
A Billion Surveillance Cameras Forecast to Be Watching Within Two Years - aerophilic
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-billion-surveillance-cameras-forecast-to-be-watching-within-two-years-11575565402
======
badrabbit
Guys, here's a wild idea: let's have more cameras owned by individuals which
will be used to track specifically politicians and law enforcement officials.
Use facial recognition and gait analysis to identify them and analyze their
mood,associations,behaviors,etc... Use high DPI long range cams where
possible. Ask people to share their ring,etc...

I just don't know how to scare society enough. Maybe use this techs explicitly
against specific demographics. Abuse it against democrats and republicans.
Track and publish analysis of every trump supporter, bernie sanders
supporter,minorities, I don't know just hit everyones sensitive sweet spots to
show them "we can do this legally!!" Because the people that will profit from
this will certainly not make their practice public enough to be visible by
lawmakers and society at large.

The tech is moving magnitudes faster than the law.

Essentially use it against them in a very hostile way to force them to take
this seriously.

~~~
ramshorns
As a side effect this might cause people who care about privacy to never run
for office.

~~~
petre
If you care about privacy you don't run for office anyway. Nosy journalists
and opponents will look into your history and watch your every move once you
do.

------
alexcnwy
I gave a talk on "Deep Neural Networks for Video Applications" at the GDG
DevFest conference last weekend [1]. It's crazy how powerful computer vision
is and how relatively easy it is to apply to video streams. It's not perfect
but you can absolutely replace a human watching video in most situations / use
cases, for example:

* identifying vehicles & reading license plates * identifying people and tracking them across cameras * identifying products on the back of trucks * counting people in queues or getting in/out of vehicles / stores * detecting suspicious activity / shoplifting

Generally you don't even need to completely eliminate humans watching footage,
you can just present the human with cases detected by the object and let the
human decide whether it's a true positive / what to do.

It's scary but useful technology because there's no way humans can watch all
the footage being produced by a billion cameras...

[1] [https://speakerdeck.com/alxcnwy/gdg-devfest-2019-deep-
neural...](https://speakerdeck.com/alxcnwy/gdg-devfest-2019-deep-neural-
networks-for-video-applications)

~~~
boiler_up800
I disagree that identifying people and tracking them across cameras works
well. If you have high res cameras and facial recognition then maybe.

~~~
alexcnwy
Yeah sufficient resolution is definitely an issue.

I'm not suggesting you can use models in all situations or an all current
setups, just that it's possible (and surprisingly easy) to use models to
automate a lot of analysis on video.

A lot of current commodity $100 cameras are good enough resolution for many
use cases but of course you do need sufficiently high res video and good
enough lighting conditions.

You also don't necessarily need to do facial recognition to track people. I'm
nervous of the privacy implications of all this surveillance tech but it's
possible to do useful tracking (e.g. I've worked on a project counting people
to prevent over-filling busses which is a big issue in Africa) without needing
to use facial recognition. In the counting case, you don't need to recognize
people to count them and can do edge computing on quite low resolution video
so that the raw footage never leaves the device (only computed count
statistics).

------
jonny383
On the subject of tracking, does anybody know of any current -on-the-market-
security cameras that also do passive air / radio sniffing on things like WiFi
and Bluetooth?

