A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle

> Each surveillance technology in our field guide includes the following categories to help you “spot” surveillance technology in the wild

One shouldn't trust their eyes alone to spot all the hidden cameras that private property owners love to have covering the streets. For example, it took me months to realize that a tenant in my own building has three cameras pointed down from the windows of their unit and can track my every coming and going if they so wish, and that's an environment I have my eyes on every single day.

I have a modified Olympus OM-D E-M5Ⅱ MFT camera body that I picked up on a whim because it came with a bunch of lenses and batteries and other things I wanted to use with my PEN-F, and it turned out to be amazing for spotting hidden surveillance cameras.

The way it works is that the underlying camera sensor can see IR by design, and an IR-cut filter is installed over it to restrict it to the visible spectrum for photography. The mod simply opens up the camera body and removes that part. Surveillance cameras in dark rooms (or at night on the street) then show up as bright spots, because the modified body can see the ring of IR LEDs they use to illuminate dark scenes for night surveillance.

I don't have any surveillance-spotting images to share, because I usually only do that via the viewfinder live preview (because tbh a photo of an all-black room with a single bright IR blob isn't interesting enough to shoot), but for example here is my IR photo of the Windows XP “Bliss” hill (near the Sonoma/Napa border) both as-shot and after channel mixing:

- https://i.ibb.co/23t4HdrZ/P5160220-1.jpg

- https://i.ibb.co/1Yw8RFLS/P5160220-2.jpg

Not affiliated with and have never purchased from this store, but here are bodies converted for every system: https://www.lifepixel.com/product-category/converted-cameras

I wonder what they mean by this?

> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”

The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.

Still somehow was "impossible" for the Seattle police to recover security camera footage of my bike being stolen under the light rail station security camera.

There are too many technical inaccuracies in this to take it serious (or to try and address them all here). Directionally it is fairly accurate, but the author clearly has very little knowledge of surveillance cameras, their capabilities, or even broadly how to identify ALPR vs. traffic control cameras (and similar nuances).

Lots of po-mo art-school language on this site about “encoding ways of seeing” and “gazes.”

The content itself is somewhat interesting but imo plain language would be more accessible.

This is out of date, Amazon Go has shut down. RIP to some really cool tech.

> A probe packet contains the MAC address as well as the list of all the past Wi-fi networks that your device has tried to join before, which can reveal a lot about you!

Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.

  Flat black circles on top of traffic signal control boxes, which are large, gray or painted metal boxes, typically found at street corners.

  The Acyclica device casts a fake Wi-Fi network and tracks phones that try to join the network in passing cars. Since each phone has a unique identifier …, different Acyclica installations can track your personal location as you pass them in the city.

Is iOS latest susceptible on default settings? w/“Rotating” “Private Wi-Fi Address“

For everyone interested in this topic: with https://mapcomplete.org/surveillance, anyone can easily see and update surveillance camera's in OpenStreetMap

I still feel so conflicted on things like the Flock cameras. On one hand I understand that they have the capability of incredibly enhancing the ability for police departments to solve more crimes. Especially things related to vehicle theft, they could likely track down your stolen vehicle very quickly especially if they have a wide network of cameras.

However, my concern is always about the possibility for misuse. Even if I trust the current government, it doesn't mean I will trust a future one. What if they use the technology to track/monitor people like investigative journalists? We've already seen a recent state passing bills that would make it harder for investigative journalism to happen. So it's not even out of the realm of possibility for this technology to get used in ways that even would be deemed "legal" as they can simply expand the laws to use it unreasonably in the future.

There is also the other obvious concern which is surrounding things like data breaches or other unauthorized access issues. There have already been many people exposing some large security flaws in a lot of the devices currently out there.

Where I am stuck is how do we balance the huge set of benefits that can come from this kind of tech, with the tradeoffs? Ultimately this tech is unlikely to stop being implemented as governments and even most of the population is largely unbothered by mass surveillance. I almost don't even bother bringing up discussions on these topics with non-tech people as I have yet to find someone who seemed to care at all about this. If anything they are very in support of this technology being implemented as they seem unable to understand the tradeoffs due to it often requiring more technical knowledge. They just see all the positives it can give, and don't grasp the negatives.

Ultimately people usually desire safety, and these cameras definitely can give people more safety. Is it possible to balance safety with proper privacy safeguards?

Surprisingly milquetoast list given the title

Saying that patterns are dangerous because they can reinforce stereotypes sounds a lot like you are saying the stereotypes are true.

If the survelliance tech is so great, why post amber alert messages with the license plate numbers all over all highways to help find the car?

Based on context on their site, this looks like it was generated in ~2019 from data gathered before that, and some stuff in it is out of date as other comments mention.

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