
Atlas of Surveillance - anigbrowl
https://atlasofsurveillance.org/
======
srameshc
> Police Department signed an agreement with Amazon's home surveillance
> equipment company, Ring, in 2019 to gain special access to the company's
> Neighbors app

this is the most scary part.

~~~
peacelilly
We really need these things to be Closed Circuit by law. Want the data? Get a
warrant and seize the device physically. Centralized databases of surveillance
information needs to be outlawed criminally.

~~~
manigandham
You can buy closed circuit cameras for the past 40 years. People buy Ring to
avoid the in-home infrastructure.

~~~
dredmorbius
Hence, _by law_.

A legal mandate avoids the race-to-the-bottom trend.

~~~
manigandham
What race to the bottom? It’s a choice. People like having choices.

~~~
dredmorbius
When "choice" effectively limits societal options or generates massive
externalities and/or long-term unpredictable impacts, all parties upon whom
the "choice" impacts are not given voice, or choice.

Often commonweal is a better guiding light than "choice".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom)

Sophie Zawistowska was offered a choice. Did her utility benefit by it?

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=DZ9bht5H2p4](https://youtube.com/watch?v=DZ9bht5H2p4)

~~~
manigandham
It's the user's choice to use a cloud-hosted security system. They can weigh
the trade-offs and risks for themselves, same as with any other system.

Whether that data is accessible by law enforcement is a completely separate
issue. A proper solution would be limiting this access and requiring consent
and transparency, not removing infrastructure options because you think you
know better than everyone else about what's best for them.

~~~
dredmorbius
The issue, by virtue of legally allowed warrantless access, is inextricably
conjoined, and the impacts of that choice accrue to not only the
decisionmaker, but to countless others. Your premises are false.

Your proposed (and grossly insufficient) remedy is one form of legal mandate.

I'd strongly commend Shoshana Zuboff, Hanna Arendt, and Paul Baran, amongst
numerous others:

"On the Engineer's Responsibility in Protecting Privacy", Paul Baran, 1968:

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3829.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3829.html)

Another view was expressed by AI pioneer and Nobel Laureate (economics)
Herbert Simon:

 _" The privacy issue has been raised most insistently with respect to the
creation and maintenance of longitudinal data files that assemble information
about persons from a multitude of sources. Files of this kind would be highly
valueable for many kinds of economic and social research, but they are bought
at too high a price if they endanger human freedom or seriously enhance the
opportunities of blackmailers. While such dangers should not be ignored, it
should be noted that the lack of comprehensive data files has never been the
limiting barrier to the suppression of human freedom. The Watergate criminals
made extensive, if unskillful, use of electronics, but no computer played a
role in their conspiracy. The Nazis operated with horrifying effectiveness and
thoroughness without the benefits of any kind of mechanized data processing."_

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7d...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a9e7/33e25ee8f67d5e670b3b7dc4b8c3e00849ae.pdf)

There is, of course, one slight problem with Simon's argument: The Nazis did
make heavy use of mechanised data processing, provided and supported by IBM.
Edwin Black documents this meticulously in his book _IBM and the Holocaust_ :

[https://ibmandtheholocaust.com](https://ibmandtheholocaust.com)

~~~
manigandham
That's a wildly unreasonable stretch and limiting freedom for the claim of
security leads to far worse results.

Infrastructure and third-party vendors need to be managed against risk. This
is no different than using Gmail vs your own hosted email box. Same with a
million other services. Are you claiming that they should all be shutdown now?

Legal issues need to be fixed by legal solutions, not by disallowing the
service from existing.

------
thewebcount
It's really interesting to me that in Los Angeles, we have every technology
except for "Gunshot Detection". Anyone know why? It seems like one of the less
intrusive forms of surveillance. Isn't this the thing that turns a series of
cameras in the direction of a very loud sound? Seems less harmful than
specifically copying down every license plate that drives by an intersection,
or every face that enters a building. (Which isn't to say they should have it,
just that it's an odd omission.)

~~~
kulahan
From what I've read, by itself, it's not a great system. For example, you can
shoot a gun somewhere else to distract officers, and some noises are
misclassified as guns (teaching officers to ignore those alarms, making the
system ineffective).

~~~
Cactus2018
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/shotspotter-
de...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/shotspotter-detection-
system-documents-39000-shooting-incidents-in-the-
district/2013/11/02/055f8e9c-2ab1-11e3-8ade-a1f23cda135e_story.html)

....

Wrapped in a weatherproof container roughly the size of a watermelon, each
ShotSpotter sensor combines microphones, hardware, software and a clock linked
to the Global Positioning System, which uses satellites and radio navigation
to pinpoint precise times and locations.

In the cacophonous urban environment, sensors are calibrated to ignore all
sounds except for those that most closely match the “impulsive” sound of an
explosion, said James Beldock, a senior vice president for ShotSpotter.

