Welcome to 2015. We’re certainly not in Kansas anymore.
Not only is the police state here, but it is upgrading all the time.
While people are busy fighting an uphill battle with apparently rampant
cases of abuse, excessive force and a misguided and failed War on Drugs, many
are too far behind the times to keep up with these technologies – now being
tested or used in police departments across the country.
While the use of technology in policing is nothing new, it might surprise
you have far things have gone – with much of police surveillance now fully
automated and integrated into wireless networks, and monitored by Homeland
Security-funded fusion centers.
Reason.tv rounded up these examples of creepy, robot, privacy destroying
police tactics (and it’s only just beginning):
• Smart street lights created a stir in the alternative media a few years ago, with news that
Homeland Security grants were putting big brother funding on the streets
quite literally. Now, they are being tested in Las Vegas. The intelligent
street lights are equipped with two-way communication and monitoring devices,
and may be used to record conversations on the streets, or to broadcast
official messages from the authorities during an emergency, or in the midst
of a crime. Apparently, they can also broadcast music. Maybe that will give
them enough street cred to keep the creepy level off the radar. Paul Joseph
Watson wrote:
The Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure
that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous
wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing
for “security, energy management, data harvesting and digital media,” according to the Illuminating
Concepts website.
In terms of Homeland Security applications, each of the light poles
contains a speaker system that can be used to broadcast emergency alerts, as
well as a display that transmits “security levels” (presumably a similar
system to the DHS’ much maligned color-coded terror alert designation), in
addition to showing instructions by way of its LED video screen.
The lights also include proximity sensors that can record both pedestrian
and road traffic. The video display and speaker system will also be used to
transmit Minority Report-style advertising, as well as Amber Alerts and other
“civic announcements”.
• Location tracking Wi-Fi is now being tested in Seattle
and other locations as part of a wireless mesh network. Of course, most
already know that their cell phones and computers share data with their
providers, the NSA and a host of other data hungry watchers, but now the
police are using boxes set up at numerous street intersections to ping and
track cell phones in the area, logging location data for thousands of drivers,
passengers and pedestrians that could be used to establish the whereabouts of
a suspect, pursue criminals, as evidence in traffic disputes or perhaps for
crowd control.
The Wi-Fi tracking devices appear as white boxes mounted on poles or
street lights. The data interconnects through a wireless mesh network with
existing traffic cameras, police squad vehicles, networks of cameras and
other interfaces on the emerging fiber network, and a host of authorities in
the region, including police, the Sheriff’s Department and the regional
fusion center. Officially, the mesh network aides communication during
emergency scenarios, but also functions as a roaming live-time surveillance
network.
Reason.tv reports that Seattle residents been reporting wi-fi networks popping
up on their cell service with the names of intersections (such as 3rd &
Union) since 2013.
• Sting Ray cell phone interceptor / cell phone tower impersonator
devices are now being secretly used by the FBI, local police departments and…
probably other spy agencies, foreign and domestic, as well. The use of this
technology remains less known than other techniques, in part because the
Justice Department has pressured local law enforcement to keep hush hush
about the use of this tool, even in the face of court testimony.
The best part, from a policing point of view, is the kid-in-a-candy store,
fish-in-a-barrel opportunity for revealing data on everyone from suspects to
innocent bystanders who may have data wanted by the authorities… now or
later. No warrants need apply.
Melissa Melton writes:
According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has been
actively advising police departments to refuse disclosure about certain cell
phone surveillance technologies, including the widely used “StingRay” device,
even in routine state records requests.
Evidently, the StingRay technology allows law enforcement to “trick” cell
devices into sharing identifying personal and location data with them that
would ordinary be sent to communications companies and require request
procedures.
Instead, police are bypassing company assistance and collecting unique
information on suspects, persons of interests, and – as the AP reports – they
can even “sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods,” all without
any court orders or oversight.
• See-through-radar, as used in such on the market
technologies as the Range-R, allows police to see the location of all the
people inside a building through the walls, again, without a warrant.
USA Today reports:
At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their
officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the
walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new
concerns about the extent of government surveillance.
Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began
deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the
courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The
technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has
said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the
inside of a person’s house without first obtaining a search warrant.
Knightscope Photography Team, Creative Commons
• PoliceBots – Right now, the Knightscope K5 looks like
an inept R2D2 unit, but soon people will see it as the early deployment
prototype of the dangerous Robocop type units that science fiction has long
warned us about.
They are scheduled to begin actual patrols in the Silicon Valley area
sometime this year, and will principally be used to detect criminal activity and
alert human officers… for now, of course. Later, they are supposed to be
capable of crime prediction as well as prevention, but we
already know that Minority Report is no-knocking at the door.
According to the Daily Mail, these bot-officers carry a
number of advanced and perhaps troubling capabilities, including rapid
license plate scanning and something referred to as ‘odor detection’:
The five foot tall robots have a combination of laser scanning, wheel
encoders, inertial measurements, and GPS that allows fully autonomous
operation and charging.
It also has odour detectors, and can even monitor air pollution as it
travels around.
Using cameras they can also read up to 300 car number plates a minute,
allowing them to monitor traffic.
• Drones – The use of drones is, unsurprisingly, also
expanding, but the devices are become so cheap at the same time that their
use is becoming accepted. Hence, police departments and law enforcement are
snatching them up and making purchases that often fly under the radar of
public controversy. Infinitely cheaper than helicopters and other aerial
devices, drones are poised to be anywhere and everywhere that law enforcement
wants eyes.
• “Eye in the Sky” – Reason.tv also included an “Eye in
the Sky” HD camera mounted inside a Cessna-style aircraft that flies over a
city locale for up to six hours, recording everything that takes place in the
community – with options to zoom in on areas of interest in live-time and
play back to review what officers weren’t focusing on.
The Atlantic reported on how the device was used secretly
in Compton, California, and only revealed to the public years afterwards –
kept hush hush by law enforcement to quell privacy concerns:
In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department sent a civilian aircraft* over Compton, California,
capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that
10-square-mile municipality.
Compton residents weren’t told about the spying, which happened in 2012.
“We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so
we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see
people,” Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the
Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first
reporting on this important story. The technology he’s trying to sell to
police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like
Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo,
it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened
anywhere they weren’t watching in real time.
The question is, where does it all end?
Are there any limits to how far police or government authorities will go
or can go?
The Fourth Amendment seems clear enough in its intent to protect people from
unwarranted searches and seizure, but it has been all but trashed and
scrapped in the wake of the paranoid War on Terrorism and unparalleled mass
surveillance technologies.
The problem is that there may simply be no turning back. Expectation of
privacy are now as low as a fat, bald, unemployed dude hoping for a date with
a supermodel. Basically, freedom is dormant and privacy is, for the time
being, now all but nonexistent.
Further Reading: 2014 Year in Review: 7 Examples of Police State Technology
Making Our Rights Obsolete
