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ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

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Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#161

Post by notatoad »

verteu wrote: post #116
jcrawfordor wrote: post #71

Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evol…

Why didn't you mention that the only "conversation" recorded by ShotSpotter admitted in court was a guy saying "[shooter's name], why did you shoot me!" two seconds after the sound of gunfire? It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.

that doesn't really change the fact that they have microphones that are capable of recording voices, they have storage of the recordings, and are able to retrieve recordings and are willing to provide them to the police.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#162

Post by humanistbot »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #84
bastawhiz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just says a signal if there is a loud noise in public. This is probably false. There have been two convictions as a result of recordings of conversations that happened through the devices. I, for one, do not want microphones capable of recording my conversations placed near me by the government. Not because I'm paranoid the government is conspiring against me, but rather because I have zero confidence they're st…

It sounds like you are paranoid. Why would the government be listening to a conversation you might be having near a device used for tracking gunshots? Is there some little man somewhere just waiting to pounce on you or anyone just for that purpose? I don't know how effective these devices are but any tool that helps the police go after criminals is a good thing and no one should be fighting against good things.

Over a two year period in the US, there were over 600 cases where police officers and civilians with access to law enforcement databases violated internal policies and safeguards to access private data about "romantic partners, business associates, neighbors, journalists and others for reasons that have nothing to do with daily police work". This is certainly an undercount, as this is just who got caught and the department didn't cover it up. These are the cases they admitted to doing it and were charged, so the records are public.

"Among those punished: an Ohio officer who pleaded guilty to stalking an ex-girlfriend and who looked up information on her; a Michigan officer who looked up home addresses of women he found attractive; and two Miami-Dade officers who ran checks on a journalist after he aired unflattering stories about the department."

https://apnews.com/general-news-699236946e3140659fff8a2362e1...

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#163

Post by refulgentis »

modriano wrote: post #158
zemo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 walkin…

This isn't intricate or Rube Goldberg.

When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?"

It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's a great idea and in fact the moral option. Maximize shareholder value => stonk go up => Americans have safe retirements.

Why am I talking about Google?

People talk past eachother on this stuff. The problem isn't that "have they ever done anything bad?", it's that the incentive structure is set up such that something that crosses the line will eventually happen. They have an incentive to keep the customer happy.

And as the article, and comments below from 1.5 hours before you posted point out, there's no room for argument on that: this already happened. A court threw out info because it was illegally obtained.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#164

Post by blatherard »

prophesi wrote: post #126
simonw wrote: post #26

If anyone wants the raw data, it's available in window._Flourish_data variable on https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed Which means you can extract it with my https://shot-scraper.datasette.io/ tool like this: shot-scraper javascript \ 'https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/16818696/embed' _Flourish_data \ > /tmp/data.json That's a 25MB file. I loaded it into SQLite like this: cat /tmp/data.json | jq .events | \…

Thanks! And alternatively you can create an anchor element in the console with `href` set as a JSON stringified representation of `window._Flourish_data`. Then set a download attribute with the filename you'd like, and simulate a click to download it. To use it in leaflet, you'll need to iterate over the `events` array and change `lon` to `lng` before adding each point to the leaflet map.

An even simpler option to get the data, at least in firefox, is to open the console, enter `window._Flourish_data` then right-click the result and select "Copy Object" which will put the json in your paste buffer and you can then paste it into a file.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#165

Post by Retric »

verteu wrote: post #116
jcrawfordor wrote: post #71

Hello all, occasionally I write what I consider "Albuquerque content" and I do not expect it to become broadly popular. This article is something I put together very quickly and it probably assumes a certain degree of familiarity with the political context around policing in Albuquerque (which either side will tell you is very contentious) and, more broadly, policing and civil justice. Even without the currently evol…

Why didn't you mention that the only "conversation" recorded by ShotSpotter admitted in court was a guy saying "[shooter's name], why did you shoot me!" two seconds after the sound of gunfire? It seems an important piece of context if you are concerned about surveillance.

There are multiple conversations from shot spotter admitted into court. New Bedford, Connecticut and Oakland had court cases off the top of my head, but a much wider range of conversation ends up being listened to by police and parallel construction is a thing.

Further, the concern is unequal policing biases statistics resulting in more uneven policing. A grid of microphones covering a full city is unbiased, placement based on past data isn't.

Drug crime is known to be fairly evenly distributed across different incomes, arrests are extremely biased.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#166

Post by thereisnospork »

kstenerud wrote: post #148
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. I…

> Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. This is in fact the crux of the problem. By significantly increasing monitoring of areas with higher crime rates, you inadvertently create a vicious cycle feedback loop: The more you monitor an area, the more samples you get, biasing the stats (because your sampling is no longer uniform). Then these stats…

The point is supposed to be that the monitoring and increased policing makes at least certain crimes impossible therefore improving the area for the rest of us.