“It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that way.”

The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds because it is
directional, meaning that the noise changes its frequency as the bullet moves
through space. A person may hear a gunshot a half-mile away if the gun is
fired toward him. But a person 200 yards away may hear nothing if the gun is
fired away from him.

Once sensors register a potential gunshot, they transmit the data to the
ShotSpotter computer network for analysis. The computer server compares the
time that each sensor logged the sound to calculate the likely location of its
source, a process of triangulation and multilateration.

“That sound will reach a sensor 100 yards away at a different time than it
reaches a sensor 200 yards away,” Beldock explained.

The more sensors that capture the noise, the more accurate the location. A
sound detected by 10 sensors can be located to within two feet, he said.

The computer system also classifies the likely source of the sound based on
its sharpness, frequency and consistency across sensors. This is critical,
because other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and
helicopters — can also trigger the remote sensors.

....

~~~
saghm
> sensors are calibrated to ignore all sounds except for those that most
> closely match the “impulsive” sound of an explosion

> The blast of a gun is different from other explosive sounds

> “It’s a very, very sharp wave,” Beldock said. “No other sound works that
> way.”

> Other impulsive sounds — including fireworks, backfires and helicopters —
> can also trigger the remote sensors

They're calibrated just to hear explosions, and in fact _no other explosive
sound works that way_, but then they're triggered by...helicopters? Which are
not propelled by explosions?

~~~
scarier
For what it's worth, neither bullets nor helicopters are propelled by
explosions. While the distinction is somewhat technical, gunpowder doesn't
explode--it just burns really fast. This is less important for small arms than
for, say, artillery, but being able to control burn rates is critical for the
design of most firearms/cannons and things like solid-fuel rocket motors
(which function as one big propellant grain)--in many of these cases,
detonation would likely prove catastrophic.

All that to say that helicopter blades can create similar pressure waves as
gunshots. Supersonic bullets passing overhead make very distinctive sounds,
but the noise of the gunshot itself is much less unique. I never really got
comfortable living in places with a large number of cars that backfired a lot,
because I couldn't easily tell it apart from gunfire.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>gunpowder doesn't explode

Define "explode".

Any chemical reaction that produces more outputs than inputs by volume can
explode if you trap that pressure.

The flame front on gunpowder isn't fast enough to make a pressure wave that
sounds like a bang if there's nothing to trap the combustion byproducts (like
the space behind a bullet as it travels down the barrel).

You can harmlessly set off gunpowder (old school black powder and equivalents)
as a party trick. Don't try that with Semtex.

I'm not an acoustics expert but I think it's going to be fundamentally very
hard if not impossible to build a shotspotter type system that both works in
an urban environment (where sound bounces off all sorts of things) and doesn't
get a false positive from things like motorcycles backfiring.

------
rshnotsecure
Let us not forget the Netsential leak from #BlueLeaks a few weeks ago.

Netsential.com [1] was a Houston-based software dev, hosting, and cloud
provider. I lived most of my life in Houston, and they are loosely connected
to an old ISP called Texas.net and a more recent data center company called
Data Foundry.

Something like 630+ websites were hosted by Netsential. All of them DHS fusion
centers, multi state intel sharing groups, police training outfits, etc. The
source code leaked as well for all of these websites. Extremely poorly done
ASP.net rigged together "web apps" with CSV files being used for the backend
data tier.

Here is the most fascinating thing. 7 years ago, as part of the Edward Snowden
document dump, a single page screenshot of an list of the Top 16 addresses the
NSA was targeting in North America appeared.

#16 on that list [2], codenamed WAXTITAN, was the IP address 64.9.146.208,
which belonged and belongs to Netsential/YHC Corporation [3].

The question now I think is who in the world are these other 15 IP addresses,
all of which are scattered around typically rural North America?

[1] - netsential.com

[2] -
[https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/...](https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH0133/eab0259d.dir/doc.pdf)

