The Newest Growth Market For License Plate Readers Is Those Assholes Running The Local Homeowners Association

from the 'we-feel-people-don't-hate-us-enough-already' dept

Everyone loves surveillance creep. Well, by everyone, I mean the government and the vendors that sell to them. Automatic license plate readers have made their way from police cruisers to malls, as has facial recognition tech that very often fails to actually recognize people.

The "everyone" may now include the near-fascist organizations turning neighborhoods into glittering shrines of conformity. I'm talking about homeowners' associations -- the anal-retentive busybodies who want to make sure your grass is cut to the correct length and that no one's offending passersby with creative mailboxes.

The Denver Post reports the newest customers for surveillance tech is HOAs and gated communities.

License plate readers posted at both entrances to an upscale Aurora neighborhood snapped pictures of passing cars Wednesday, recording the type, color and license plate number of each vehicle and inputting that information into a database.

Such technology used to be relegated to law enforcement. But these cameras were purchased by the local homeowner association in January after a few burglaries of cars and a home in the neighborhood. Red signs near the cameras warn passersby of “24/7 Video Recording.”

“It’s going to keep us safer,” said Richard Warshaw, president of the Bel-Aire Estates Owners Association.

I don't want to make too many assumptions, but click through to take a look at Richard Warshaw, who appears to be exactly the way I'd expect him to look.

Anyway, this is the growth market for vendors with surveillance tech to sell. Spy gadgets have gone from military to police to business owners to bitter busybodies who want to know everything about everyone who passes through their carefully -- and forcefully -- curated neighborhoods.

Flock Safety appears to be one of the bigger players in the HOA ALPR business. Its site makes a handful of dubious claims in the space of a single splash box, including the audacious assertion that only its product prevents crime.

I attempted to discuss this claim with the FlockBot, but only got asked for my email address and phone number so the company could pitch some of its camera "solutions" that *squints at screenshots* "capture vehicle lice plates."

This only raises my confidence in the quality of Flock's products.

Back at the Denver HOA, it appears the private surveillance approval process isn't that much different than the public surveillance approval process. In other words, input from the general public is ignored.

Warshaw said the five-person board of the homeowner association decided to add the three cameras and use money from the neighborhood’s dues to pay for it. The entire 75-home neighborhood did not vote on the decision, but Warshaw said he hadn’t heard any negative feedback.

Following government precedent, the HOA's deployment of ALPRs is also pretty much unjustifiable.

Warshaw, who has lived in the neighborhood since 2005, admitted that one home burglary in 15 years is not exactly a rash of crime.

Warshaw insists the product makes residents "feel safer." This is a really curious [pronounced "bullshit"] claim, considering residents don't appear to have been asked their opinion, before or after the purchase.

I guess the only opinion that matters is that of the "leadership," whether it's a city council approving the tech behind closed doors or HOAs doing the same thing. As the Denver Post points out, surveillance tech deployment continues to increase while crime rates continue to decline. These declines preceded the mass rollout of ALPRs, Stingrays, and facial recognition tech, strongly suggesting law enforcement agencies (and HOAs!) had ways to deal with criminal activity that didn't involve pointing invasive tech in the direction of non-criminals.

Finally, Flock Safety -- the preferred provider of HOA surveillance tech -- makes a completely incongruous, if not completely impossible, claim on its website. Whoever approved this copy should be forced to stand naked in front of the nearest CCTV camera until I get tired of mocking them.

Please explain to me how "privacy" is being "protected" by giving law enforcement instant access to license plate photos. The FlockBot remains silent on the issue, but really really really wants to annoy you with emails and sales rep calls.

Filed Under: authoritarians, hoa, home owners associations, license plate readers, neighbors, privacy, spying, surveillance
Companies: flock safety

Selling Fear? There's An App For That

from the BE-A-PART-OF-PRISON-PIPELINE! dept

Fear sells.

Fear has always sold. It has sold wars to the public, both real and imagined. It has propelled the endless funding of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. It has sold the killing of unarmed citizens by police officers to courts. It has sold the diminishment of our Constitutional rights, most notably at our borders. It has sold surveillance creep -- the steady encroachment of cameras in public areas, increasingly coupled with tech that makes anonymity a historical relic.

It has sold newspapers and brought eyeballs to newscasts. As the public has shifted its news consumption to the web, the fear salesmen have followed, ensuring what bleeds still leads, even online.

The public still buys it, even when the facts don't back up the narrative. A decade of historically low crime levels has made little dent in the public perception that we live in a country overrun by drug cartels, sex traffickers, and assorted lowlifes hellbent on separating us from our possessions and lives.

