have to hit a balance
somewhere. Which is exactly why systems like this raise difficult issues.

~~~
tomerv
Given that the microphones are placed in a public location, and that they
record noises heard in the street, one could argue that it's a reasonable
level of surveillance.

The real concern will be when governments start to identify their citizens by
their voice signatures, and then use that to track their whereabouts.

~~~
InclinedPlane
That's not the worst of it. Consider the full implications here. Imagine a
worst case scenario where gunshot detection is used as a pretext to put
microphones all over city streets, every block say. Now imagine that those
recordings are stored forever and properly time / location tagged, not a
technologically difficult problem.

Then imagine what is possible with such data. First off, you could use
triangulation and advanced filtering between multiple microphones to be able
to pinpoint the source of each sound and separate it out from the background.
You could, as you say, identify individuals by their voices. You could track
their wherabouts. You could monitor who they are talking to and when. You
could learn so much about their lives by monitoring all of their conversations
in "public". In the worst case scenario of the government turning into a
police state this is a frightening level of surveillance.

~~~
tptacek
Apart from the fact that the devices are apparently designed _not_ to be
capable of recording conversations, and can clearly be improved to make it
even more difficult to record conversations, "not deploying gunshot detection"
isn't the only privacy control that cities can employ; cities can just make it
illegal to collect raw audio.

~~~
kijin
The article mentions that the devices did manage to record conversations in at
least one case. If so, they are clearly capable of recording conversations,
just not optimized for it.

Also, how do you distinguish gunshots from background noise and triangulate
the location of shots without first collecting raw audio from multiple devices
and analyzing it?

~~~
bigiain
Indeed, there's clearly some disinformation going on in the article:

"James G. Beldock, a vice president at ShotSpotter, said that the system was
not intended to record anything except gunshots and that cases like New
Bedford’s were extremely rare. “There are people who perceive that these
sensors are triggered by conversations, but that is just patently not true,”
he said. “They don’t turn on unless they hear a gunshot.” "

So apparently "the sensors", "They don’t turn on unless they hear a gunshot.".
How, exactly, do they "hear a gunshot" if they're not (yet) turned on?

I suspect the truth is there's some software configuration that inhibits
_recording_ of the sensor data until a gunshot-like event occurs (though if
_I_ were designing this system there'd be at least a 30second or so buffer, so
I could archive the sounds that if heard _before_ a gunshot as well as
afterwards). But I'd hesitate trust that "configuration" to be particularly
secure - much like the TSA "pornoscanners" - which in spite of claims of it
being impossible, seem to be able to record images for the amusement of the
operators and their friends…

------
DanielBMarkham
_“If the police are utilizing these conversations, then the issue is, where
does it stop?” he said._

Libertarians consistently make slippery-slope arguments when most everybody
else is just happy that some immediate problem is solved. This line of debate
is freaking getting old, and I'm the first person to do it.

The problem is that it always _is_ a slippery slope. No bullshit. Changes take
place over years or decades, so there's no single time you can raise an alarm.
Right now it's gunshots. Next it will be car sounds -- estimating speeders and
the conditions for traffic accidents. Then somebody will work out screaming.
Then, perhaps conversations. And let's not forget that the systems will be
justified by talking about the horrendous inner city. In actuality the vast
majority of the time these systems will be used in places nowhere like that.
When you read stories like this remember that these guys are selling equipment
just like any other startup. You're getting their best pitch.

Big cities need this stuff, so it's a good thing for them. (Although I imagine
we'll just start seeing a lot of silencers). What concerns me is that 90%+ of
the time there's no crime being committed, save for discharging a firearm. So
there's all these thousands of "criminals" discharging firearms that haven't
been arrested before but could be now. Yay? Is it always a good thing with the
grip of the state tightens, as long as we can point to something good coming
of it?

Hopefully the cops will be so overloaded with gunshots they'll ignore the
system and use it only for forensic purposes. But I doubt it. Instead I
imagine we'll see these discharge numbers added to the crime reports for
cities in an effort to secure more funding for even more police presence.
Whether that's a good thing or not is debatable. There's obviously a real
problem in Chicago and several other cities, but the rest of the country not
so much.

