Big Brother using art institute to make spying on public more appealing
Chicago - The project is led by computer scientist Charlie Catlett's team and the city, other institutions are involved, he said. The boxes that will hold the sensors are being made by designers at the School of the Art Institute, and Catlett said he has secured more than $1 million in in-kind contributions of engineering help from corporations including Cisco Systems, Intel, Zebra Technologies, Qualcomm, Motorola Solutions and Schneider Electric.
Center for Computation and Data at the University of Chicago (CCDUC) and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) explained “the whole project is, how can you get the city to be more helpful to people by telling us about itself?”
Catlett claims that “he information collected by the sensors will not be connected to a specific device or IP address.”
The curled metal fixtures set to go up on a handful of Michigan Avenue light poles later this summer may look like delicate pieces of sculpture, but researchers say they'll provide a big step forward in the way Chicago understands itself by observing the city's people and surroundings.
The smooth, perforated sheaths of metal are decorative, but their job is to protect and conceal a system of data-collection sensors that will measure air quality, light intensity, sound volume, heat, precipitation, and wind. The sensors will also count people by observing cell phone traffic.
Some experts caution that efforts like the one launching here to collect data from people and their surroundings pose concerns of a Big Brother intrusion into personal privacy.
Charlie Catlett claims the planners have taken precautions to design their sensors to observe mobile devices and count contact with the signal rather than record the digital address of every device.
Researchers have dubbed their effort the "Array of Things" project. Gathering and publishing such a broad swatch of data will give scientists the tools to make Chicago a safer, more efficient and cleaner place to live, said Catlett, director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data, part of a joint initiative between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
Spying in the name of safety, we're not buying your lies anymore!
"The city is interested in making Chicago a place where innovation happens," said Catlett.
That's B/S, the city is interested in illegally spying on the public.
Many cities around the globe have tried in recent years to collect enormous piles of "big data" in order to better understand their people and surroundings, but scientists say Chicago's project to create a permanent data collection infrastructure is unusual.
While data-hungry researchers are unabashedly enthusiastic about the project, some experts said that the system's flexibility and planned partnerships with industry beg to be closely monitored. Questions include whether the sensors are gathering too much personal information about people who may be passing by without giving a second thought to the amount of data that their movements—and the signals from their smartphones—may be giving off.
Chicaog Mayor Rahm Emanuel maintains that this urban sensing is part of his “technology plan”.
Urban sensing is the use of technology to monitor activities within a city for the sake of “urban policy making”.
This includes:
• Economic data
• Urban economies
• City product investments
• Income disparity
• Financial status
• Living conditions within the city
• Infrastructure service
• Environment considerations
Over the last decade many cities have launched efforts to collect data about everything from air quality and temperature at street level to the traffic flow of pedestrians and vehicles, all in the name of making urban centers run more efficiently and safely.
Much of the useful data has been "exhaust" from an increasingly digital and technological world, scientists say. Improvements in such technologies have led to novel conveniences like smartphone applications that tell you whether your bus is on time or how backed up the expressway is likely to be when you head home.
The first sensor could be in place by mid-July. Researchers hope to start with sensors at eight Michigan Avenue intersections, followed by dozens more around the Loop by year's end and hundreds more across the city in years to come as the project expands into neighborhoods, Catlett said.
"Our intention is to understand cities better," Catlett said. "Part of the goal is to make these things essentially a public utility."
More B/S! Your intention is to spy on Americans in public streets while making HUGE PROFITS!
The claim they're not using recording devices... can anyone say Shotspotter? See the story below for more info.
"We don't collect things that can identify people. There are no cameras or recording devices," he said. Sensors will be collecting "sound levels but not recording actual sound. The only imaging will be infrared," rather than video, he said.
"Data-hungry researchers are unabashedly enthusiastic about the project, but some experts said that the system’s flexibility and planned partnerships with industry beg to be closely monitored.
Questions include whether the sensors are gathering too much personal information about people who may be passing by without giving a second thought to the amount of data that their movements — and the signals from their smartphones — may be giving off.
But such an effort could still lead to gathering more sensitive information than is intended, said Fred Cate, an expert on privacy matters related to technology who teaches at Indiana University’s law school.
"Almost any data that starts with an individual is going to be identifiable," Cate said. When tracking activity from mobile phones, "you actually collect the traffic. You may not care about the fact that it's personally identifiable. It's still going to be personally identifiable."
King, the Harvard sociologist and data expert, agreed that the Chicago scientists will inevitably scoop up personally identifiable data.
"If they do a good job they'll collect identifiable data. You can (gather) identifiable data with remarkably little information," King said. "You have to be careful. Good things can produce bad things."
Officials need to plan for "the natural tendency that economics play," Cate said. "If you spend a million dollars wiring these boxes, and a company comes in and says we'll pay you a million dollars to collect personally identifiable information. What's the oversight over those companies?"
People's personal data has already been exposed to use by others for years, experts noted. Whether it's use of data from public utility accounts or images from Chicago's massive system of surveillance cameras, traditional notions of privacy are changing and eroding, experts said. And when it comes to private companies seeking your data for commercial reasons, there is often a limit to their intrusion.
