New police radars can 'see' inside homes • Hacker News Board

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#91

Post by lazyjones » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #54

That device is more useful for firefighters than for cops. Firefighters need to find people inside burning buildings. Looking for trapped people is one of the more dangerous jobs in firefighting. The fact that it's being sold more to cops than firefighters indicates that cops are getting too much money for tactical gear. The device is a fairly basic Doppler radar, although the sensitivity is impressive. Someone might…

> That device is more useful for firefighters than for cops.

It's even more useful for burglars than for both cops and firefighters...

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#92

Post by fluidcruft » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #69

jonahx wrote: post #13

As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past. It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your ow…

During a typical 2nd Amendment[1] debate ("flame war", really) a common argument was raised about how various "big, modern weapons" required a different set of rules. Regardless of how one felt about people having "small" (i.e. traditional arms with which society has experience), surely it must be obvious that "big" (new, unknown) things like nerve gases or atomic bombs are so dangerous they must be kept from civilia…

> ... trying to keep technologies bottled up as "forbidden knowledge" is at best only a delaying tactic ...

> ... a real risk that technology will happen faster than our ability to assimilate those technologies ...

> ... the alternative is to give into natural selection as yet another species that didn't adapt to its environment fast enough.

I guess if you came across a hole in the dike, the small thing you can change would be to grab a jackhammer?

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#93

Post by hawleyal » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:44 PM UTC

kozlinov wrote: post #90

Privacy? Fuck privacy! The 21st century attitude. People, seriously, we need to do something about it until it is too late.

I think it's not "fuck privacy", but merely realizing there wasn't really privacy to begin with. More like "privacy is an illusion".

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#94

Post by tempodox » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

Yikes, that site makes noise shortly after opening it. Fank you very much, will never visit again.

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#95

Post by acdha » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 3:04 PM UTC

woodman wrote: post #44

systemtrigger wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes…

Development? The technique has been well known for a long time, I remember hearing about it in the late 90s. It isn't widely used because it isn't practical. Also, your countermeasure doesn't work if there is another reflective surface inside the room.

> Development? The technique has been well known for a long time

The difference is that these things used to be the domain of major government agencies rather than a hobbyist with a few hundred dollars and a poor sense of privacy.

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#96

Post by ashark » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 3:07 PM UTC

x3c wrote: post #70

rtpg wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thing I thought. This is exactly the same. Unless someone starts commercialising mass sales of radars, this is basically inadmissible in court. For those who don't know, the basis for ruling thermal imaging an unreasonable search is that most people don't have high-resolution thermal imaging devices (so you can't assume you're being watched that way)

Parallel construction is a great way to bypass the trivialities like constitution and law.

It's funny ("funny") how much police work operates like how I wrote papers in high school.

Write it from one (possibly unapproved, but convenient) source, find citations for various passages in several books after it's done, mostly by using the index to find exactly what's needed to avoid needing to read more than a couple paragraphs of each book, until the "minimum sources" number is hit.

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#97

Post by mseebach » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 3:17 PM UTC

systemtrigger wrote: post #37

jonahx wrote: post #13

As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past. It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your ow…

Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes…

The bottom line with both of these technologies is that their usecases are simply too narrow to inspire causal use.

The radar-gadget is useful if you're about to storm a house full of armed adversaries - in most other cases, you can just peek through the window or knock on the door and get much the same information.

The laser-bouncer is great for eavesdropping on people who take some effort to hide their communication - if they don't, hiding a wireless microphone or a high-capacity dictaphone is orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper.

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#98

Post by bornabox » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #54

That device is more useful for firefighters than for cops. Firefighters need to find people inside burning buildings. Looking for trapped people is one of the more dangerous jobs in firefighting. The fact that it's being sold more to cops than firefighters indicates that cops are getting too much money for tactical gear. The device is a fairly basic Doppler radar, although the sensitivity is impressive. Someone might…

Reading the article, I thought this might be a UWB (Ultrawideband) device. But going through the tech specs, I'm not sure. It just might be, but it doesn't say in the specs.

"...of a stepped-frequency continuous wave (SFCW) radar transceiver...The RANGE-R cycles through a sequence of 120 frequencies in 2 MHz increments from 3.18 GHz to 3.42 GHz. At each of the frequencies, it transmits a maximum 32mW power level with no modulation."

UWB would work with 500 Mhz or more spectrum, here it's only 240 Mhz, but why not. And UWB would be a pulse-based system.

I thought that there were already UWB Radars deployed with firefighters. Can't find any right now.

If you're interested in UWB: (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband (2) http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/ultra-wideband

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#99

Post by cmdrfred » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 4:01 PM UTC

systemtrigger wrote: post #37

jonahx wrote: post #13

As disturbing as the police use is, I am more disturbed by the possibility (inevitability?) of devices like these, and similar audio devices, becoming so cheap and readily available that even basic privacy from strangers while in your home becomes a thing of the past. It seems to me that before too long anyone could pick up audio and video devices for a couple hundred bucks that would allow them to see you in your ow…

Bouncing lasers off window panes to detect audio is a worrisome development. The counter-measure is to install dual pane windows equipped with acoustic transducers that vibrate the panes with white noise. For the device mentioned in the article, when the technology becomes available to consumers and/or is open-sourced, anyone will be able to count the occupants of any location near to them. The question again becomes…

You can always do what they did in burn notice and simply tape a vibrator to the window.

Re: New police radars can 'see' inside homes

#100

Post by palmer_eldritch » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 4:06 PM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #83

patal wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's absolutely not what parent was arguing, though. Also, that "line of thinking" not necessarily leads there. Accepting the technology is but one step. But we still need to raise moral and ethic questions about it. All parent was really saying is, that the nazis wouldn't have thought twice about using said technology to kill even more people.

It absolutely is what the parent is arguing. It's impossible to say "Evil people would use this technology for evil!" without implying something should be done to stop them, otherwise you're tacitly condoning evil. The thing that should be done is stopping the evil people from doing things, regardless of what they use, rather than questioning morally ambivalent technology just in case evil people use it.

Once a technology has been invented, uninventing it because it might be used to harm people doesn't work. Especially if the people wanting to do the harm are in a position of power (like the nazis were).

Wondering about the countless wonderful or horrific uses new technologies might have is simply part of critical thinking.

I don't think anyone did that calculation but if we were to add up all the good technology brings us with all the bad it brings us, I'm not sure we'd end up in the positive.

So I think it's pretty natural when you hear about some new technology to ask yourself "great, how's that thing going to be used against us?"

Asking yourself what you could do to stop it is a completely different matter. And we all know here that security through obscurity is a pretty poor defense.