For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera.
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .
Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space).
There's probably several interesting ways to make a QR code on the ground with chalk. I'm thinking of a turtle bot loaded with spray chalk, for starters.
I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.
I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.
Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.
I keep wanting to see the "Rainbows End" style experiment.
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)
I have similar, albeit probably more radical, views.
All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)
We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.
I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.
It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).
A friend of mine in school had a similar thought - make body cams so cheap that everyone has one. Watch the watchmen.
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
This only works if society was okay with surveillance on private property. The wealthy can afford large tracts of private land and can afford to send people on their behalf to interact in public for many things. They can pay services to come to them as well.
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
This is incredible, great work and will definitely be using and sharing this!
Where in the repos can we find the plugin/scraper for given municipalities to help contribute when they seem to be broken? As looks like the last meetings and agendas scraped for Cook County are from March/April of this year
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
"We have seen a flock of turkeys walk right along that fence on the outside, but I have also seen them
jump high enough that they could easily land on the 4ft fence. Just 2 more feet of fence would
stop all of this and give us the sense of security that we have every right to."
Search context is legitimately hard, especially since this is unstructured text data that (ime building CivicBand) needs to be OCR'd not parsed for best results.
You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.
Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
I sometimes imagine local laws/contracts with a provision like: "This system may not be operated if there is no state law that makes it a class X felony to violate someone's privacy in any of the Y conditions."
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
Genuine question: I’m someone who hates the centralization of data with companies like Flock. I also want safer streets. I have liked things like speed cameras and bus-mounted bus lane cameras specifically because they target the problem without the need for police involvement. How do you get the latter without ALPRs? Or do ALPRs indicate cameras specifically collecting license plates independent of active enforcement?
ALPRs are generally just cameras that create searchable timestamped databases of identified vehicles, private or public. But they're only really useful for public entities, because they're the only ones who can in the general case do anything with a tagged car (look up who owns it, curb it, &c).
I'm all about monitoring privacy related things, but I think the bigger piece here is the monitoring of city counsels for this kind of data. Wow! I just hadn't thought about doing that before. This is a massive trove of information and building a strong, more generic platform around it could yield huge insights to enable fast action as municipalities start implementing things. I have actually built some code to review local city counsel meetings by transcribing them and downloading meeting packets but opening this up at a larger scale could be a massive thing.
Im glad WA ruled that you can get flock data with a FOIA request and because of this local cities decided to disable the cameras. Currently they have put caps of the lenses of the installed cameras in WA.
Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
what is stopping me from putting a bright infrared light on my car angled in a way causing the camera to not be able to detect my plate? overexposed? this should be totally legal afaik since nothing is hiding my plate from any view to a normal human?
When I was working at EFF I would complain about people creating "persistent unique identifiers", and particularly ones that someone can passively log. Many governments probably have classified databases that are more intrusive than the ALPR databases, based on electronic surveillance means, which engineers might have been able to mitigate through more cautious protocol design.
I've thought that license plates themselves are such a persistent unique identifier, but one that we sort of didn't notice until the recognition and storage technologies got cheaper.
The original motivation for license plates seems to be about enforcing safety inspections of cars (maybe also liability insurance?). Nowadays we also have a lot of other uses that have piled up. The top two I think are very popular: allowing victims of crimes involving motor vehicles to identify the vehicles reliably, and allowing police to catch fugitives in vehicular pursuits. Maybe these were actually even considered part of the original motivation for license plate requirements. Below that, still fairly popular, you have allowing non-moving violation citations such as parking tickets; allowing police to randomly notice wanted persons' vehicles that happen to be nearby; and allowing government agencies another enforcement lever for other stuff by threatening to cancel previously-issued plates. (Oh yeah, and nowadays also paying for parking online!)
I could imagine more modern approaches that would put more technological limitations on some of these things, but I guess any change would be controversial not least because you're intentionally taking some data away from law enforcement (which I think is a normal thing to want to do). The one that's really hard is the "victims of crimes easily identifying vehicles". If you replace license plates with something that's not easily to memorize or write down, the reporting gets a lot harder.
Maybe we could try to have license plates change frequently using something like format-preserving encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption) so they still appear like existing license plate formats, and then prevent law enforcement agents or agencies from directly receiving the decryption keys, so they have to actively interact with the plate issuer in order to answer specific investigative questions about specific vehicles. If police receive a report of a crime they can ask to find out what the involved vehicle's displayed plate will change to on specific dates.
This would have the problem that a partial or mistranscribed or misremembered plate would be pretty useless (you couldn't easily search for, or detect, a partial plate match). You could add some error correcting codes to the plate numbers, but I don't think existing plate numbers are long enough for that. Also, if the plate numbers didn't change very frequently, you could probably partially deanonymize ALPR datasets based on recurring patterns of locations over time.
The best lesson is probably that, if you make a new technical system, you should be very cautious about the identifiers that go into that system, as they may still exist decades later, and used for new kinds of tracking and new kinds of surveillance that you didn't anticipate.
Many metros, including Las Vegas and LA, have rolled out thousands of facial recognition traffic cameras above the signals at intersections.
The ALPR situation is trivial by comparison. Transportation privacy is a historical oddity. You can’t drive down the road in a major metro or walk down an airport concourse without being identified and tracked by your facial geometry.
The US federal government seems to be entirely hellbent on accumulating facial biometrics on the entire population.
Why aren't those flock cameras being destroyed all the time in the US?
