One shouldn't trust their eyes alone to spot all the hidden cameras that private property owners love to have covering the streets. For example, it took me months to realize that a tenant in my own building has three cameras pointed down from the windows of their unit and can track my every coming and going if they so wish, and that's an environment I have my eyes on every single day.

I have a modified Olympus OM-D E-M5Ⅱ MFT camera body that I picked up on a whim because it came with a bunch of lenses and batteries and other things I wanted to use with my PEN-F, and it turned out to be amazing for spotting hidden surveillance cameras.

The way it works is that the underlying camera sensor can see IR by design, and an IR-cut filter is installed over it to restrict it to the visible spectrum for photography. The mod simply opens up the camera body and removes that part. Surveillance cameras in dark rooms (or at night on the street) then show up as bright spots, because the modified body can see the ring of IR LEDs they use to illuminate dark scenes for night surveillance.

I don't have any surveillance-spotting images to share, because I usually only do that via the viewfinder live preview (because tbh a photo of an all-black room with a single bright IR blob isn't interesting enough to shoot), but for example here is my IR photo of the Windows XP “Bliss” hill (near the Sonoma/Napa border) both as-shot and after channel mixing:

- https://i.ibb.co/23t4HdrZ/P5160220-1.jpg

- https://i.ibb.co/1Yw8RFLS/P5160220-2.jpg

Not affiliated with and have never purchased from this store, but here are bodies converted for every system: https://www.lifepixel.com/product-category/converted-cameras

My car was stolen in Seattle and it was found with the person driving it when he was pulled over by police. In the car he had paperwork with his name on it, a weapon, and his work uniform with his name badge (he was a security guard - lol) and a neighborhood witness.

Despite a mountain of evidence, the prosecutors declined to press charges because without direct video evidence of him stealing the car, they would not get a jury to convict, because jurors in Seattle have become accustom to thinking that the only way to overcome reasonable doubt is to have it on video. And even that often isn't enough...

> The camera can have different ways of seeing encoded in it, including kinds of gazes that enforce social agreements about what kinds of behavior and people are considered “normal”

The phrase "kinds of gazes" strikes me as the sort of thing that's only going to make sense to people trained in a very particular and idiosyncratic flavor of ethical critique. What a normal person sees here is, "These cameras can detect if people are acting bizarre and dangerous," which is probably something most people would appreciate. In Seattle, the problem, of course, is that the streets are full of people acting bizarre and dangerous, it doesn't take a camera network to find them, and the police seem to be under strict orders not to do anything about it.

The content itself is somewhat interesting but imo plain language would be more accessible.

Generally, most modern devices send broadcast/wildcard probes precisely to avoid leaking the PNL. From what I know, directed probes are only sent for hidden APs.

  Flat black circles on top of traffic signal control boxes, which are large, gray or painted metal boxes, typically found at street corners.

  The Acyclica device casts a fake Wi-Fi network and tracks phones that try to join the network in passing cars. Since each phone has a unique identifier …, different Acyclica installations can track your personal location as you pass them in the city.

However, my concern is always about the possibility for misuse. Even if I trust the current government, it doesn't mean I will trust a future one. What if they use the technology to track/monitor people like investigative journalists? We've already seen a recent state passing bills that would make it harder for investigative journalism to happen. So it's not even out of the realm of possibility for this technology to get used in ways that even would be deemed "legal" as they can simply expand the laws to use it unreasonably in the future.

There is also the other obvious concern which is surrounding things like data breaches or other unauthorized access issues. There have already been many people exposing some large security flaws in a lot of the devices currently out there.

Where I am stuck is how do we balance the huge set of benefits that can come from this kind of tech, with the tradeoffs? Ultimately this tech is unlikely to stop being implemented as governments and even most of the population is largely unbothered by mass surveillance. I almost don't even bother bringing up discussions on these topics with non-tech people as I have yet to find someone who seemed to care at all about this. If anything they are very in support of this technology being implemented as they seem unable to understand the tradeoffs due to it often requiring more technical knowledge. They just see all the positives it can give, and don't grasp the negatives.

Ultimately people usually desire safety, and these cameras definitely can give people more safety. Is it possible to balance safety with proper privacy safeguards?