Microsoft, NYC Marketing Vast Surveillance System To Other Cities

Presto Vivace writes with this snippet from the New York Times: "'In the six months since the Domain Awareness System was unveiled, officials of Microsoft, which designed the system with the New York Police Department, said they have been surprised by the response and are actively negotiating with a number of prospective buyers, whom Microsoft declined to identify.' Don't want this in your city? You might want to let your local leadership know how you feel."

Here in the nation's capitol

[Presto Vivace]

the local police chief explicitly said it was OK to record officers acting on official business. [cnet.com]

What really irritates me is that

[Presto Vivace]

there is always money for surveillance and swat teams, but never money for education, health care, jobs programs, or anything that people would actually want.

Remember what we learned from the TSA

[GodfatherofSoul]

Don't trust a word of what we're told, only what we can see. Like their scanners, we were first told they couldn't record images, then that turned to "well, they can but only in testing mode", then that turned to "well, they can on production machines, but they can't be pulled off them", then that turned into stories of TSA agents emailing around pictures of passengers to their friends.

Re:But who watches the watchers?

[Anonymous Coward]

He shouldn't worry. Here's how the London Metropolitan Police handled the execution, er, tragic death of a Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, misidentified as a terrorist in 2005 [wikipedia.org].

Missing CCTV footage

Initial UK media reports suggested that no CCTV footage was available from the Stockwell station, as recording media had not been replaced after being removed for examination after the previous day's attempted bombings. Other reports stated that faulty cameras on the platform were the reason for the lack of video evidence. An anonymous source confirmed that CCTV footage was available for the ticket area, but that there was a problem with the platform coverage. The source suggested that there was no useful CCTV footage from the platform or the train carriage.[103]

Extracts from a later police report stated that examination of the platform cameras had produced no footage. It said: "It has been established that there has been a technical problem with the CCTV equipment on the relevant platform and no footage exists." It also reported there was no footage from CCTV in the carriage where Menezes was shot, saying "Although there was on-board CCTV in the train, due to previous incidents, the hard drive had been removed and not replaced."

The platform CCTV system is maintained by the Tube Lines consortium in charge of maintaining the Northern Line; unofficial sources from inside the company insisted that the cameras were in working order. It was also reported that London Underground sources insisted that at least three of the four cameras trained on the Stockwell Tube platform were in full working order, and rejected suggestions that the cameras had not been fitted with new tapes after police took away footage from the previous day, 21 July, when suspects in the failed bombings caught trains there.[104]

Police do something they don't want recorded for the public to see, the surveillance equipment will coincidently be malfunctioning at that time.

Re:But who watches the watchers?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Please don't mistake my quotation for agreement. As it happens, Joe Pasco is a slimy shitbag even by the relaxed standards of lobbyists, he has quite the history, and the idea that '[police officers] “need to move quickly, in split seconds, without giving a lot of thought to what the adverse consequences for them might be.”' is nothing more than a flowery way of saying "We must be given impunity, or the terrorists or somebody win."

New York doesn't quite have LA's pure sleaze; but they make up for it in a more efficient, technocratic, vision of surveillance dystopia(As icing on the cake, a number of totally-ethically-unimpeachable corporate actors, mostly financial sector, even have cozy deals that provide them with access to the surveillance centers, just to keep a watchful eye on their interests...) Heartwarming place, really.