Imagine an appliance brick and mortar shop that gives users free WiFi. In the
middle of the night, masked intruders burgle the place and steal $50,000 worth
of goods. In addition to logging the (fairly useless) footage of masked people
stealing stuff in the dark, the system also recorded some Bluetooth / WiFi
beacons. If sufficient "fingerprinting" information can be collected from this
data, it could become possible to look backwards for clues to who these users
were in earlier collected data (say for example, when the assailants had
previously scouted the store during the daytime making a plan).

~~~
EternalAugust
Well, you can sniff wifi with any network card and driver that support
promiscuous mode for the wireless standard you're interested in. For
bluetooth, I have used the Ubertooth One [1]. Unfortunately the range is
pretty short with this device... Radio sniffing in general is done with
software defined radio (SDR). Three pieces of hardware I have used for this
and can recommend are the RTL2832U [2] (ultra cheap, can honestly say its some
of the most fun I've ever had for 20 bucks), HackRF One [3], and the USRP B200
[4]. I like using GNU Radio for signal processing.

I mention these because this type of equipment is very easy to acquire and
that, even if there are no companies out there currently offering what you're
suggesting, doing this type of radio surveillance (DIY or otherwise) would be
fairly easy. Heck, you can even do really high res Van Eck phreaking with the
USRP B200 quite easily [5]. You could look at the criminal's twitter feed if
he was scrolling through it. :P

[1]
[https://greatscottgadgets.com/ubertoothone/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/ubertoothone/)

[2] [https://www.rtl-sdr.com/](https://www.rtl-sdr.com/)

[3]
[https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/](https://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/one/)

[4] [https://www.ettus.com/all-products/UB200-KIT/](https://www.ettus.com/all-
products/UB200-KIT/)

[5]
[https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR](https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR)

Edit: grammar & wording

~~~
EternalAugust
Replying to myself because I thought I should add that in no way do I think it
would be ethical to use or building such a surveillance system. Especially one
that employs Van Eck phreaking.

------
SkyMarshal
I've come to accept the notion of no privacy in public spaces, as long as
individuals retain the right to surveil everything too, and to publicly
release our videos about police misbehavior and everything else we catch on
camera.

The balance of surveillance power between government, corporations, and the
public must be maintained.

~~~
chaps
Yes, however.. the sad, frustrating and unfortunate thing is that police
agencies 1. don't maintain their records very well and 2. police agencies use
tons of tactics to prevent the public from getting access to its records. So
the public's access to use police agencies' own self-monitoring to create
conditions of somewhat reciprocal privacy is stymied by intentional
resistance. Often times the only way forward is through very time consuming
law suits.

That said, if you want to know how to help out, you can start by submitting
public records requests for information on your local law enforcement agency.
There's so much to do!

~~~
SkyMarshal
What I meant is that an individual's ability to use their own portable camera
(in phones, etc) to film anything happening in public spaces, including police
misconduct, should never be infringed or made illegal.

That's the ultimate against counter police misconduct 1) happening and 2)
being hidden/obscured/obstructed by police agencies as you describe.

~~~
kyuudou
>to film anything happening in public spaces,

I was tracking the progress of some activists who decided to action in this
respect, Peaceful Streets Project
([http://peacefulstreets.com/](http://peacefulstreets.com/)), in Austin a few
years back. The police started getting super pissed at all these people
filming them while doing arrests in public to ensure proper procedure.

At some point the police came up with some ordinance saying you had to be 50
feet or some other ridiculous distance away from an officer engaged in duty, I
think.

Anyway perhaps some of you can stop talking theory and take action like the
PSP has done. Be forewarned that getting on the police's radar is not going to
be fun, depending how high they are on the thuggish crony scale. You might
even be arrested for interfering with an officer's duties and find yourself in
a byzantine justice system that will make you hate it forever.

I think the efforts of the PSP did eventually result in the Austin PD wearing
bodycams so that all their activity on the clock is recorded. There's a little
cottage industry in making such wearable devices such that they hold up to the
scrutiny of chain-of-custody and other legal concepts behind securing evidence
and all that jazz.

If enough people do it, it can work. The hard part is getting to that tipping
point to convince enough people to do it without real fear of reprisal or
complicating their lives.

~~~
SkyMarshal
That's excellent, thanks for the link. It's great when citizen surveillance
results in police wearing bodycams. It both protects the police from false
accusations and protects citizens from misconduct. Of course that assumes, as
you point out, the chain-of-custody and securing evidence are effectively
addressed, but overall it's a net improvement.

------
jointpdf
So I’ve had this (perhaps naive and not novel?) idea for a while and am
curious what people think. What if it were required by law that all
surveillance video is “anonymized” in real-time via computer vision software?
In other words, use an image segmentation model like Mask R-CNN to cut out or
blur each person appearing in frame. Violent/criminal behavior can still be
detected in real-time either via software or by human operators (you don’t
need to see someone’s face or skin color to determine if they’re e.g.
committing a violent act).