~~~
haberman
Most of these slippery slope arguments are made by people who seem to have no
actual experience with any of the issues at hand apart from reading 1984 and
Fahrenheit 451. This gives them about as much credibility as someone whose
information comes from watching Jack Bauer on 24 and Fox News.

You cannot come to reasonable conclusions about issues like this without
seeing what's going on in the real world. This is not a math problem we're
talking about; you can't sit around thinking and extrapolating and expect your
conclusions to mean anything. It's like trying to run a scientific experiment
without any data.

Do you know anything about criminal law? Do you know anything about the legal
checks that are in place that prevent your doomsday scenario from happening?
Are you aware of how evidence rules are applied in real cases? I'm sure you've
read stories about the most egregious abuses, because they are the ones that
pop up in the feeds that you read, but do you extrapolate from these that all
cases are like this?

I say all this because I recently had the very eye-opening experience of
serving on a juror in a five-week criminal trial. I realized that many of the
prejudices that the technorati crowd has about the justice system are totally
unfounded, at least for the case that I sat on. Our jury was not a clueless
bunch of simpletons, our prosecutor couldn't get whatever he wanted by just
saying "think of the children," and the judge was not an apathetic overworked
bureaucrat who let anything slide.

 _What concerns me is that 90%+ of the time there's no crime being committed,
save for discharging a firearm. So there's all these thousands of "criminals"
discharging firearms that haven't been arrested before but could be now. Yay?_

Are you really arguing that discharging firearms is a victimless crime? (edit:
I'm talking about dense urban areas).

~~~
ghshephard
I don't believe you could come up with a better definition of "victimless
crime" than "discharging firearms within the boundaries of a dense urban
area." "Discharging Firearms" is akin to "Driving Car" or "Operating Forklift"
or "Owning Swimming Pool" - all of these acts can potentially be dangerous,
but, responsibly done, the risks can be mitigated. (Though, statistics seem to
indicate it is inordinately more dangerous to own a swimming pool than to
discharge a firearm, in terms of accidental deaths of children per year of
doing so)

~~~
roel_v
Listen, I think many of the people responding to you are sympathetic to your
argument (as in, pro gun ownership, not being alarmist, etc - I certainly know
I am), but you're hurting the cause more than you are helping it by comparing
"discharging firearm" with "owning swimming pool". Your Freakonomics example
was about _gun ownership_ , not _shooting it_. I don't see how you can
reasonably argue that shooting a gun is equally safe or unsafe than is "owning
a swimming pool".

Of course the risks of firing a gun can be mitigated and controlled, but to do
so, one needs a lot more rules and procedures (both on the individual and
societal level) for guns than for forklifts and swimming pools. If you
disagree with that, I'm afraid I (or, I suspect, some or most of the other
people responding to you) won't be able to have a real discussion with you
since our fundamental assumptions would then appear to be so far apart that
we'd have to regress to a much more fundamental level and clarify those
assumptions first before it would make sense to come back to the relatively
high-level argument at hand.

~~~
ghshephard
My bias, I guess, is growing up with the sound of gunfire on a daily basis
from family and neighbors. I didn't really think it was a big deal - just
became part of the background noise. The concept of "Gunshot detection
systems" just seemed ludicrous to me. I didn't actually realize until I
googled a bit that it actually _was_ illegal to discharge a firearm within
certain city limits - I would have argued (and lost) that the law was
"negligent discharge of a firearm"

I guess if it's illegal to do so, then a "Gunshot Detection System" has use.
In the same way that Red Light cameras and Speeding Detectors serve a function
in managing those laws.

There are lots of places in the Bay Area where you can safely discharge a
firearm within city limits. At least I know I need to review the various
city/municipal bylaws to see whether it's legal.

------
nosse
I've kind of been waiting for this. This could provoke really interesting
renaissance of the crossbow among street gangs. And other deadly melee weapons
might get big leaps of progress. There might be a telescopic sword coming or
something similar.

Here's something from India. From times when weapons had to be carried
secretly. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urumi>

My forecast is that in the long run, bystanders will get less damage. But real
murders get harder to investigate as there will be no gunpowder residue. And
crossbow is easier to manufacture by oneself than firearm and that makes
murder weapon tracking harder.

