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

[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.