If a crime is committed and the video is needed as evidence or for identifying
the person(s), then the archived video can be “unmasked” via court order or
other process. There is some precedent for this, relating to when US citizens
incidentally appear in foreign phone calls collected by intelligence agencies
(see:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligen...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmasking_by_U.S._intelligence_agencies)).

This way, there is a reasonable level of privacy preservation (=anxiety
reduction) for people innocently going about their lives. It also limits
opportunities for abuse, like stalking and discrimination. The effectiveness
of surveillance systems as a crime deterrent and source of evidence is still
maintained under this policy. That is, it’s basically a Pareto improvement—no
one is made worse off, while many are better off.

~~~
rapnie
Check DeepPrivacy, a project that does automatic face anonymization.

[https://github.com/hukkelas/DeepPrivacy](https://github.com/hukkelas/DeepPrivacy)

------
mindfulhack
I think people's freedoms and rights are going to live on through social and
legal regulation, not banning or countering surveillance technology itself.

E.g. with an existing technology known as firearms, it's not socially 'OK' or
legal to just go up and randomly shoot someone with such technology, but
technically you could do it, if you really wanted. There's consequences to it
though.

So we need consequences for violating people's privacy or using their
information in a way that is abusive or unfair to their human rights.

Radical transparency of disclosure such as what insurance companies know about
you that they feed into their business will have to be legally mandated. (How
about an open-source algorithm too?) We will need new frameworks by which data
collected on you and used against you MUST be disclosed, because otherwise it
could be total abuse and fake. We know China is already in that territory.

The world of deepfakes is going to make 'deniability' a major opposing force
of surveillance as well.

We have an interesting future ahead of us.

~~~
mesofile
What would be great is if judiciaries only treated video as admissible if it
was cryptographically watermarked in tandem with a globally distributed
blockchain-style rolling checksum, to resist tampering (deepfakes or just
plain old timecode manipulation). Combine that with a licensing scheme, as a
condition of using the global checksum service, that guaranteed by law access
to video by any party captured on said video — i.e. scenes & events in public
areas would be required to be made available to members of the public, on
request; or video of private areas would still have to be shared with any
subjects that it captured, if it were to be introduced as evidence.

~~~
Ajedi32
Timestamping doesn't prevent fakes, it just means you have to create the fakes
ahead of time instead of being able to generate them retroactively.

------
travisgriggs
I'm actually OK with this future. I think it's inevitable. But what to me is
the choice of whether the cameras watch everyone, or just certain classes of
someone.

There was a scifi novel many years ago, forget the name, where everyone's
glasses were constantly live feeds. The author posited that crime went down,
but also transparency amongst the powerful/elite climbed as well.

~~~
aeternum
The powerful/elite can simply avoid public places and deal behind closed
doors. Seems unlikely that it will increase transparency amongst that group.

------
wallflower
> He was holding a small device in his hand, the size and shape of a lollipop.

"This is a video camera, and this is the precise model that's getting this
incredible image quality. Image quality that holds up to this kind of
magnification. So that's the first great thing. We can now get high-def-
quality resolution in a camera the size of a thumb." ...

"But for now, let's go back to the places in the world where we most need
transparency and so rarely have it. Here's a medley of locations around the
world where we've placed cameras. Now imagine the impact these cameras would
have had in the past, and will have in the future, if similar events
transpire. Here's fifty cameras in Tiananmen Square." ...

"There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to
be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear
witness." ...

ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN

-From "The Circle" by David Eggers

------
Taniwha
Great news for me! here in NZ art performance of any kind is protected and may
not be recorded without an appropriate license.

I've publicly declared the rest of my life to be "performance art" and look
forward to a continuing stream of license income from people who have
illegally recorded my performance without permission .....

------
annoyingnoob
Will it look like this?

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Building...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Building_covered_in_eyes_in_Barcelona%2C_Spain.jpg)

------
bryanrasmussen
So the number of cameras will increase 30% by the end of 2021, the rate of
population growth is 1.08%. if we can keep this up it won't be long before we
have as many cameras as people, however, and here's the kicker, since the
cameras are tied to locations and not to people it means that not every person
will be under constant surveillance!

