EFF adds Street Surveillance Hub so Americans can check who's checking on them

For a country that prides itself on being free, America does seem to have an awful lot of spying going on, as the new Street Surveillance Hub from the Electronic Frontier Foundation shows. The Hub contains detailed breakdowns of the type of surveillance systems used, from bodycams to biometrics, predictive policing software to …

[MachDiamond]

Amateurs

Law enforcement has been dropping the ball on basic investigative techniques for years. I'm not against the use of technology, but it's just a tool and the outputs of those tools need to make sense rather than the police slavishly believing the outputs even when they make no sense. Gunshot detectors can be a good tool if there are lots of gun crimes in an area. If a call comes in from somebody that there's been a shooting, the detectors can help narrow down where to look and possibly find where the shooting happened.

Gratuitous use of license plate readers can be an issue as it's often just mass surveillance. I know of a couple shopping centers that have them and the Los Angeles Police Department keeps extensive databases on number plates with patrol cars feeding in data 24/7. I know an LAPD officer that was in a class where they allowed him to look up his own car (the system isn't available to all officers) and he commented on how scary it was to see a listing of everywhere his personal car had been logged. He did notice one mistake as he knew that at that date/time he was a considerable distance away on a trip with his wife in his car. Facial recognition is also prone to big mistakes. I don't see a problem for a shop to use it so they know if somebody they've had issues with before returns, but again, it's a tool and there could be errors. For the police to arrest somebody based solely on a facial recognition system tagging them can be a huge problem. Often enough, it shows up the shortcomings when the wrong person is detained and it's completely obvious they are not the droid(s) the police are looking for.

[Grinning Bandicoot]

GIGO The equipment is low bid and often installed and forgotten leaving a spiders' webs or maybe a slight splash of bird droppings to distort the image. So then it is up to the interpreter of the images to make a determination of what is and what is not shown. This sounds like a verrry borrring task which means it is kicked down to the bottom of the heap meaning the newbie. So then it becomes a matter of money - who has enough to out last the opponent. That a ticket received one time when I was three hours from the supposed incident turned into one of these farces.

I see somewhere in the near future that these systems will be used to follow the policing authorities with these of a felonious nature practicing their arts where the police are not found. Also a grand way to blacken someones rep, fake plates going to the local place of ill repute. Just think what has been done in the past and looking to future elections I see a lot of FUN.