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Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

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Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#181
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretend to be innocent and mistakenly drop a heavy steel bar stolen from the gym on the camera and run away.

opps, I accidentally dropped this heavy steel bar while on a pole 30-40' off the ground.

There’s a few good reasons you need a certification to get liability insurance to climb radio towers and this is one of them.

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#182

A lot of statements and theories about these camera's from all sorts of directions, but they're just pole cams. LEA's have been using pole cams since before I was born (I'm 34). I worked in law enforcement as an analyst and spent some time staring at pole cams that were setup to surveil known drug dealers or criminal gang members. To do one correctly (i.e. legally) you typically need a warrant or a court order, but i…

One might wonder how comes that US has so much drugs flowing with all this cameras around and massive surveillance.

One might think that drugs are only an excuse.

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#183
post #35

Anybody else afraid to click some of the links in that post until you hear about legality of accessing (and controlling!) a DEA camera that's likely part of an active investigation?

I know what your risk-management matrix says, but there's a whole world out there to explore, buddy!

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#185
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use nordvpn that I purchased with a credit card. Before using it I would get notices from my ISP for pirating but not anymore. As far as I'm concerned it just makes me not the lowest hanging fruit and that's good enough for me. Even if they wouldn't cut off my service from those notices I consider it worth $50 a yearfor peace of mind. Plus it comes in handy for getting around some geo restrictions.

Case in point: thinking that any of this is relevant in a thread about people logging into government-setup cameras. Btw, you might want to look into what came out of this story: https://medium.com/@derek./how-is-nordvpn-unblocking-disney-... — it's mostly guesswork but I'm not sure how a company buys 32 million residential ips otherwise.

I have special insight into this situation (including both companies named within) and it is exactly as the article implies. These people are printing money on the backs of regular (unsuspecting) people, and nobody asks questions because of the amount of money involved. To be quite honest, this is what I imagine the fine line must look like, which exists between things that don't need regulation and things that do. That fine, fuzzy line of "These people are obviously up to some hinky bullshit and lying-not-lying to everybody involved".

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#186
post #35

Anybody else afraid to click some of the links in that post until you hear about legality of accessing (and controlling!) a DEA camera that's likely part of an active investigation?

Only 350m people in the world need to worry, the rest of us are outside of your (legal) jurisdiction.

Ohhh boy, do I have some bad news for you...

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#187
post #124
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oakland has shotspotter and my understanding is that it's been considered a failure

Really? Why? In DC, I think it's been pretty successful because lots of gunshots do not result in police calls.

This is an interesting system. I have worked with this technology on large and small scales, and it's a lot less accurate than you'd think. You have no hope of sending a police cruiser to check out a single gunshot based on the outputs of this system. But a single gunshot won't generate a police call in many cities as it is, so no change there. But a gang war? Sure, that will get the phone lines going and also generate many data points to help pinpoint the location using this system. So many factors affect the speed of sound through air, that the problem becomes one of those logarithmic "How many more microphones do you want to install to eke out this tiny bit of accuracy?" kinds of things. I'm not sure it's useful to point to what cities are saying about it, either. The technology itself is a Hard Problem, but I'm also 100% sure many law enforcement bureaucrats will use any excuse to keep money flowing into their budgets, even if the money is earmarked for something that doesn't work (or doesn't work well).

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also worth noting that just about every redlight intersection has cameras mounted on top pointing at traffic in each direction. It's pretty much impossible to navigate through a city anonymously in a vehicle. Now with facial recognition software getting so advanced I'd water it's impossible to walk through a city anonymously as well. They don't necessarily need aerial imagery when every intersection has HD cameras po…

Video-based lane occupancy detection is widely used by traffic lights, but it's rare for these cameras to be connected to anything other than a trigger module in the signal cabinet. It is conceptually possible to also connect these cameras to a remote monitoring system, but this comes at a very high cost. My city has been one of the stronger proponents of doing so but has only connected a very limited number of inter…

The city (major suburb) I used to live in has done this with all the intersections that lead into the city, effectively making it impossible to enter or leave the city without them having a record of it. I know they are able to scan license plates from these cameras -- and do so automatically -- because it's how they are able to "catch" people trying to use those 3M strobe lights that ambulances and fire trucks use to make the lights turn green: An intersection detects the use of the strobe, but also is able to know that no (deployed) emergency vehicle is near that intersection, so it automatically "calls" the police department with the license plate of the offender. This information was buried on that city's website in a bunch of short videos the traffic engineers made about their new gee-whiz traffic management system.

Which, by the way, many municipalities are building (or have already built) "new gee-whiz traffic management systems" which are Orwellian nightmare machines. They seem to be flying well under the radar because everybody hates traffic, and especially because nobody is allowed into the new traffic management buildings for tours, to see the capabilities of the system that seem to be hooked directly into law enforcement's computers.

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#189
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Why? In DC, I think it's been pretty successful because lots of gunshots do not result in police calls.

This is an interesting system. I have worked with this technology on large and small scales, and it's a lot less accurate than you'd think. You have no hope of sending a police cruiser to check out a single gunshot based on the outputs of this system. But a single gunshot won't generate a police call in many cities as it is, so no change there. But a gang war? Sure, that will get the phone lines going and also genera…

Hm, I'm not so sure. Take this for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#Shooting_a...

Officers were able to locate and respond within a minute because of a system like this.

Re: Redditor finds unsecured surveillance cameras seemingly placed by US government

#190
post #19

I'm more surprised about how those cameras handle the reddit traffic without a glitch

these cameras cost thousands of dollars.

> The VB-H43's powerful DIGIC Net II Processor allows simultaneous streaming of M-JPEG and H.264 codecs in multiple resolutions (1080p, 720p and 4:3 category video sizes) to meet various end-user needs.

> Max. 30 Clients + 1 Admin Client - H.264: Max. 10 Clients

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