Surely some intrepid politician will see how unsustainable and just plain
wasteful such a situation is and, in cooperation with some tech company, push
for the development of some sort of mobile monitoring solution tied to every
human being.

~~~
marmaduke
> mobile monitoring solution tied to every human being

Like a, um, handheld, networked device required for modern lifestyle and work,
backed by major corporations like Google and Apple?

~~~
bryanrasmussen
hey, that's a great idea! if only every one had one of those we would be well
on our way to a more sustainable surveillance state!

------
ErikAugust
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/589](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/589)

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/FFpgV](http://archive.is/FFpgV)

------
tehjoker
Damn, when I read 1984 I was like what a sweet tech setup Winston has in his
pad. What a modern city!

So blessed to be living in an era of unimpeded technology deployed for our
benefit.

------
peter303
Who will interpret the 9 trillion hours of resulting video then? Every person
in the world would have to spending three work shifts a week watching and
evaluating it.

~~~
nitwit005
Many (most?) of the cameras out there only have the recordings looked at if a
crime is reported, some motion sensor is tripped, or some other condition.

A friend of mine opened a business, and he was required to have a security
camera to make things convenient for the police. The law specified VHS as no
one had bothered to update it, but he just burned them a DVD the one time they
asked for a recording.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
These are not a real problem. The bigger threat is automated facial
recognition throwing false positives and having swat teams mow down innocent
people because a computer said they were criminals.

~~~
Scoundreller
Who needs to mow them down? Getting denied a credit card, product returns,
plane tickets or FAANG accounts will be bad enough, but permitted because
“nobody has a reasonable expectation of those”.

------
hjkhtroeiupwq
It's inevitable that in 20 years every living person on this planet will have
it's location tracked in real-time.

All kinds of crime will become impossible. Today the police doesn't have
resources to spend on stolen packages, bikes or small time muggings.

But with permanent tracking and AI it will be trivial to backtrack any
interaction.

And it will be impossible to disable the tracking. Even if you don't have any
tracking on you, unless you are literally invisible you'll be tracked through
millions of other peoples cameras each day.

Something like Google Street View, but in real time will also exist.

~~~
thephyber
> All kinds of crime will become impossible

This will never be the case.

The constraints are currently on the resources available for police to _find_
the suspect. While prolific surveillance will make finding the X "persons of
interest" easier + faster + more reliable, the constraint would then be on
identifying other evidence and the court/prosecutor system to process plea
bargaining and/or jury trials.

Additionally, jails and the resources concerned with jailing are very
expensive (VERY large outlays and high upkeep) in the current high-cash-bail
environment.

~~~
hjkhtroeiupwq
You can think of various ways to fast track justice for small crimes, similar
to small claims court. You don't need a jury trial for an obvious bike theft.

But you don't even need to get to this stage. If you have 99% conviction rate,
people will just stop doing crime, starting with the ones for which crime was
just a marginal thing anyway (maybe even for the adrenaline rush), and as a
result you'll have even fewer crimes to prosecute. It's a positive feed-back
loop.

And you don't need to put people in prison. Something like China's social
credit is coming everywhere. Steal a bike, you pay double for everything.

~~~
heavyset_go
> If you have 99% conviction rate, people will just stop doing crime

You should take a look at DAs conviction rates sometime. Federal conviction
rates are 99.8% in the US.

~~~
larnmar
I’m not sure what the denominator is there, but it’s not all crimes committed.

~~~
heavyset_go
It's all criminal cases that went before a judge.

------
gaahrdner
Nobody can watch all these, I don't get it.

~~~
colecut
VideoAI, give me the names of every face seen within X blocks of [riot,
business, person of interest's home] between Y time and Z time.

~~~
tehlike
Proximityai, give me the names of people who were in the x blocks between y
and z time using WiFi and cell connectivity.

~~~
AndrewBissell
At least with Proximityai, you don't show up if you leave your cell phone at
home when you go to a protest.