The farce is the utter failure of the 'survalience state' to actually catch and prosecute people.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#167

Post by thereisnospork »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #138
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting surveillance for gun crime in areas with the highest rates of gun crime is obviously what’s happening. I think the author and some commenters are nervous about claims that gun crime is inversely correlated with neighborhood wealth, which creates some of these strange accusations that some other bias is at play. If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. I…

> If you pull up a map of crime in most cities the inverse correlation with home prices is obvious. If the police department spends the majority of its resources on certain areas, it will respond to the majority of incidents and make the majority of arrests in those areas. You can truthfully say "look, these numbers are higher than anywhere else!" but that doesn't necessarily mean there's more crime happening there —…

>With regard to the article, why is it obvious that police are putting surveillance in areas with the highest rates of gun crime?

Because there are nicer neighborhoods and less than nice neighborhoods? In so far as I can tell this is true to various degrees in every place I've ever lived or visited. Colloquially, some neighborhoods have manicured lawns, other neighborhoods have cars on blocks - it's 'obvious'[0] that the latter warrants more policing.

[0]The truth of it is arguable, perhaps, but it is very obvious.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#168

Post by TaylorAlexander »

xeckr wrote: post #123
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument assumes that the devices are only used as marketed. My understanding is that this assumption doesn’t hold, and that police regularly use these systems as an excuse to harass people in poor neighborhoods. The reports I have read suggest that police will enter a neighborhood they want to patrol, and if they see someone they don’t like they can claim they were called in by shotspotter, then shake down the…

You are suggesting that police regularly invent false positives for ShotSpotter. Is there any evidence to support this? This would seem like something that would easily show up on an audit.

Sourcing this for you, I see that there has indeed been a great deal of rigorous investigation, reporting, and lawsuits regarding the ways ShotSpotter leads to overpolicing, though I had misremembered one thing - the false detections come from the system itself, though this does also lead police to perceive areas as more dangerous and then patrol them more often, leading to measured increases in stop and frisk pat downs.

The ACLU has a thorough article breaking down reporting from the City of Chicago Inspector General, Northwestern School of Law’s MacArthur Justice Center, Vice news and the Associated Press.

ACLU article with links to the other reports here:

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...

Key takeaways from the reporting linking ShotSpotter to over policing listed here:

1) ShotSpotter false alarms send police on numerous trips (in Chicago, more than 60 times a day) into communities for no reason and on high alert expecting to potentially confront a dangerous situation. Given the already tragic number of shootings of Black people by police, that is a recipe for trouble.

2) Indeed, the Chicago IG’s analysis of Chicago police data found that the “perceived aggregate frequency of ShotSpotter alerts” in some neighborhoods leads officers to engage in more stops and pat downs.

3) The placement of sensors in some neighborhoods but not others means that the police will detect more incidents (real or false) in places where the sensors are located. That can distort gunfire statistics and create a circular statistical justification for over-policing in communities of color.

Re: ShotSpotter: listening in on the neighborhood

#170

Post by modriano »

refulgentis wrote: post #163
modriano wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 walkin…

This isn't intricate or Rube Goldberg. When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?" It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's…

These devices don't send audio over the network unless a shooting-like noise is detected. I get it, if the state can listen to all of our communications that are immediately coincident with shootings, what privacy will any of us have?

But in all seriousness, you should actually read the section for that court case. Here's all of the text for that case from the link:

""" Commonwealth v. Denison, No. BRCR2012-0029 (Mass. Super. Ct. Oct. 7, 2015) "ShotSpotter is a listening and recording system that runs 24/7, attuned to the sound of gunfire. When the system hears gunfire, or what it recognizes as gunfire, it locates it, reports it, preserves the recording, and send the recording to the customer within seconds.” The defendant, charged with first degree murder, moved to suppress a recording made by ShotSpotter of an verbal exchange among numerous individuals before and after the fatal gunshots. The court rejected that the argument that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the exchange was “audible by anyone passing and was in fact heard by a crowd of neighbors and other witnesses.” However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded. The court also found that the interception was “willful” because the police had “purposefully directed the placement of the sensors.” The court granted the motion to suppress: “the continuous secret audio surveillance of selective urban neighborhoods ** is the type of surreptitious eavesdropping as an investigative tool that the Legislature sought to prohibit." """ [0]

The verbal exchange was recorded because it was incident to the shooting that triggered the recording. In addition to recording the shooter(s) shoot the victim(s), it also recorded the shooter(s) and victim(s) speak before the shooting. This was in public so there wasn't an expectation of privacy, and I can't imagine this is the kind of recording that the Massachusetts's legislature "sought to prohibit".

[0] https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/01/08/CRIMINAL%20E...

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