More cities are using DHS grants to install surveillance equipment in buses and trains.

In city after city, transit authorities are installing sophisticated surveillance equipment to record every word spoken by riders.

An article published by Wired reveals that buses and subways around the country are being equipped with the spy apparatuses.

Where are so many cities — many of which are notoriously suffering from budget shortfalls — getting the money to monitor citizens? The Department of Homeland Security.

According to a story from The Daily cited in the Wired report, DHS is sending grants to municipalities to pay for the purchase and installation of the surveillance equipment.

“In San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security is funding the entire cost with a grant. Elsewhere, the federal government is also providing some financial support. Officials in Concord, N.C., for example, used part of a $1.2 million economic stimulus grant to install a combined audio and video surveillance system on public transit vehicles, records show,” writes Michael Brick in The Daily.

Surveillance stimulus. From Fusion Centers to the Buffer Zone Protection Program, Homeland Security is setting up the preliminary infrastructure that will support the conversion of states and cities into nothing more than administrative outposts of the federal government’s domestic spying center.

Government use of these recording devices seems to infringe on the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches (including of conversations) without probable cause. The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Additionally, when combined with GPS data sent by the buses to remote servers, passenger locations and movements can be tracked by those with access to the data received from the microphones and cameras mounted in the buses.

Wired describes the technology powering the surveillance: "The RoadRecorder 7000 surveillance system being marketed for use on public buses consists of a high-definition IP camera and audio recording system that can be configured remotely via built-in web server." Moreover:


According to the product pamphlet for the RoadRecorder 7000 system made by SafetyVision (.pdf), “Remote connectivity to the RoadRecorder 7000 NVR can be established via the Gigabit Ethernet port or the built-in 3G modem. A robust software ecosystem including LiveTrax vehicle tracking and video streaming service combined with SafetyNet central management system allows authorized users to check health status, create custom alerts, track vehicles, automate event downloads and much more.”

The systems use cables or WiFi to pair audio conversations with camera images in order to produce synchronous recordings. Audio and video can be monitored in real-time, but are also stored onboard in blackbox-like devices, generally for 30 days, for later retrieval. Four to six cameras with mics are generally installed throughout a bus, including one near the driver and one on the exterior of the bus.
As of press time, seven cities are in the process of buying or installing these devices: San Francisco, California; Eugene, Oregon; Traverse City, Michigan; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Hartford, Connecticut; and Athens, Georgia.

In San Francisco, the entire cost of the installation of the system on 357 of the city’s buses and trolley cars — $5.9 million — was paid for by a DHS grant. Reportedly, the contract provides for monitors to be placed in 600 additional public transportation vehicles.

DHS doled out taxpayer money to city managers in Concord, North Carolina, as well. In Concord, $1.2 million in federal “stimulus grant” money went to equip its buses with the powerful new surveillance gear, which includes both audio and video components.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/13973-city-after-city-buses-are-being-bugged-by-big-brother

Adding audio recording to surveillance cameras threatens a whole new level of monitoring in American life.

By Jay Stanley:
 
If we start allowing the addition of audio surveillance to all those cameras, that will be an enormous and significant new assault on our privacy—one that will really reshape the character of public life in America.

I spoke recently with my ACLU colleague David Rocah, staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, who has been on top of this issue since it first arose there. He told me how it has unfolded:

In July 2009, the MTA [Maryland Transit Administration] sought an opinion from the state attorney general on whether turning on the audio recording capability of the pre-existing video cameras on the agency’s buses would violate the state wiretap act. Once the request became publicly known, reporters immediately called us, and we expressed our view that the audio recording would be an illegal invasion of privacy. There was also opposition expressed by important state legislators from both parties. The MTA quickly decided to shelve the proposal.

The following year, and each year since, we’ve seen legislation that would have not only authorized the MTA to turn on audio recording, but required it. We and others opposed that legislation, and it has never made it out of committee, and never gone anywhere.

Then, in October of this year, the MTA announced that despite that history, they were just going to go ahead and do it, as a pilot program on 10 buses, with the intent to expand it to their entire fleet.

This time we affirmatively sent out a press statement saying “you shouldn’t do it.” Legislators reached out to us concerned about the invasion of privacy and expressing their interest in introducing legislation to prohibit it. Now it looks like bills will be offered that will say audio cannot be turned on all the time, but only by bus operators in response to some safety incident on the bus. The most protective option would have been to just prohibit audio recording altogether, but this proposal seems to me to be adequately privacy protective. So that’s where things stand now.

A basic question about this audio recording, of course, is its legality. In Maryland, David hopes that this can be addressed through legislation, not litigation. We do think it’s illegal, but, given the problematic state of today’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, it would not be a slam dunk in the courtroom. David, who has of course been thinking about the legal issues around this practice, explains:

The primary claim would be under the state wiretap act, which prohibits recording a “private conversation” without consent. So the question would be whether this is a private conversation, which the courts have said is one where there’s a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” Normally, you would borrow from Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, where courts frequently say that the fact that something takes place in public means that there isn’t a reasonable expectation of privacy.

But I think this type of situation and context hasn’t actually been addressed by the courts. It’s too simplistic to say, “because it’s a public place, you can’t have any reasonable expectation of privacy, since when you’re in public you always run the risk that someone may be nearby who will overhear it.”

The usual circumstance where a third party recording comes up in a public place is when someone happens to hear something, and happens to be recording. But that’s not the same as recording that’s pervasive and continuous, like what the MTA is doing. On each bus there are six cameras—so if they go through with this that would be six microphones, and logic tells you that six mics on a bus are going to pick up most of what is said on the bus.

This, it seems to me, is a different situation—where the government is destroying the possibility of saying something private in a public place. In reality there have always been lots of circumstances where you could be private even though you’re in a public space, in the sense that if you’re the only two people on a bus, and the only other person is the driver up front. You could talk in a low voice to your heart’s content, and the driver would never hear you, and you would know who’s on the bus, and so you could have a private conversation and be perfectly assured that no one would overhear. And I don’t think the government should be in the business of destroying that possibility.

You could argue that at some level it’s trivial to talk about it in the context of only public transportation—how important is it really to have private conversations on buses? But what’s at stake here is the principle of the government audio-surveilling our public spaces, and creating a situation where we can’t have a confidential or private conversation unless we lock ourselves up in our houses. And that’s inimical to the Fourth Amendment. I don’t think there are any cases involving that kind of pervasive audio monitoring. But the Supreme Court has left open—in cases like US v Knotts and US v Jones—the argument that there’s a crucial distinction between happening to overhear something, and pervasive surveillance.

 Audio recording on buses & trains would throw important privacy principles out the window for very little benefit—basically, to allow prosecutors to add additional hate-crime charges where they already have video of an assault, and to support witness testimony with audio recordings of the first seconds of an incident before the bus driver is able to activate recording.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security-free-speech/adding-audio-recording-surveillance