A few year down the road the Shirky principle demands a revelation that ShorSpotter sponsored the NRA. It’s amazing lime 500 years later, there’s still a developed country on earth that hasn’t figured the externalities of gunpowder
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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
151–160 of 443 posts
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#152Interesting how takes on ShotSpotter vary depending on the context and situation. In San Jose it was used to help enforce rules against firing guns in the air. In these cases there would usually be reports to police, but finding the shooter was extremely difficult. With ShotSpotter it became possible to identify locations on individual lots. Using this information enforcement became much more effective and there was a huge reduction in celebratory gunfire. In a large number of these cases no charges needed to be filed as gun owners were often uninformed, apologetic, and compliant. From the start of this program it was explicitly stated that ShotSpotter information would only be used by constables on patrol and would not be admitted as evidence in court. System coverage was based on where crimes were being reported. That such criteria overlap with race and class makes sense without necessarily being connected.
It would be interesting to know if there might be some reasonable bounds that could be used to enable ShotSpotter to be used without being considered intrusive surveillance. Having information about gunshots or possible gunshots can be extremely useful for responders who need to understand where events are happening. This does not necessarily mean that the system has to be open to other uses, especially recording and replay of audio.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#153Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: > Conversations recorded by ShotSpotter sensors have twice been introduced as evidence in criminal trials. In one case the court allowed it, in another the court did not. The possibility clearly exists, and depending on interpretation of state law, it may be permissible for ShotSpotter to record conversations on the street for future use as evidence.
Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above. I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were. >On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the…
But that’s not how shotspotter is supposed to work. It’s supposed to detect gunshots, not be used for evidence of voice recordings. If that was the point they could just put microphones recording everyone and play them back whenever there was a crime.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#155i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part. but this: > The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh . the distance to the…
Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority communities.
I get they can’t necessarily do anything about this, since they’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were to design a system to spot a certain kind of crime in real time, would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime or in zones that experienced it scarcely? It's hard to buy into the rhetoric of "it's only fair if you monitor the crime equally" if you have already independently sampled it for decades and by now know the zones where it's much likely to happen. Would you patrol a d…
> would you place it in zones historically more plagued by that kind of crime You mean these zones? https://whitecollarcrime.zone/
For shotspotter? No.
If someone made a system for detecting fraud, embezzlement, or insider trading, you bet your ass it would be deployed there.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#157I have some noisy neighbours and I've thought of the same idea for controlling noise in neighbourhoods. You could have a microphone on every lamp post and send people fines for violating the rules.
I've been having a nightmarish time trying to track down intermittent low frequency industrial noise. It's over the EPA regulations, it's neighborhood wide, and it is on for 2 hours between 11pm and 1am on random days. The EPA did monitoring of the house and site but couldn't pinpoint where it was coming from because of how low frequency it was. This isn't surveillance, this is the equivalent of finding who is dumpin…
Now I am curious
For 20Hz noise, are there too many reflections to use an oscilloscope with 3 mics on a 25ft baseline to triangulate it (you'd have to elevate the mics)?
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious if the author lives in the wealthier or non wealthy region. I do not own a gun. I currently live in a city and would be happy to learn they were installing shot spotter near me. It's maybe the least intrusive type of surveillance there is. It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. edit: previous statement not correct but leaving it up as it's been responded to
> It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used fo…
Is there any evidence of shotspotter using the data that it collects for something other than good? Even if shotspotter collected audio that didn't contain gunshot-like sounds (which they don't; without a triggering event, the sensors never write the audio out to a file or send it over the network for review), how could they monitize it or do anything malicious with it? How could they tie loose audio of people walking around to the identities of those people (besides the method in the two court cases cited by the article, where homicide detectives listened to the audio of the shootings and heard verbal exchanges incident to the shootings where the victim verbally identified the shooters)?
It it's so amusing to me that people who carry around a phone 24/7 spend time imagining these intricate Rube Goldberg surveillance systems to be afraid of.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. My previous statement was incorrect. Edited above. I understand the hypothetical case they could be misused but I'm still not aware of any cases they actually were. >On June 8, 2007, the Shotspotter acoustic gunshot detection and location system recorded two gunshots from the corner of 83rd Avenue and Birch Street in Oakland, California. The first one, at 11:10:22 p.m., was at 8236 Birch Street, and the…
But that’s not how shotspotter is supposed to work. It’s supposed to detect gunshots, not be used for evidence of voice recordings. If that was the point they could just put microphones recording everyone and play them back whenever there was a crime.
The voice recordings were only picked up because they were incident to shootings. Without the shooting, the audio wouldn't have been written out to file or ever be heard by anyone.
Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood
#160i broadly agree with the sentiment in this article, especially the "no public oversight" part. but this: > The reader can probably infer how this coverage pattern relates to race and class in Albuquerque. It's not perfect, but the distance from your house to a ShotSpotter sensor correlates fairly well with your household income. is facetious and is almost certainly argued in bad faith. well, duh . the distance to the…
Actually this is a direct example of how systemic racism works. The goal isn’t to surveil minorities more, it’s just that the system watches places where crimes occur. Consider that, when an area has more surveillance, more people who commit crimes are caught. All of a sudden, you’re disproportionately catching minority criminals. Better put in more surveillance to cover the higher crime rates in those minority commu…
> hey’re gonna put microphones where it’s most efficient, but maybe it’s yet another argument against mass surveillance.
BINGO!