cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/50110241
Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.
oh look, the thing they told us would never happen when this shit was installed
the creep is real.
thought for the day: is thin wedge always a fallacy when it’s always fucking coming true?
Should be fun flooding these with false positives and adversarial noise.
Anywhere children are present…
They are already well known for false positives on gunshots.
My city just ended their contract with our shot spotter company because it hasn’t made anyone safer but has resulted in a ton of mistaken dispatches. People know they can fire a gun and simply walk away, it’ll be 10, 20 minutes before police roll by. Who cares?
Great, we’re gonna go from idiots blasting heavy bass, to idiots blasting anime porn sound tracks around the neighborhood.
- Get an old MP3 player. And speakers.
- Grab the audio from horror, action, gangster, etc movies.
- Make audio files with long periods (hours) of silence punctuated with about 2 minutes of screams and gunshots here and there.
- Go to the location of a Flock microphone with the MP3 player loaded with audio files, speakers, and a trowel.
- Bury the whole thing shallow and hit play.
“Keep the change, ya filthy animal!”
(Old timey Thompson pew pew pew sounds)
- Flock starts using Content ID match to filter out false positives from all known recorded media
Type to hire a voice actor
Enter AI for its first white hat job…
Then use your own voice and gun to make sure Content ID doesn’t work.
and gun
😆😭
Adversarial noise
Then Flock goes deaf any time someone drives up with moderately loud music playing on their car stereo.
thanks for the AV
Play a game with complex audio simulation and go wild for a bit. May not be 100 percent but it may be variable enough to cause it. If you can’t find a game with such a thing, look at the Fallout NV and 4 Nexus modders are batshit.
You made me realize that maybe Home Alone prepared an entire generation for the day we would have to fight dangerous but comically dumb criminals invading our home.
One of the dumbest IRL bad guys even made a cameo.
Or destroy it
Maybe this guy was doing a public service.
What do these devices look like? I’m happy to just put really loud white noise machines right next to them.
Like a little black satellite speaker with a solar panel plugged into it.
Applying a good-sized ball-peen hammer or a vise grip would be more effective, and more costly to them.
And be careful not to use a bad-sized one
Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.
Personal white noise generators?
You misspelled flamethrowers.
I like the cut of your jib.
Awesome 😎
Scramble suits
You may be confused about the way that microphones work ;-)
I’m expecting the barcode license plates any day now after Ben Jordans adversarial noise video.
Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts
If it’s legal to install that stuff at all, it’s unlikely to stay left up to the cities. You have to expect that if someone (e.g. federal govt) wants it deployed, it will go in everywhere whether the cities want it or not.
Cancelling contracts at the local level is useless in the long run. The stuff has to be banned by legislation.
That’s just incorrect, the majority of these are run by local governments.
That’s NOW. As the stuff becomes cheaper and the voice recognition becomes more powerful, it will keep expanding like a corrosive gas.
has to be banned by legislation
The list of things that the legislature needs to do is a mile high, but things will only get worse and not better as long as fascists are running the show.