~~~
protomyth
I would bet on bows before crossbows (speed, easier to hide). Quite a few
hunters here are learning bow because the number of rifle deer licenses this
season have been cut in half, but a lot of bow licenses remain.

~~~
nosse
You don't have to have a leaf spring in the bow as is custom right now. With
spiral spring, a "crossbow" can look more like a big pistol.

------
rayiner
I think people should consider the upsides to these technologies in addition
to the privacy concerns. Faster police response could lead not just to saved
lives, but also to much better suspect identification. Our current methods for
identifying suspects using evidence gathered long after a shooting hall are
complete trash. Of the wide array of forensic techniques used by police, only
DNA is remotely reliable. If a system like this meant the difference between
apprehending a fleeing suspect a couple of minutes later and picking up a
random ethnic minority days later based on highly flawed identifications, this
technology could have major benefits that must be weighed.

~~~
specialist
_Potential_ upsides. Rarely realized.

I'd rather pay for more cops.

These technologies are just used to put more distance between the corporate
profits and accountability to the communities effected.

As a history lesson, dehumanizing intelligence services, preferring satellites
and wiretaps to HUMINT, has crippled our capabilities. But it did enrich
defense contractors, so it's all good.

~~~
tptacek
This whole system deployed at scale appears to cost 0.5% of what patrol does.
There's no reason cities can't do this _and_ ramp up patrol.

------
greg_bt
I find it interesting that people's main concerns are the privacy laws. Isn't
anyone concerned that there is a need for gunshot detection? I would have
thought that the main issue was that there was enough gun related violence to
make this product viable? As much as I love to see an innovative solution to a
problem this seems a lot like its treating the symptoms and not the cause.

~~~
Kroem3r
I enjoy following these structures of cludge upon subsidy upon moral
bankruptcy.

I wonder at what point (in the adoption of this technology) it makes sense to
invest in gun silencers.

~~~
Snhr
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q8zKtnU6U>

I'm sure that silencers will still be detectable? They do make the gun softer
but it's still noticeable if you know what you're looking for I'm sure.

------
wccrawford
"If nothing else, ShotSpotter has made it clear how much unreported gunfire
takes place on city streets. In many high-crime urban neighborhoods, gunshots
are a counterpoint to daily life, “as common as the birds chirping,” as
Commander Mikail Ali of the San Francisco Police Department put it. But
whether out of apathy, fear or uncertainty, people call the police in only a
fraction of cases."

Or maybe, they got sick of calling the cops and not having them come. If the
gunshots are that common, it wouldn't be uncommon for the police to ignore the
complaints as a high-crime district.

Now they can ignore the automated reports instead of the called-in ones.

~~~
acdha
There's a potentially huge difference: if these outside company reports exist
independently of the official PD story it becomes much easier for a reporter
to start asking why the numbers are much higher. If the police are under
pressure to get their stats down (i.e. cook the books) there will probably
turnout to be a number of real incidents which were described as mistaken
reports

------
larrys
I think the assumption with this is that all gunshots would be crimes in
process and over time and with more ubiquity that might not be the case
leading to a less effective system.

I would imagine that a criminal could use a system like this to do a DOS of
police presence and/or send them on a wild goose chase so they can commit a
crime in another area. In other words they get police to scramble to 5th and
Main and they have another team to break into a place a few miles away with a
non-gunshot crime.