In our city people vandalized speed cameras all the time, so eventually government gave up and just banned them in the whole province. I'm not sure they did that because of being vandalized, but at least there was direct actionable push back.
I'm all for stationary government surveillance EVERYWHERE (in the public), just no surveillance ANYWHERE on individual persons. I think what people do in public should be heavily witnessed and recorded.
[+] [-] fainpul|3 months ago|reply
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
[+] [-] p_ing|3 months ago|reply
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
[+] [-] allenu|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rvloock|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo1618|2 months ago|reply
The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
[+] [-] rsync|2 months ago|reply
This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.
Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.
Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.
You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.
[1] https://0x.co
[+] [-] calvinmorrison|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] imglorp|2 months ago|reply
And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...
[+] [-] FelipeCortez|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jdthedisciple|3 months ago|reply
I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.
Any examples for what you speak of?
[+] [-] iris-digital|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffeg|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hopelite|2 months ago|reply
Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.
[+] [-] tefkah|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] travisgriggs|3 months ago|reply
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.
[+] [-] bitexploder|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|2 months ago|reply
All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)
We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.
I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.
It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).
[+] [-] jkestner|3 months ago|reply
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
[+] [-] plandis|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kortex|3 months ago|reply
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
[+] [-] buellerbueller|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] octoberfranklin|2 months ago|reply
FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.
[+] [-] atomicthumbs|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] phildini|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeWaka|3 months ago|reply
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
[+] [-] tayari-|2 months ago|reply
Where in the repos can we find the plugin/scraper for given municipalities to help contribute when they seem to be broken? As looks like the last meetings and agendas scraped for Cook County are from March/April of this year
[+] [-] kpw94|2 months ago|reply
Few questions:
- is the stack to index those open source?
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
[+] [-] tonymet|2 months ago|reply
https://civic.observer/auth/login
I am interested in monitoring local legislation in Clark County, WA
[+] [-] staffordrj|3 months ago|reply
https://alpr.watch/m/WPv1PO
first the came for the turkeys...
[+] [-] phildini|2 months ago|reply
You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go.
Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
[+] [-] ZeWaka|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Terr_|3 months ago|reply
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
[+] [-] bichiliad|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jmward01|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ZebusJesus|3 months ago|reply
https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigat...
[+] [-] p_ing|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dkalola|2 months ago|reply
What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
[+] [-] gearhart|3 months ago|reply
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
[+] [-] avipars|2 months ago|reply
Mentions "flock" when referring to a flock of turkeys - not flock cameras
[+] [-] ChrisbyMe|3 months ago|reply
Any interesting technical details? Getting the actual data from govt meetings looked like it was the hardest part to me.
[+] [-] snigsnog|2 months ago|reply
So for solving crimes.
I'm in favor, then!
[+] [-] garyfirestorm|3 months ago|reply
[+] [-] a456463|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] schoen|2 months ago|reply
I've thought that license plates themselves are such a persistent unique identifier, but one that we sort of didn't notice until the recognition and storage technologies got cheaper.
The original motivation for license plates seems to be about enforcing safety inspections of cars (maybe also liability insurance?). Nowadays we also have a lot of other uses that have piled up. The top two I think are very popular: allowing victims of crimes involving motor vehicles to identify the vehicles reliably, and allowing police to catch fugitives in vehicular pursuits. Maybe these were actually even considered part of the original motivation for license plate requirements. Below that, still fairly popular, you have allowing non-moving violation citations such as parking tickets; allowing police to randomly notice wanted persons' vehicles that happen to be nearby; and allowing government agencies another enforcement lever for other stuff by threatening to cancel previously-issued plates. (Oh yeah, and nowadays also paying for parking online!)
I could imagine more modern approaches that would put more technological limitations on some of these things, but I guess any change would be controversial not least because you're intentionally taking some data away from law enforcement (which I think is a normal thing to want to do). The one that's really hard is the "victims of crimes easily identifying vehicles". If you replace license plates with something that's not easily to memorize or write down, the reporting gets a lot harder.
Maybe we could try to have license plates change frequently using something like format-preserving encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption) so they still appear like existing license plate formats, and then prevent law enforcement agents or agencies from directly receiving the decryption keys, so they have to actively interact with the plate issuer in order to answer specific investigative questions about specific vehicles. If police receive a report of a crime they can ask to find out what the involved vehicle's displayed plate will change to on specific dates.
This would have the problem that a partial or mistranscribed or misremembered plate would be pretty useless (you couldn't easily search for, or detect, a partial plate match). You could add some error correcting codes to the plate numbers, but I don't think existing plate numbers are long enough for that. Also, if the plate numbers didn't change very frequently, you could probably partially deanonymize ALPR datasets based on recurring patterns of locations over time.
The best lesson is probably that, if you make a new technical system, you should be very cautious about the identifiers that go into that system, as they may still exist decades later, and used for new kinds of tracking and new kinds of surveillance that you didn't anticipate.
[+] [-] sneak|2 months ago|reply
The ALPR situation is trivial by comparison. Transportation privacy is a historical oddity. You can’t drive down the road in a major metro or walk down an airport concourse without being identified and tracked by your facial geometry.
The US federal government seems to be entirely hellbent on accumulating facial biometrics on the entire population.
[+] [-] csmpltn|2 months ago|reply
[+] [-] stackedinserter|2 months ago|reply
In our city people vandalized speed cameras all the time, so eventually government gave up and just banned them in the whole province. I'm not sure they did that because of being vandalized, but at least there was direct actionable push back.
[+] [-] almosthere|2 months ago|reply