All of this information is a Google search away, but it's ignored in favor of what still brings viewers to websites and funding to government agencies. This would all be sad enough if it weren't for a new wave of tech companies behaving like newspapers riding the fine line between information and sensationalism.

Rani Molla's report for Vox about the rise of snitch apps and the use of "neighborhood" platforms to encourage racial stereotyping under the guise of "safety" is a depressing read. But it's a worth a read nonetheless. People apparently love to be afraid, and there's a long list of tech companies willing to indulge this urge.

Violent crime in the US is at its lowest rate in decades. But you wouldn’t know that from a crop of increasingly popular social media apps that are forming around crime.

Apps like Nextdoor, Citizen, and Amazon Ring’s Neighbors — all of which allow users to view local crime in real time and discuss it with people nearby — are some of the most downloaded social and news apps in the US, according to rankings from the App Store and Google Play.

This is just part of it. But it's an unhealthy start. Citizen, for instance, used to do business as "Vigilante," so that gives you some idea of the mindset some of these apps/tech appeal to. Amazon is upping the ante further than the rest, though. It's turning its doorbell cameras into reality TV for crime junkies.

It recently advertised an editorial position that would coordinate news coverage on crime, specifically based around its Ring video doorbell and Neighbors, its attendant social media app. Neighbors alerts users to local crime news from “unconfirmed sources” and is full of Amazon Ring videos of people stealing Amazon packages and “suspicious” brown people on porches. “Neighbors is more than an app, it’s the power of your community coming together to keep you safe and informed,” it boasts.

Apps like these turn isolated incidents that don't even amount to a rounding error in local crime stats into a narrative that users' neighborhoods are full of suspicious people doing suspicious things. This kickstarts a vicious circle where cops are called on "suspicious brown people," leading to increased profiling of brown people… which leads to arrest stats that seem to prove brown people are more dangerous. And Amazon is there to get this ball rolling by hiring an editorial team to drum up fear using doorbell camera footage. What a time to be alive.

The tech revolution has made bigotry more efficient.

A recent Motherboard article found that the majority of people posted as “suspicious” on Neighbors in a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood were people of color.

Nextdoor has been plagued by this sort of stereotyping.

Citizen is full of comments speculating on the race of people in 9-1-1 alerts.

To be fair, these apps and tech offerings didn't create the problem. It was always there. They've just made it worse by tapping into this thick vein of fear and bigotry that is likely being underserved by local journalism. As Molla points out, small news entities have been dying off, leaving a void that's been filled by neighborhood-focused social media outlets. Like anything else, the potential of positive development was always there. It's just that those who use the services the most tend to be the type who view people of other races, creeds, etc. as inherently suspicious.

The solution, unfortunately, is better inputs. The researchers Molla spoke to suggest "better media literacy" and "more mindful consumption of news." Let's be honest: if those are the choices, it's never going to happen. The selling of a crime-filled America happened as crime rates dropped precipitously. Journalists sold it. Politicians sold it. Massive echo chambers were constructed and the apps that might have disrupted this have instead, for the most part, amplified the echoes.

The information has always been out there. It's just always ignored by those whose personal beliefs can't be swayed by stats and alternate viewpoints. Tech isn't going to fix it. It's up to us, as individuals, to try to pierce through this haze created by hundreds of entities whose existence depends on the public believing the nation is unsafe. And that's the hitch: you're not just going up against friends and neighbors. You're going up against entrenched beliefs held by government agencies and media concerns that have monetized fear successfully for decades.

Filed Under: fear, neighbors, overhype, social media
Companies: amazon, citizen, nextdoor

NY Governor Announces App Version Of State's 'See Something, Say Something' Program

from the swipe-left-to-report-as-potential-terrorist dept

Seizing on a terrorist attack halfway around the world, the governor of New York has vowed to make his state safer by adding more bodies to the NYPD's overstuffed counterterrorism units and, as is the style of the time, introduced an app that will allow any New York resident to report anyone with a camera near a public building, bridge, tunnel, parked car, or power line.

"See Something, Send Something" allows anyone to capture suspicious activity as a photo or written note and send the information to the New York State Intelligence Center. From there, the tip will be reviewed and if relevant, sent to the appropriate law enforcement agency. Public service announcements promoting the campaign will be played at DMV offices and service areas along state highways.

By using the app, which can be downloaded for free for iPhone and Android phone users, there is no worry about who to send the tip to or what phone number to call—users can simply send a photo of the suspicious activity using their device’s camera, by choosing a photo from its library, or sending a written note. It also includes information on what to look for and when to report suspicious activity. The service is already available in Colorado, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The governor's press release reminds New Yorkers that the app is for reporting of suspicious people/objects/actions only and very definitely not for criticizing the government's terrorist hysteria or regaling local DHS Fusion Centers with an assortment of dick pics.