Also, as anyone who has experience with home or business alarm systems knows
false alarms get to be a "boy who cried wolf" issue and you begin to not take
them as seriously as you should.

~~~
eridius
That would only be effective if you could get all the police to go to a
specific location. I don't think they typically send every single available
police officer to the location of a gunshot.

~~~
larrys
"get all the police to go to a specific location"

Maybe. But I think it would depend on the particular department obviously and
geography as well. You don't need all the police. You are decreasing manpower
and ability to respond to other calls which can vary greatly depending on what
else is going on. And this system might be installed in smaller towns with
less backup resources as well.

------
hartror
Reading about this in a country where there is tight gun control feels like
reading about a dystopia future by Gibson or the like. It is the future, but
not necessarily in a good way.

~~~
protomyth
I would imagine ND has more firearms than Chicago with a smaller total
population. FBI[1] has listed 9 murders in 2009 and 3 were firearm related. Of
the 3 in 2008[2], 0 were firearm related. Gun control doesn't stop people from
killing others, it just makes them use something else. The something else can
be a lot worse.

1) <http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_20.html>

2) <http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_20.html>

~~~
hartror
I am not in the mood for a debate on gun control. I do agree that guns aren't
a prerequisite for violet death but they do make the process significantly
easier given they are designed for that purpose.

Your example compares apples with oranges.

~~~
protomyth
The important question is "why?" not "how?" - concentrating on any tool is
missing the real problems and solutions in life.

The tools isn't Chicago's problem or else it would cause the same problem in
ND. My cousin is alive because he had a shotgun on him when attacked by
abandoned dogs. I don't blame the dogs ("how"). I blame the owner's who
abandoned them ("why").

------
staunch
If they designed the system (hopefully at the hardware level) so that it was
incapable of recording voices I would have no problem with it.

That would probably be a good thing for a competitor to create: a shot
detection system that's designed to address civil liberty concerns. I bet
someone on HN could do it.

~~~
nosse
If you do that simply by damping wavelengths of speech, you possibly make
opportunity to alter the sound of a gun so that it doesn't set the alarm of.
Maybe more importantly the sound of a gunfire would not sound like anything
familiar to human ear, so it would make it very difficult to manually pick the
real shots.

------
kens
I'm confused about the timeline in the NYTimes article. The gunfire was
detected at 7:22:07, and tactical team arrives at 7:25:02 (Pacific). The
article says, "Total elapsed time: 3 minutes, 55 seconds."

Isn't that a total elapsed time of 2 minutes, 55 seconds?

------
moreati
I wonder if false positives will take off e.g. personal attack alarms that
make a sound like gun fire

~~~
Dove
My dad was using a powder-actuated concrete nail gun for some remodeling not
long ago. It used .22 loads to drive nails. The sound it made was eerily
identical to the real thing.

~~~
kijin
The system will have to distinguish real firearms from other powder-actuated
hardware. Otherwise it's going to become useless anywhere near a construction
site.

But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun?

~~~
ComputerGuru
> _But what if you shoot a person with a nail gun?_

What if you stab a person with a knife?

It's off-topic. It was designed and built to detect gunshots from real guns.

------
rwallace
As a libertarian, I'm generally iffy about the expansion of surveillance, or
of government activity in general.

But I try to be pragmatic about it. Gunshots fired in urban areas are one
thing that really is the business of the police! There's always some tension
between law and order versus liberty; the trick is to find ways to trade the
latter for the former at as high an exchange rate as possible. This system
strikes me as having a very good exchange rate indeed.

------
hermannj314
$40,000-$60,000 per year per square mile. How many gunshots per capita per
year per square mile do need for that price to make sense as a way to spend
tax dollars?

It seems expensive.

~~~
tptacek
It is a tiny fraction of the cost of police patrols in probably any mid-sized
metro area in the US, and an even tinier fraction of that cost in major
metros.

~~~
swalsh
On the other hand, a full police force can handle more than murder. This
can't. That would be okay if murder was the function of a police force, but
its really just another amongst many responsibilities of theirs.

