Bus Rides, now with 100% more recorded conversations!

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/public-bus-audio-surveillance/

My favorite part was the one where they were like "this is obviously a violation of wiretap laws, so just put up a sign saying we're wiretapping you all the time and it's totally cool!"

Anyone have any sort of idea about where this wonderful new surveillance-state-mobile is taking us?

Public transportation, both here in KC and other places that I've used it often (the DC Metro, the TTC) has to my recollection always had placards by the little glass dome saying stuff like "For the safety of our drivers and passengers, we monitor activity on this bus/train".

I don't see how this is even remotely considered wiretapping - you're in a public location, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. If they were intercepting your cell signal and recording that, then obviously you have issues with wiretapping laws.

A bunch of states have two party recording laws, not wiretapping per se. Just that you can't secretly record other people. And yes they're right that the sign bypasses that (same deal with phone support having a recording saying the call may be monitored)

I don't like it, but it seems legal. But.. Why? The reasons about customer complaints seems thin. And nobody's going to talk about their terrorist plots or pot dealer's address if they're sitting next to a sign that says "TOTALLY RECORDING THIS SHIT, YO"

.. well, maybe their pot dealer's address. ::stoners::

I don't particularly give a shit about the privacy aspect; I don't feel like I have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a city bus. I do kinda wish the people around me had a little more shame, but that's the bus for ya. I would absolutely push for stringent controls on how they're archived and accessed, and I know lolpolice and everything, but you have to have some level of trust in law enforcement or everything is fucked.*

My much larger concern would be over efficacy. Is the safety/enforcement ROI of these systems something we need to spend our scarce municipal monies on? How ridiculous are the vendors' service contracts? Is law enforcement clamoring to prosecute a whole bunch of crimes that they just don't have the evidence for that bus audio recordings would push over the top?

I suspect that the answers to all those are pretty damning for these systems.

* yeah, everything is kinda fucked, I know.

This is basically my viewpoint on it - I don't know if there's any more advantage to having audio recordings as opposed to video.

I'm guessing the "I don't have an expectation of privacy in [location X]" attitude is probably the realistic and less depressing perspective, My attitude is a bit more emotionally pro-privacy in that I think the concept of "expectation of privacy" is narrow and derived from a previous era where the "non-expectation of privacy" sphere wasn't practical to omni-record. Now that it is, maybe our sense of expectation of privacy should be derived broadly enough so that we aren't all panopticoned so much. YMMV.

I have no idea. I ride the bus pretty much every day, and I don't really hear people doing anything exciting. One time a dude waved his dick around and we had to wait for him to put it away and leave. Another time two dudes got into a fight because one dude may have taken a picture of the other, a retaliatory photograph was snapped and then it was time to exchange contact details and by that I mean fist each other in the face. Other times people (including me) get into shouty arguments over politics or whatever, but that always ends peacefully enough.

I'm guessing because the DHS is apparently funding this (read the article) the impact would be on potential terrorists meeting on the bus to do terrorist things. Which is, like, why would a terrorist meet on a bus when they could meet anywhere else? I have no idea.

What I do know is that I resent having a camera aimed at my face by the bus. And I resent even more that my discussions could be monitored for potentially subversive communication. It's not like the US government hasn't abused the mechanisms of state to stalk and harass civil liberties and protest groups in the past or anything.

So I dislike it, and I especially dislike that they can do it so long as they put up a sign.

So can I wear a sign stating that I'm recording, and just go around recording?

I guess pretty soon we'll all be recorded all the time and all the powers that be have to do is display a sign.

Details depend on the state, but generally as long as you don't trespass to get it, recording or photographing in public ("no reasonable expectation of privacy") is not only legal but protected under the First Amendment for news gathering. The is a lively jurisprudence on what constitutes reasonable expectation of privacy.

I suspect you're right here; this program is probably more about lining the pockets of some "friend" of someone in the city's hierarchy than it is about effectively addressing public safety concerns.

Not towards fascism?

Yeah, that's always my first assumption when a city/county/state/federal body wants to buy some expensive system with no clear reason for why they need it.

Buses generally have cameras where I'm from. I don't think they record sound.

The cheapest form of bus surveillance would be to crowdsource it. Pretty much everyone has a phone that can take video and more and more folks have smartphones that could presumably stream it. We could pay them with free bus fare or coupons or some shit.

Hell, we could even expand it and get rid of the need for patrol cars and instead have soccer moms and tweens and old couples walking their dogs record all the goings on with their iphones. Once a week you'd be given $10 for the appstore. Rewards would vary by the crimes they caught -- if someone records some neighbors' domestic dispute that ends in death, they get the neighbors' house!

OR we could have itty bitty drones that fly around the ceiling of buses with bottlerockets to shoot at wrongdoers.

That's what Operation TIPS was missing: Reward tiers!