Results of Cambridge Microphone Installation Discussions

[trysha.livejournal.com]

From my last post, I followed this and did some research..

The Department of Homeland Security has given Cambridge (and other cities) a grant to install "shot spotter" technology around in urban areas.
My understanding is that this coming to Somerville soon.

This is a series of microphones placed on poles all across the city that constantly analyze the sounds in the area. Once the system detects a sound pattern that matches a "gunshot" it triangulates the location and sends this information to the police. It saves the recording of this event and the system operators have access to this recorded data.

The Cambridge police have assured us that this can only detect high decibel events.
However, this system is capable of recording voices (at least loud ones).

Now, I know that Cambridge and Somerville police are not plotting nefarious schemes here.
They are excited about cool new toys and cool ways of helping people.

Let's step back for a second.
The police are placing microphones across the city and then saying "trust us, we will only use this to help find gunshots". The good guys have this today.

As a software engineer I can make reasonable guesses as to how the system works. Let's just say that I am concerned.

The shot spotter website:
http://www.shotspotter.com/news/article/producers-blog-privacy-and-security-in-the-balance
Essentially says (paraphrased) "You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public area, you give your info to advertisers all the time anyway, so what does it matter".

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

it will be interesting in use, since i would expect most of the gun shots will be FROM the police.

mmm...

perhaps it'll be harder to cover things up.

if the bad guys know about the microphones, they will be more likely to use suppressors...

perhaps we should be more concerned about the toys to intercept cell phones? or all the cameras? plate scanners? and more. police state much? :D

#

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

i would expect most of the gun shots will be FROM the police.

This being the US, that seems unlikely to me. Do you have any statistics on that?

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

stats you would trust / believe?

having followed many a story the last couple decades, i get a sense that since the police have gone militarized, they tend to be the ones doing most of the shooting - as in, overkill mode. overwhelming force.

take for example that couple shot to death in their car recently. 120+ rounds in 30 seconds. they were innocent. they could not fire back, because they had no guns. one detective in particular executed them at close range with multiple magazine changes.

or take Watertown recently with the Boston bombers. the guy that hid in the boat. the police used a number of grenandes on him, then they shot the boat up pretty good, and hit more than a few houses while they were at it. the bad guy didn't have a gun. so, there's a nice case of tracking how many shots actually happened during the excitement. at least one guy has a new chair due to the bullet hole ;)

what's interesting with some of the tracking systems i've read about, is that coupled with cameras, they can FIND the scene of the shoot, potentially even get some facial recognition on the perp, and TRACK them while they attempt to run. combine that with some other stuff, and well, it could be an interesting window on shootouts. course, the other things it can be used for... not so great.

if the police weren't so good at losing data when convenient, a bullet tracking / counting system could be used against them, much like their own dash cams tend to do.

there are many very good police out there, but it seems a number of the bad ones end up on youtube sooner or later.

#

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how accurate spotcrime.com is, but assuming they have access to any public records of shootings, you have to go back to November of 2010 to find one in Somerville. Googling for "shooting somerville ma" the most recent one I find is 2007. This isn't saying that the police are doing a lot of shooting either. Here we prefer our arsons to our guns, apparently.

To my mind even using an police administrator to open a cardboard box containing one of these things would already be a waste of public resources. Use the time that would be spent installing and monitoring them to find the Summer Arsonist, that would be good for everyone.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

using an police administrator to open a cardboard box containing one of these things

It might well be a waste of time, but I expect that the time is paid for by the DHS grant, and heaven knows, every bureaucracy likes being able to spend money given to it by an outside source.

The irony of all this is that the idea was conceived a couple of decades ago, when random gunfire on the streets of poor neighborhoods was unpleasantly common. IIRC, that was parodied in Last Action Hero (1993) when the Bad Guy is boasting about how the city is hell. He fires a few shots and shouts "Attention! I have just killed a man." After a few seconds, a faraway voice replies "Shuuut up!!!".

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

According to Da Google (heh), there were 11,000 "firearms-related" homicides in the US in a recent year, and 587 "citizens killed by police officers". Of course, those numbers can be bent a long way, and those are deaths, rather than shootings. But it seems reasonable to estimate that citizens fire at least 10 times as many shots as police.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Do you have any reason to believe that these units, which transmit data to the police, are only transmitting the data they say they are and only to whom they say they are? It would be shit-simple and dead cheap to have them also transmit IDs of every cell-enabled device they can pick up.

But, no, wait a sec. I'm wrong. These are being distributed by the NSA which is a respected government agency, so that couldn't possibly be going on with these.

Dear Somerville, do the right thing. Say "No thanks" to the NSA. Gun-shots are not exactly a huge issue in S'ville. Take all the money you would spend to install and monitor these things and use that to clean some storm drains instead. You'll prevent an actual real threat to life from rats, instead of inviting more rats (the NSA) into our community.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

this.

unfortunately, some of these govt offers aren't actually offers. more like "we'll install them, and but you maintain them ..."

like cities getting those nice "tanks". the tanks are free, but the $50k or so a year in upkeep, is on the city. it's basically just a "loan" as the govt can "borrow it" as they want. which means a nicely distributed set of equipment. it's a good military strategy. plus pushes costs back down the line.

#

[ron_newman]

wait, the NSA is distributing these? I don't see that in the original post.

[trysha.livejournal.com]

The Department of Homeland Security is giving out grants to urban police forces for this.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sorry, somehow I get NSA and DHS confused sometimes. Not hard to do. Still Department of Homeland Security is distributing them (or giving grants and specifying which specific equipment those grants can be used for), But given that NSA has been able to force independent consumer electronics and software companies to provide NSA access, we have to assume that the have no *less* power over DHS.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

The phone system is already logging where cellular devices are.