In order to keep the app focused on safety, users should report only suspicious behavior and situations (e.g., an unattended backpack or briefcase in a public place) rather than beliefs, thoughts, ideas, expressions, associations, or speech unrelated to terrorism or other criminal activity.

Well, good luck with that.

The office also reminds users that no matter how often they send messages about the suspicious Muslim listening to ISIS instructions on his headphones with ever-increasing amounts of exclamation points/capital letters, it will never result in local law enforcement instantly arriving to "control the scene."

The app does not replace 911 and should not to be used for someone needing immediate police action or to report an emergency.

Not included in the press release is any disclaimer or warning that "immediate police action" may result in serious injury or death, even (or especially) if impending injury/death is what's hoping to be prevented by the summoning of law enforcement.

The governor's office also links to recommended reading material to better inform would-be See-Senders about the warning signs of potential terrorist activity.

Terrorist cells have been known to record and monitor activities, taking pictures and making drawings.

ALSO: new parents, artists, people with excessive amounts of time on their hands, public sector employees, everyone who possesses a smartphone, etc.

A clarifying note inside the app that will probably be read by no one adds some cautionary wording not found on the NY DHS website.

Taking pictures or video of facilities, buildings, or infrastructure in a manner that would arouse suspicion in a reasonable person…All reporting on photography should be done within the totality of the circumstances.

But acting as an extra set of eyes for a city that has millions of them -- some even located in human skulls -- doesn't just help fight the War on Terror. It also helps fight the War on… Fire.

Being observant supports homeland security and fire prevention efforts.

If nothing else, the app comes highly recommended by someone who watches a lot of cable news programming.

This App was on Cnn, Cnbc, Msnbc.. Due to IsIs we have to do all we can to protect ourselves

The app itself has been around since January 2013. Despite that, it's apparently still only usable in six states. And there seems to be no information available on how many suspicious activity reports the app has generated, much less if it's actually resulted in any attacks prevented.

What it is, though, is "something," the favorite activity of politicians looking to capitalize on tragic events. My Mobile Witness is nothing more than "Do Something: the App." It gives those who feel they need a direct line to local DHS offices something to do with their idle fingers/paranoia and gives the state's top legislator something to say in the wake of the Paris attacks. Everybody wins… except maybe those who are accosted/arrested for whipping out their sketch pad within eyeshot of a public structure.

Filed Under: andrew cuomo, neighbors, new york, overreaction, say something, see something, send something, spying, surveillance, terrorism, trust

Greece Wants To Use Amateur Snoopers Wired For Sound And Video To Catch Business Tax Dodgers

from the not-so-virtual dept

Greece has been much in the news recently over concerns that it would not be able to obtain an extension of international loans made to it previously, with serious knock-on effects for both itself and other EU countries. As part of a deal that was reached, the Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis -- formerly Economist-in-Residence at Valve Corporation -- was required to explain how Greece will reform its economy and find more money to pay back its debts. One way to do that is to try to recover some of the tens of billions of euros that Greek citizens owe their government in unpaid taxes (pdf). That's a pretty obvious thing to do, perhaps, but the way Varoufakis hopes to cut tax dodging by businesses isn't so conventional, as the Guardian explains:

[Varoufakis ] proposed recruiting large numbers of "non-professional inspectors" on short-term casual contracts of no longer than two months who would be paid by the hour. They would be "wired for sound and video", trained to pose as "customers" and "will be hard to detect by offending tax dodgers."

The idea here seems to be to obtain evidence that businesses are failing to give customers proper receipts, which would then allow shops and companies to avoid paying tax on those sales.

The data the amateur snoopers gathered would be used by the authorities "immediately to issue penalties and sanctions."

Varoufakis said the launch of the amateur snoopers would act as a deterrent, "engendering a new tax compliance culture" in Greece.

Well, it might do that, which will be good for the Greek economy, but it will probably also engender a deep distrust by businesses of all new customers and tourists, especially if they look at all shifty. It might even lead to heated, possibly violent, confrontations between business people and those suspected of being "amateur snoopers." That, in its turn, is probably not going to help social cohesion or international solidarity at a time when Greek society is under huge strains because of its economic problems. Still, you have to feel a certain sympathy for Varoufakis, who needs to come up with new ways to pull back some of the vast sums owed to the Greek government by tax dodgers. He must be longing for the good old days when the only economic problems he had to worry about were digital ones in virtual worlds.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: greece, neighbors, shops, snitches, snoops, tax evasion, yanis varoufakis