
The LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks - whbk
http://www.laweekly.com/los-angeles/forget-the-nsa-la-cops-spy-on-millions-of-innocent-folks/Content?oid=4473467
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alcari
No, let's not "forget" about the NSA. Other groups may be doing bad things
too, but that doesn't diminish the badness of the bad things done by the NSA
(or anyone else).

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walshemj
True but Bruce Scheiers panglosian suggestion of just handing over the
internal monitoring to the FBI aka the cops is just going to make things
worse.

Remberer what the FBI has done in the past (under hoover) compared to what the
NSA has not done.

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LeeHunter
Some of this is disturbing and some is not. I don't know why the article makes
a big deal out of predictive policing and it's roots in counter-insurgency.
Putting police officers where crime is likely to happen is just good
management. More power to them. I could care less whether the software was
developed for Fallujah. Why would you want to put police resources where
they're not needed?

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omarforgotpwd
Haha, this is funny. I'm one of the co-founders of PredPol, the startup that
makes the predictive policing software LA uses. I think it's a stretch to call
anything I wrote in my dorm military grade, but I suppose I'll take that as a
compliment. For the record, the DoD called us once asking if some of the
models we use to predict crime could be used to predict IED locations, but
nothing major ever came of it as far as I know. Also, I live in Santa Clara
not Fallujah.

P.S. PredPol predicts crime using only the time, place, and type of past
crimes using some simple statistical models. All that is public information
for municipalities in the US.

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EGreg
Can you back this up with some links please?

And anyway, even if the LAPD may not be using anything more sophisticated than
PredPol with growing their CCTV array, they will in the future. Think of it
like this: right now the data is stored. In 5-10 years it will be cross
correlated and profiles will be built on everybody. Thanks to the efficiency,
the definition of crime will be expanded. Look at Singapore's law against gum
wrappers. Look at local laws against homeless blankets. More to the point -
the sites you surf can be cross correlated with the places you visit to
indicate a reasonable belief that you may harm your kids and they will be
taken away after you've been aubpoenaed in court.

20-30 years from now: court cases initiated by computer and suggested to the
DA, based on cross correlated databases. Theories built and presented against
you by the eloquent lawyer, with the jury thinking, "yeah this cant be all a
coincidence." And a vastly expanded private prison complex.

All in all maybe not a bad thing, but people arent used to living like robots.

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rgbrenner
Not only is omarforgotpwd right, but the article is completely wrong with
regard to predictive policing. It was invented by the LAPD w/ the help UCLA
researchers in 2008. It is not the result of military research, and was not
used by the military until recently. LAPD has repeatedly been credited with it
since 2008.. and I was not able to find a single link that backed up the
article's claim that it came from the military.

And the program is far from futuristic. Basically, if a certain type of crime
has happened in an area recently, the LAPD patrols the area more often. Big
deal.

Here's a summary from the FBI:

[http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-
enforceme...](http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-
bulletin/2013/April/predictive-policing-using-technology-to-reduce-crime)

And here's a longer article about it (including the history) from RAND:

[https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/243830.pdf](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/243830.pdf)

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perlpimp
this is creepy, while stopping at a gas station I have noticed a camera
scanning customers and their cars in a very robotic way - possibility being
scanning faces and car plates.

Where does it end, when and how? Is it a felony to destroy devices that spy on
me for which I didn't authorize the gathering of intelligence on me?

I am sorry but all this is really gets under my skin. my 2c.

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icantthinkofone
I own some restaurants. We have cameras, too. No, they don't scan customers
and cars in any way. You're implying those cameras are owned by the police.
You're making stuff up.

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bediger4000
I've seen steerable cameras in shopping mall parking lots follow shapely,
fashionably dressed young women. Also, some cities have deals where the police
(or "Public Safety") department monitors cameras that private sector entities
buy and install.

I believe that person, in short.

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icantthinkofone
And, despite that (if it were true), most do not. Crossing the line of using
police in private sector situations is possible because the private company
asked them to, such as in large shopping malls.

In any case, it still does not mean it's every camera system throughout the
world which would, again, be a false statement.

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wellboy
A bit of a linkbait, since the NSA surveillance covers probably 3 billion
people at all times and the LAPD covers L.A. with maybe 5 million people.

So the capabilities of the NSA are around 1,000 times bigger than the
capabilities of the LAPD.

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TeMPOraL
Capabilities of LAPD are probably a _subset_ of NSA's - the latter can
probably pull up on demand every information the former gathered.

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atmosx
> LAPD's mild-sounding "predictive policing" technique, introduced by former
> Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, is
> actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S.
> military, based on "insurgent" activity in Iraq and civilian casualty
> patterns in Afghanistan.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure
about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein

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mindcrime
"Hackers of the world, unite".

Seriously, it's time the resistance starts to coalesce a bit, and hackers get
to work mitigating the damage that this stuff does. Hack the facial
recognition cameras and scramble the data so they don't recognize a damn
thing... hack the license plate database and and change every recognized plate
number out for a random number.

Better yet, let's develop technological means to counter this crap. Treat it
as damage and route around it, to use an analogy. Let's create wearable
devices that blur your face out of video feeds, or a license plate frame that
can keep your tag from being read, etc.

The political system has failed us and it's now a technological arms race. And
while the NSA may hoover up a lot of the best mathematicians, I'd still wager
that there are more smart hackers who don't work for the govt. than ones who
do.

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Joeboy
"Forget the NSA" is taking it a bit far, but I think we should not forget that
there are other threats to our privacy. In particular we should not obsess
about whether software is "NSA-proof", or imagine that the problem would go
away if the NSA's activities were somehow curtailed.

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EGreg
Let's skip 10-20 years ahead, ok? The march of technology cannot be stopped.
I've always said that terrorism is a problem of technology. Now we see the
surveillance state is as well.

The truth is that vast troves of data on people are any organization's crack,
whether that organization is an a corporation, a government agency, or a local
law enforcement agency.

Good luck taking the crack away. If you think the war on drugs has been
ineffective, wait until you try making organizations quit as others are
smoking up.

Look around, Hacker News. Embrace the inexorable march of technology. It is
our time to disrupt these products with new ones and turn it for good, but
wishing it would all stop is more suited to luddites.

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Aoyagi
This reminds me (and I apologize for the OT), I know Singapore also relies
heavily on camera surveillance, but is it known whether they then process the
data in a similar (i.e. harvest as much as they can) way to LAPD? Are there
any known incidents of abuse of that system? Again, sorry about the OT, but
the city state intrigues me greatly.

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dhughes
How much of this and the NSA are due to the "gee whiz" effect as I call it?
These organizations have cool new technology so they want to use it for no
other reason than that.

It's like the HTML blink tag it was annoying and pretty much useless but just
because it existed people used it.

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coldtea
Read this scholarly work for an ever more disturbing description of changes
and trends in LA:

[http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-
Angeles/...](http://www.amazon.com/City-Quartz-Excavating-Future-
Angeles/dp/0679738061)