"Most companies don't care about you, they care about people like you," King said.
http://wbezdata.tumblr.com/post/88953442194/array-of-things-project-adding-sensors-to-chicago-sohttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-big-data-chicago-20140621,0,3075626.story?page=1
Utility companies across the country are using Raytheon's gunshot detection system to spy on Americans:
A gunshot detection system developed by Raytheon BBN Technologies is to be deployed at utility sites in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
Boomerang is to be deployed through an exclusive sales and distribution agreement between the company and LJC Consulting Inc., which does business as Mil-Com Security Solutions. Raytheon said an initial order has been received for 110 Boomerang systems and that it is working with utility companies elsewhere in the country for the system's deployment. "Boomerang has been saving lives in combat operations since 2003," said Ed Campbell, president of Raytheon BBN Technologies. "Boomerang is a unique, proven capability that will now help protect our nation's critical power infrastructure against gunfire incidents."
So its saved lives on battlefields across the globe which green lights it for use to SPY ON AMERICANS? That's the common theme with military spying equipment.
Gunshot detectors spy on public conversations, click here & here to read more.
As usual the common denominator is profit, private companies make spying cheaper & cheaper as our civil rights evaporate:
"The utility industry is selecting Raytheon's Boomerang system because of its reliability, low total cost of ownership, and ease of integration with other security systems," said Christian Connors, president of LJC Consulting.
The head of Raytheon's consulting business admitted they'e making SPYING on Americans easier!
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2014/06/17/Raytheons-gunshot-detection-system-being-deployed-by-utility-companies/3561403027139/
Emails show big brother asked Florida police officers to deceive judges:
Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails.
At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.
A series of five emails (.pdf) written in April, 2009, were obtained today by the American Civil Liberties Union showing police officials discussing the deception. The organization has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with police departments throughout Florida seeking information about their use of stingrays.
“Concealing the use of stingrays deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance and keeps the public in the dark about invasive monitoring by local police,” the ACLU writes in a blog post about the emails. “And local and federal law enforcement should certainly not be colluding to hide basic and accurate information about their practices from the public and the courts.”
The emails show police in Florida are going even further to conceal their use of the equipment when they seek probable cause warrants to search facilities where a suspect is located, deceiving the courts about where they obtained the evidence to support their application for the search.
The initial email, which bears the subject line “Trap and Trace Confidentiality,” was sent by Sarasota police Sgt. Kenneth Castro to colleagues at the North Port (Florida) Police Department. It was sent after Assistant State Attorney Craig Schaefer contacted police to express concern about an application for a probable cause warrant filed by a North Port police detective. The application “specifically outlined” for the court the investigative means used to locate the suspect. Castro informs his colleague that the application should be revised to conceal the use of the surveillance equipment.
“In the past,” Castro writes, “and at the request of the U.S. Marshalls (sic), the investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been revealed so that we may continue to utilize this technology without the knowledge of the criminal element. In reports or depositions we simply refer to the assistance as ‘received information from a confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.’ To date this has not been challenged, since it is not an integral part of the actual crime that occurred.”
He then requests that “If this is in fact one of your cases, could you please entertain either having the Detective submit a new PCA and seal the old one, or at minimum instruct the detectives for future cases, regarding the fact that it is unnecessary to provide investigative means to anyone outside of law enforcement, especially in a public document.”
Capt. Robert Estrada, at the North Port Police Department, later confirmed in an email, “We have changed the PCA within the agency after consulting with the [State Attorney's Office]. The PCA that was already within the court system according to the SAO will have to remain since it has already been submitted. At some point and time the SAO will submit the changed document as an addendum.
We have implemented within our detective bureau to not use this investigative tool on our documents in the future.”
The release of the emails showing interference by a state attorney and the U.S. Marshals Service comes two weeks after agents from the Marshals Service took the extraordinary measure of seizing other public documents related to stingrays from the Sarasota Police Department in order to prevent the ACLU from examining them.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-told-cops-to-deceive-courts-about-stingray/ New York city's improperly anonymized taxi logs reveal drivers info: Recently, thanks to a Freedom of Information request, Chris Whong received and made public a complete dump of historical trip and fare logs from NYC taxis. It’s pretty incredible: there are over 20GB of uncompressed data comprising more than 173 million individual trips. Each trip record includes the pickup and dropoff location and time, anonymized hack licence number and medallion number (i.e. the taxi’s unique id number, 3F38, in my photo above), and other metadata. These data are a veritable trove for people who love cities, transit, and data visualization. But there’s a big problem: the personally identifiable information (the driver’s licence number and taxi number) hasn’t been anonymized properly — what’s worse, it’s trivial to undo, and with other publicly available data, one can even figure out which person drove each trip. In the rest of this post, I’ll describe the structure of the data, what the person/people who released the data did wrong, how easy it is to deanonymize, and the lessons other agencies should learn from this. (And yes, I’ll also explain how rainbows fit in).https://medium.com/@vijayp/f6bc289679a1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7926358