Seattle cops may soon be watching, video update…
A New Apparatus Capable of Spying on You Has Been Installed Throughout Downtown Seattle. Very Few Citizens Know What It Is, and Officials Don’t Want to Talk About It.
November 6, 2013
by Matt Fikse-Verkerk and Brendan Kiley
If you’re walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You’ll see off-white boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to utility poles. If you’re walking around downtown while looking at a smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: “4th&Seneca;,” “4th&U; nion,” “4th&University;,” and so on. That is how you can see the Seattle Police Department’s new wireless mesh network, bought from a California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.
The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?
How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone, laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its “media access control address”—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous to a device’s thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?
September 7, 2007
Seattle police may turn to private security cameras around the downtown business core to help watch for assaults, drug deals and other crimes.
Following the lead of many other U.S. cities, police and the Downtown Seattle Association are examining the creation of a surveillance system that would allow officers to track live video footage from security cameras on and around downtown buildings.
But the idea has been sharply criticized by privacy advocates.
The video would serve as additional eyes for police, who are facing increased violence in areas near Westlake Center and Third Avenue and Pine Street, proponents say.
“I think we’re a little bit behind the curve compared to other cities,” said David Dillman, vice president of operations for the Downtown Association, which promotes the development of the urban core. “It’s another resource. We still have limited capacity to put police out on the street.”
Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said he has seen camera-surveillance programs work in Chicago and London and believes they’re something every police department should consider.
“It is certainly of great interest, particularly downtown,” Kerlikowske said. “It would be foolish of a police department not to explore it.”
But creation of such a program would likely face fire from the American Civil Liberties U nion (ACLU) and other groups that fear such surveillance could lead to an erosion of privacy.
Last month, an ACLU report on the use of camera surveillance by police in California concluded that video surveillance does not deter crime. The group urged California cities to stop deploying surveillance cameras in public places.
“The use of surveillance cameras, unfortunately, comes at the expense of proven crime-reduction measures such as better lighting, foot patrols, and community policing. In this sense, throwing money at video surveillance actually detracts from law enforcement’s efforts to reduce crime,” said Mark Schlosberg of the ACLU of Northern California, a co-author of the report.
Moving crime around?
Doug Honig, spokesman for the ACLU in Seattle, said that “public surveillance cameras serve mainly to move crime from one area to another.”
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