[3] - [https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at-
noon-01-waxtitan/](https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at-noon-01-waxtitan/)

~~~
justanotheranon
that is an incredible connection. thank you for sharing. im glad im not the
only one who has read most of the Snowden leaks, and whenever anything new
happens like a big hack or leak, i go back and search the Snowden files to see
if there are any connections.

in that list of program names, i remember seeing WILDCHOCOBO and DARKTHUNDER
in other Snowden files.

here is WILDCHOCOBO

[https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/SPINALTAPMakingPassive...](https://search.edwardsnowden.com/docs/SPINALTAPMakingPassiveSexyforGenerationCyber2015-01-17_nsadocs_snowden_doc)

page 19 of that is very very interesting. it lists around 100 NSA programs
that are all part of some kind of global passive CNE implanted on hundreds of
servers that provides ingest/exfil to feed back home into XKEYSCORE.

DARKTHUNDER is also on there.

the odd thing is that slidedeck is about NSA program JOLLYROGER tracking SD
cards via their unique hardware volume IDs.

why would NSA TAO be hacking MSPs like Netsential at all? why is NSA spying on
Fusion Centers, who get their reports from FBI, who themselves got the data to
write the reports from NSA SIGINT? why is NSA spying on regional and local Law
Enforcement further down the food chain? NSA already has that data. NSA
wouldnt even need to use TAO and CNE to collect data from Netsentia. They
could just ask for the data.

my best guess is it's some kind of Inside Threat monitoring system. TAO hacks
into those systems to install CNE implants that watch for SD cards being
inserted, to detect rogue Fusion Center and LE personnel who are bulk stealing
files by copying them onto SD cards.

but that seems like a really dumb thing to do. why not just disable the SD
card readers and/or remove the hardware? a PC in a Fusion Center shouldnt even
have an SD card reader.

ironic, since Snowden roughly implied in his recent autobiography that the way
he stole millions of NSA's top secret files was by sneaker net'ing them home
using SD cards.

LOL NSA has been screwing up its defense against SD cards for at least a
decade and that screw up is what made Snowden possible.

i bet dozens of Russian and Chinese and Israeli moles have stolen far more
than Snowden ever took from NSA using

~~~
rshnotsecure
My concern is similar to yours. By hacking and subverting everything, the NSA
paved the way / "presented a picture of what was possible" to rogue foreign
governments. The US was unprepared for this, and once it was realized, we
couldn't even morally accuse them of wrong due to NSA past...

I think US agencies have sort of realized this mistake now, and actually for
the last couple of years. The former NSA directors have said some revealing
comments that reflect pretty authentic looking doubt, shame, and guilt over
the various pathways programs took (with the exception of perhaps Admiral John
Poindexter).

Perhaps agencies like the DHS, which when it was created was the largest
reorganization of government since the Department of Defense was created in
1947, have not yet learned...

------
lukejduncan
And this is just state surveillance. There’s a guy who’s building a private
surveillance network in San Francisco, with the buy in of the District
Attorney and local police departments, and a goal of complete surveillance of
city streets.

[https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.c...](https://www-
nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-
surveillance-san-francisco.amp.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
De-AMPlified: [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/technology/britain-
survei...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/technology/britain-surveillance-
privacy.html)

------
ratherbefuddled
Ironic that the application won't load in Firefox without disabling Enhanced
Tracking Protection because it relies on third party access to storage.

~~~
nabilhat
I just loaded the map by itself in its own tab [0].

I think it just wasn't tested very well in Firefox. The third party map is
blanking out for me at widths over 2048 pixels in a Firefox window. That's
what I get for using an ultrawide monitor, I guess.

[0]
[https://mediaprogram.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactiv...](https://mediaprogram.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/interactivelegend/index.html?appid=adab41ac3fb049c18898bd1e04ea9368)

------
CapitalistCartr
There is no surveillance tech anyone can invent that won't be used at home
against the domestic populace. And I do mean against. Parallel construction
has become just another tool in the arsenal of control.

~~~
dllthomas
We really need to start calling "parallel construction" what it is: willful,
premeditated perjury.

~~~
pc86
Genuinely curious, in what context is it perjury? My understanding of parallel
construction is:

1\. Officer receives information $A through inadmissible means (which may be
illegal, but not necessarily)

2\. With information $A, officer is able to "prove" that a suspect perpetrated
a given crime

3\. Officer pieces together proof from possible unrelated, but admissible
evidence - $B and $C, let's say.

4\. And this is the part where I don't know that perjury is what we're talking
about: Officer simply testifies to the truth of $B and $C, and that the
suspect committed the crime in question.

~~~
ajsnigrutin
The problem is, that they lied about how they got te evidence.

Eg, they plant a hidden camera in your house, see you packing drugs and puting
them in your car in your own garage, and driving away. Since they got the info
that you had the drugs from illegally set cameras, they can't just stop and
search your car, but they can "randomly" stop you for a traffic check, and
just "randomly" have a drug sniffing dog present, which finds the drugs in
your car.

If the judges let this go through, the police would use more illegal methods
(illegal searches, etc.) to gather data, then just "randomly" detect crime,
and then the state would win cases.... and we (the people) don't want that.
That's why, if you prove, that they knew the drugs were there from an illegal
source of information, everything derived from that illegal source should be
dropped as a illegally obtained evidence, to disincentivise the use of illegal
methods.

Basically, the officer saying they randomly stopped you, would be a lie
(=perjury), because they stopped you due their illegal cameras.

~~~
_ah
This already happens. I once had a conversation with a Homeland Security
officer at a backyard BBQ, and he said:

 _" When you see on the news that Police randomly stopped a car and discovered
a huge cache of drugs... you don't actually think that's random, do you?"_

TBH I had never thought about it before but now I recognize this pattern
everywhere.

