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Posts Tagged ‘Surveillance’

Miami Beach police use camera blimp to get around drone surveillance ban

15 Jan

The Miami Beach Police Department found a loophole to circumvent Florida’s 2015 ban on police drone surveillance — a tethered, relatively immobile blimp with a camera attached to the underside. Officially called a ‘tethered aerostat,’ the helium-filled vehicle was used to monitor the approximately 15,000 people who attended the Capital One Beach Bash over the New Year’s holiday.

In 2015, Florida passed the Freedom From Unwanted Surveillance Act, which banned the use of drones for police surveillance. In a letter to the city commission on January 3, City Manager Jimmy Morales explained the police department’s use of the camera blimp, citing necessity due in part to ‘the legal restrictions on police departments under Florida law and because of limited battery life and flight time’ associated with drones.

We have an ? on all things @CapitalOne #BEACHBASH #MiamiBeach #NYE2019 pic.twitter.com/sOJLnGqDaS

— Paul Acosta ???? (@PaulAcostaMBPD) December 28, 2018

Morales went on to call the blimp ‘a new technological solution for aerial monitoring,’ one the police department felt was necessary due to “the emergence of new threats of terrorism seen around the world in such large gatherings…”

A Miami Beach Police Department spokesperson told the Miami New Times the department doesn’t believe its tethered aerostat violates state law. Use of a lighter-than-air vehicle for aerial surveillance has proven controversial, however, with critics saying there is little difference between a stationary floating camera and a remote-controlled flying camera.

The region’s law enforcement has repeatedly demonstrated interest in camera-based surveillance, including the Miami-Dade Police Department’s attempt in 2017 to deploy a wide-area surveillance system involving Cessna planes equipped with cameras. That plan, which was abandoned following heavy criticism, would have monitored the entire county using technology developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in combat zones.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Architecture of Surveillance: NSA Spy Outpost in Brutalist NYC Building

09 Dec

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ]

titanpointe-tower

Like some ancient megalith, an imposing windowless structure in Manhattan may be even more sinister than it appears. The AT&T Long Lines Building at 33 Thomas Street was built for machines, designed to house long-distance phone lines in the 1970s, but reports now suggest it has been used by the National Security Agency as a listening post in the heart of America’s financial capital. Welcome to the home of Project X, both a supposed name of the place (also known as Titanpointe) and title of a short film about it by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras.

Aside from its everyday functions, the 29-story, bunker-like building was constructed to house over 1,000 people in a nuclear attack (with its own food, water and generators) — what better place, really, to conceal government agents for indefinite periods of time? The building is located toward the southern tip of Manhattan, just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site. Its proximity to offices and meeting places of the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank also make it an ideal location from which to spy on such organizations.

project-x

According to reports, NSA and FBI employees and contractors working in the building were given tips on how to avoid standing out when entering and exiting the structure. They were told what clothes to wear and cars to rent to remain inconspicuous.

design-plan

Edward Snowden was a major source for the associated links now bringing this all to light. Apparently, there is no direct evidence that government agencies used the actual AT&T equipment on site — it may have just been an ideal staging space for their own technologies and operations. There is, however, a major “gateway switch” on site (routing international calls) which has led some to suspect there may be more to the story. So far, of course, the NSA has declined to comment.

imposing-architecture

“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.”

[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Offices & Commercial. ]

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Swedish court rules drone photography is surveillance and requires a permit

25 Oct

Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court has issued a ruling that classifies drone photography as surveillance, thus meaning operators of drones with cameras would need to obtain a surveillance license – an unlikely case for members of the public. Swedish drone owners are understandably upset with the ruling, stating that it will effectively kill an entire industry. Local media outlets also find it troubling, since no exceptions are made for journalistic applications.

UAS Sweden, an organization of Swedish drone operators, plans to try to convince lawmakers that the decision is an overreaction that will have a tremendous negative impact on their industry. Either way, the policy will likely be difficult to enforce. Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet points out that local police seem unlikely to prioritize any reports of suspected unauthorized surveillance.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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Nemesis Machine: Cybernetic Cityscape Visualizes Surveillance Data

15 Jul

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 9.41.23 AM

Activated by unspecified data transmissions, spinners whir and lights blink atop skyscrapers of computer parts arranged like a miniature city, visualizing information in real time as it’s collected – including your own movements as an observer. Your own face blinks back at you from a video monitor as you gaze at the many electronic parts cobbled together into a strange dystopian vision of a modern metropolis. ‘The Nemesis Machine’ by Stanza makes use of data that’s already being collected in London, including environmental monitoring and security-based technologies, representing “the complexities of the real time city as a shifting morphing complex system.”

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nemesis machine 2

In that way, the machine becomes a sort of physical avatar of the city, reflecting its activity even when it’s assembled in another country altogether. The viewer becomes almost like a drone hovering over the miniature cityscape, observing all of those beeps, blinks, clicks and movements as they’re sent from the sensors in London, including temperature, humidity and motion. The installation asks the question, what will future cities look like as we move even further into the era of constant surveillance?

nemesis gif

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 9.38.24 AM

nemesis machine 3

“The Nemesis Machine is a mini, mechanical metropolis that monitors the behaviors,a activities, and changing information, of the world around us using networked devices and electronically transmitted information across the internet. The artwork reforms this information and data creating parallel realities. At the heart of this work lies an interest in the urban environment, the network of cameras and sensors to be found there, and the associated issue of privacy and alienation.”

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“The installation poses the question of who owns the data and speculates that virtual borders will soon create more systems of control. What I’m doing, which is sort of new ground, is that I’m hacking access to a network and re-appropriating the data and information, and I’m re-contextualizing it to give it a wider meaning. I want to show that you can do something positive with this data. And as I say data is the medium of the age. The real world is made virtual and then real again.”

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Sculpture & Craft. ]

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Is This 3D-Printed Robot The Future of Surveillance?

15 Aug

[ By Steph in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

Robot Surveillance 3D Printed High Speed
Mobile robotic surveillance devices are nothing new – you can purchase remote-controlled ones online, and the government has been developing spy gadgets that get smaller, faster and harder to spot with each passing year. But the STAR V3 3D-printed robot is able to scoot 15 feet per second and flatten itself to get under doors, calling to mind the iris-scanning robots from the movie Minority Report.

Developed by a team of researchers at The University of California, Berkeley, STAR (Sprawl Tuned Autonomous Robot) V3 is clearly bio-inspired, moving around on six legs that call to mind insects and lobsters. It can overcome obstacles three times taller than its own hip height, and travel at a top speed of 5.2 meters per second. Each side of the robot body has three spoke-wheel legs with a drive distributed from a single motor. All the components can be 3D-printed using a Project 3000 machine, and the parts can be assembled within about thirty minutes.

Robot Surveillance Spider BAE

BAE Systems developed another creepy-crawly robot (among many other sophisticated robotics) that will move in swarms to investigate caves, bunkers and other potentially dangerous places on the battlefront, theoretically reducing casualties. But it’s not hard to imagine these things being deployed in domestic situations, as well, equipped with cameras to spy on people without their knowledge. Once you see how fast the STAR V3 moves in that video, you might just get paranoid about what can fit under your door.