The city of Chicago has 3000 CCTV cameras that are operated by the police department. They are in big boxes mounted on street lamps that are clearly marked as to what they are. Now the city wants to add covert cameras that wouldn’t be identified.
“We have blue-light cameras all over the city,” Weis said recently during a radio interview. “I think the next stage we’re going to go to is having more covert cameras.”
If you still doubt that aerial drones, similar to ones used in military combat missions, will never be used at home then think again. Recent accounts of British police using them during criminal pursuits and large demonstrations are popping up weekly. There has been very little in the way of announcements from these police departments as I’m sure they fear public backlash. This method of testing new technology and then setting policy latter is a dangerous precedent for police tactics.
Police departments keep very quiet until they have documented evidence of their new tools having caught some horrific crime. They then go on the marketing offensive, touting cost savings and the safety they will bring to officers. Like CCTV these drones will be an even easier sell here in the US because of the boost these sectors will bring to the economy. People who come out against these new systems will be labeled as anti-law enforcement or even anarchists.
Before the police have the chance to roll out such tools we need to be proactive in our opposition to such tools. These drones are not flying at 10,000 ft like their military cousins but able drop down and look in windows of houses. The real push will come from the private sector which stands to make millions of dollars in the sale of these devices to local law enforcement.
It must be nice to be Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher. He is a kid in a candy store. Over the last couple of years he has been able to fulfill his techno lust for every crime fighting device imaginable.
First he is having money thrown at him to protect the Republican National Convention and now he is given grants to install spy systems that he doesn’t even have a plan for.
The RNC allowed him to outnumber anarchists 100 – 1, with the most frightening show of force that the mid-west has ever seen. With his share of the military convention budget he was able to stockpile enough weapons, armor, chemicals and vehicles to stop a modern day Visigoth invasion.
Now he is putting up cameras around the county without a plan to monitor them. These CCTV systems have been shown by studies and experts to be a questionable expense in fighting crime. But money is no object when we talking about descent.
I’m sure next year there will be opportunities for Sheriff Bob to broaden his toolbox to include drone planes.
It is a slippery slope and allowing cameras now will only show precedence when the next technology comes along.
The Hungry Hacker has a great list of text you can search for, using Google, to find accessible security cameras. They title of their blog post, “How to Hack into a Security Camera?”, is slightly misleading as you can’t do much more than move the camera around. You don’t have any administrative controls over it.
This is an interesting story of a town that is actually thinking about privacy and security instead of privacy vs. security.
The council voted 9-0 against building the network of eight video cameras throughout the city on Feb. 2 after hearing different opinions during two sessions about the video cameras.
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“What agencies would have access to the camera’s digital images?” said Nancy Murray, the director of education at the ACLUM. “What guarantees would residents have that (the images) would not be used for purposes other than traffic control?”
But Cambridge’s neighbor Brookline went in a different direction about putting up security cameras.
Before Cambridge made its decision, Brookline, another community that has access to the Homeland Security grant, decided differently. In January, its Board of Selectman voted 3-2 in favor of a one-year trial for the video camera network.
A Swedish study of 44 large city installations of CCTV cameras shows that crime reductions was “Small and Nonsignificant”. In areas where there were improvements in crime statistics there was also other mitigating factors like increased lighting or increased police presences.
“Other Western democracies are more interested in the research than [are] our own,” observes Brandon C. Welsh.
At the behest of the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, Welsh, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, analyzed 41 surveillance-camera studies from around the world. In October, he and a co-author concluded that “CCTV [closed-circuit television] caused a small (16 percent) but significant decrease in crime” on average in the locations studied, as compared to similar nearby areas not covered by cameras. “However, this overall result was largely driven by the effectiveness of CCTV schemes in [parking lots], which caused a 51 percent decrease in crime.” And, he noted, all of the parking lots with crime decreases had also added fresh lighting and more security officers.
Welsh’s analysis found an average crime decrease of only 7 percent in downtowns using cameras, a reduction he termed “small and nonsignificant” — that is, conceivably due to chance.
Welsh’s Swedish report was an updated version of an analysis he conducted for the British government in 2000. “The Blair government did not want to release our study,” Welsh says of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. “They had already spent hundreds of millions of pounds … with very little to show with respect to crime reduction. And yet countries and governments continue to roll these programs out.”
So picture this; Feds walking around a protest streaming video back to HQ. HQ dumps images into databases. Database kicks back flags. Feds round up exactly who they want.
The Homeland Security Department is testing technology that would allow its agents to use cellphones or e-mail devices to covertly share live video of possible terrorists over a law enforcement network.
“The Board of Supervisors gave initial approval Tuesday to a measure to allow people charged with a crime in San Francisco to have access to recordings from city surveillance cameras to prove their innocence.”
“….two men were exonerated by videotape after they were accused of robbery and spent 69 days in jail.”
“The head of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office of Criminal Justice, former U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan, opposes the legislation mainly because he believes it undermines standard criminal justice procedures. Newsom can veto the measure, and it would take eight supervisors to overrule him.”
I’m guessing that as communities get sued for access to their footage that many of them will shut down these systems because it is just too expensive to keep that much data in storeage
“The measure, approved on a 7-2 vote, also requires the city to keep recordings from the 74 cameras posted at high-crime intersections throughout the city for at least 30 days, though the city department that stores the video footage said that mandate is currently not technologically possible given the equipment on hand. “