~~~
bonestamp2
Yes, it already happens and that's why it's a problem. If they discovered that
they should "randomly" pull over that vehicle through evidence that was
gathered illegally, then it should also be considered a violation of the 4th
amendment... which is likely why the EFF has launched this project.

~~~
dllthomas
It would be interesting - and likely amusing - to extrapolate how many people
_must_ be driving around with huge caches of drugs, based on an assumption
that purportedly unrelated traffic stops (or equivalent) were in fact random
samples.

~~~
stanfordkid
I really do think a "google maps" for police activity needs to be created --
including every single arrest, prosecution , subsequent legal claim... you
should be able to rate police officers like restaurants on Yelp

~~~
pc86
My local courthouse _is_ rated on Yelp. In a shocking turn of events nobody
could have ever predicted, it has 1 star.

------
frequentnapper
Stuff like this gives me some hope. Where states like China have complete
surveillance and control over their citizens, and that's where other fascist
states seem to be headed, at least in western countries we are having these
debates. And even though it seems like an ever-losing battle, my hope is that
we can all be educated enough and band together on things that unite us to
fight back against surveillance society controlled and abused by the powerful
few.

~~~
ssss11
Yeah but doesn’t it feel like a race to the bottom? I mean, it feels like our
politicians think country X is doing it so we (western democracy) better too,
or risk losing global position in military/economy/etc

~~~
mathieubordere
What's the alternative? As an informed civilian you cannot just let it happen
imo.

------
dannyobrien
The traditional reminder that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which built
this atlas, is only able to do do thanks to the donations of individuals like
you:

[https://eff.org/30](https://eff.org/30)

------
jimmySixDOF
While there is a listing for Drones, I think they may need to add a category
for when they are deployed in a Pervasive Wide Area mode like as in "Eyes in
the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All" [1] as
trialed in Baltimore [2] sometime back. Who knows what the current state of
play is for this?

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40796190-eyes-in-the-
sky](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40796190-eyes-in-the-sky)

[2]
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/milit...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/military-
style-surveillance-air-often-legal/595063/)

------
facelessID
In Beverly Hills, there's some push for futuristic tech with autonomous cars
and facial recognition. My point is, the people that participate in the local
government and police measures are very average. Any smart, capable person
could get involved and help develop better programs.

However, because law enforcement and wealth inequality is what it is, I'm
somewhat open to surveillance system in certain areas of BH that are high risk
targets. I hope these systems aren't used against regular residents and only
actual threats. But, of course, that's a fallacy.

------
chaostheory
Surveillance just going to get worse in the US Why?

There has been a police shortage since the early 2010's where most departments
only had a 1/3 of the manpower that was needed. Now with public sentiment
against the police, I'm sure the police shortages will increase, eventually
forcing the government to rely on more surveillance, AI, and robotics to fill
the gap.

~~~
pdelbarba
Not if they have no funding for those things...

~~~
chaostheory
They are less expensive than people, and they will get funding for those
things once crime hits a threshold.

------
blintz
Anyone notice that the facial recognition points north of SF are errors? They
contain information about programs in Nebraska and Florida. I wonder what led
to the error and if there are more.

------
netcan
Does anyone know what's going on in florida with face recognition?

~~~
AWildC182
Reading through a couple of the descriptions it looks like they have a state-
wide database for searching face images against FL driver's licence photos.
Since all the departments are signed onto the system, they all get the symbol
but there may be other reasons/more invasive systems mixed in with the clutter
so take that for what it's worth.

~~~
richierich93
I live over in West Palm Beach / Palm Beach. The security is nuts. Cameras and
high gain antennas all over.

------
opless
Why is there nothing in the UK or EU ?

~~~
kongtse
if you read it right, it's all in the construction. so you or better everyone
should share this page, as well as if you want to contribute something,
register there
[https://atlasofsurveillance.org/collaborate](https://atlasofsurveillance.org/collaborate)

[https://supporters.eff.org/collaborate-atlas-
surveillance](https://supporters.eff.org/collaborate-atlas-surveillance)

so that the whole thing can also be further developed worldwide

------
Kerrick
It maps the license plate readers of the Poplar Bluff, MO police department
onto Buffalo, MO.

------
jp0d
This only has USA data.

------
qdiencdxqd
Phew, glad to see Australia has no surveillance apparatus!

~~~
Perenti
Except of course the Ipswich Mall, Brunswick St in Fortitude Valley, and the
Queen Street Mall in Brisbane CBD. That's that I know of.

~~~
suizi
The visible is usually the tip of the iceberg.

------
D_B_Koopa
the UX of this isn't great.

~~~
skedaddle
How so?

