Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.
Which… is basically worthless because of just how many cameras there are out there.
A “fun” exercise a couple buddies and I did a few years (… decade?) back was to just use an afternoon of plugging python packages together and scraping county traffic cam feeds to track someone, with their consent, over a few days. And it was ridiculously easy to get their schedule down basically day one and even get a LOT of data on who they were seeing or where they went after parking just based on when and where the car “disappeared”.
And that is just publicly available traffic cameras. Not the giant mess of speed and red light cameras and all the other crap we have in a modern surveillance state.
So even if people are climbing traffic poles and midlining over to the actual boxes to smash them? Those are even less of an issue than normal outages from rain on a windy day.
In 2003 a friend and I were brainstorming what the next big disruptive tech would be and how we might get investment to start a company based on it. My conclusion at the time: cheap digital cameras. 22 years ago they were already cheap and high resolution enough to kill the film camera industry, and they’ve only continued on through today with color night vision, etc.
He did finally get investment and start his own company: automating regulatory paperwork for small companies that would be swamped in it without help.
Meanwhile, networked cameras are approaching “smartdust” levels of ubiquity. It’s like living around the time of Gutenberg and seeing the world relatively smothered in printed text leaflets, hundreds of times as many pages of text in less time and for lower cost than scribes. The changes have only just begun, and people aren’t really aware of how fundamentally life has changed as a result.
Which… is basically worthless because of just how many cameras there are out there.
A “fun” exercise a couple buddies and I did a few years (… decade?) back was to just use an afternoon of plugging python packages together and scraping county traffic cam feeds to track someone, with their consent, over a few days. And it was ridiculously easy to get their schedule down basically day one and even get a LOT of data on who they were seeing or where they went after parking just based on when and where the car “disappeared”.
And that is just publicly available traffic cameras. Not the giant mess of speed and red light cameras and all the other crap we have in a modern surveillance state.
So even if people are climbing traffic poles and midlining over to the actual boxes to smash them? Those are even less of an issue than normal outages from rain on a windy day.
In 2003 a friend and I were brainstorming what the next big disruptive tech would be and how we might get investment to start a company based on it. My conclusion at the time: cheap digital cameras. 22 years ago they were already cheap and high resolution enough to kill the film camera industry, and they’ve only continued on through today with color night vision, etc.
He did finally get investment and start his own company: automating regulatory paperwork for small companies that would be swamped in it without help.
Meanwhile, networked cameras are approaching “smartdust” levels of ubiquity. It’s like living around the time of Gutenberg and seeing the world relatively smothered in printed text leaflets, hundreds of times as many pages of text in less time and for lower cost than scribes. The changes have only just begun, and people aren’t really aware of how fundamentally life has changed as a result.