Atlas of Surveillance
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.)
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/...
[3] - https://blog.12security.com/darkness-at-noon-01-waxtitan/
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...
Ironic that the application won't load in Firefox without disabling Enhanced Tracking Protection because it relies on third party access to storage.
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.
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.
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:
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
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/08/milit...
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone know what's going on in florida with face recognition?
Why is there nothing in the UK or EU ?
It maps the license plate readers of the Poplar Bluff, MO police department onto Buffalo, MO.
This only has USA data.
Phew, glad to see Australia has no surveillance apparatus!
the UX of this isn't great.
Pretty funny how the map doesn't load in Brave due to ad/tracker blocking.
> 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.