~~~
tptacek
Are we talking past each other? Note the words "tiny fraction".

------
zheng
I'm not 100% on the laws around this, but if a city was utilizing ShotSpotter,
wouldn't they have to disclose the area(s) they were monitoring?

~~~
Anechoic
My city (Springfield MA) has a shotspotter system, and even though I have
pretty high-up contacts among Springfield PD who know that my interest in the
system is purely academic (I'm an acoustical consultant) they wouldn't reveal
to me any of the transducer locations. In fact just trying to find a picture
of a shotspotter transducer is difficult (the pic in the NYT link is only the
second one I've seen).

~~~
yellowbkpk
The sensors are very easy to spot. They are small, white/pale-grey boxes about
4 inches square by 2 inches deep. They're usually placed on stop light struts
or on free-standing poles by themselves. They're easy to mistake for emergency
vehicle "light changer" systems, but the difference is these are on roads
where there are no stop lights. Also, I've seen clusters of 3 or 4 of them
attached to the same pole that a camera is attached to -- presumably the
camera automatically pans and zooms in on the area as soon as a shot is heard.

~~~
Anechoic
_They are small, white/pale-grey boxes about 4 inches square by 2 inches
deep._

Are you sure about that? That doesn't jibe with the picture I've seen
(<http://i.imgur.com/XBevy.jpg>) and doesn't sound optimal for an acoustic
transducer.

~~~
justinph
I'm 99.9% sure that is NOT a shot spotter. We have Shotspotter in some areas
Minneapolis, as well as city-wide wifi. Those little cans are all over the
place and are part of the WiFi System. I took a photo of one just down the
street from my house: <http://i.imgur.com/OqYEA.jpg>

~~~
jauer
The can looks like a BelAir Networks BelAir200 WiFi Node.

------
mcantelon
>The detection system, which triangulates sound picked up by acoustic sensors
placed on buildings, utility poles and other structures, is part of a wave of
technological advances — among them, license plate scanners, body cameras,
Global Positioning System trackers and hand-held fingerprint identifiers

This technology also happens to be very useful for domestic counter-
insurgence, something of interest to an economically polarized state during a
time of economic transformation.

~~~
cperciva
No, it really isn't. The first step in any insurgency is to compromise
intelligence and surveillance systems, and these sensors are very fragile
sitting ducks.

~~~
Daniel_Newby
Insurgents do not attack prepositioned listening posts. Their tools are
randomness and radio silence.

------
danielharan
I wonder if this could also detect car crashes?

~~~
Gustomaximus
It is a fairly distinct sound. You could probably scale this out to a bunch of
other uses. Detect for; cries for help, cars doing burnouts or loud parties at
inappropriate hours. It would combine really well with CCTV if it could alert
an operator to look in the area of a sound rather than have to send a patrol
out for minor things.

------
DigitalSea
The movie Minority Report is starting to look a hell of a lot more real. I
didn't even know this technology existed, it's awesome but at the same time
scary. I wonder what other technologies are out there like this nobody really
hears about?

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tocomment
I've always wondered if a similar system could be developed to monitor and
locate the sound of windows being broken?

You could have one in every neighborhood. It might also be good in parking
lots/garages.

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phreeza
Another interesting application of this (which I believe is being done) is
sniper spotting in warzones.

~~~
jauer
I've heard of it being mounted on humvees. This article says there are hand-
held versions as well: [http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-
shotspotter-sn...](http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/scaneagle-shotspotter-
sniper-spotter-02986/)

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jrockway
They have to replay the sound because the gunshots are indistinguishable from
the sound that lady's bones make when she contorts herself to sit at the
terminal. (Look at her arm.) What an ergonomic nightmare.

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gonzo
phased arrays of microphones: the future is now

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lhnn
Time to hack it: Drive around with a 1963 Oldsmobile and get pulled over
immediately.

