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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Clearly there needs to be Yellow "FBI Surveillance" stickers you can put on utility poles. Put the stickers on all the poles and note the ones the FBI takes off, build your geo database and add it to OpenStreetMap!

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How can they be detected? Just visually? Radio link?

I think he means that you put stickers on every utility pole and see which ones they take down to "keep their secret".

Unless you mean how do you detect utility poles, in which case visually should suffice ;)

I doubt that the FBI is that stupid.

But seriously, it'd be cool if someone could share a photo of one.

Exactly, they might take them all down, but more likely would ignore them when they are everywhere, since they would then signify nothing, and be costly to have removed.

Or, they might take down a few of the wrong ones just to troll people.

That is exactly what I'm suggesting, and don't put it past the FBI to not think things through. If it was too obvious if all the poles got tagged you could do them slowly over time.

Right, just keep hitting them at random, and see which ones disappear the fastest. But you'd need to crowd-source it, and build an app so people could quickly geo-tag as they apply them.

I can't imagine that putting stickers on utility poles is illegal ;)

It probably actually is illegal under something like "defacing public (maybe private?) property" and just not enforced.

But might be for something like this

Right. I used to put up posters for stuff, and people did say that it was illegal to put them on utility poles. But everyone did.

If they look anything like the cameras in these articles, they are easy to spot - a big white box with a glass covered lens slot on the side:

http://www.dailytech.com/Federal+Court+Cops+Cant+Spy+on+Your...

https://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2011/04/smile-yo...

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/srp-removes-mystery-box-...

http://www.kcbd.com/story/31589368/only-on-kcbd-lpl-lpd-addr...

For sale http://www.covert-systems.com/sale_items/pole_cam_VP2c_2450....

http://www.app-techs.com/video-surveillance/covertsentry.asp

The KCBD ones are fairly small.

And the Covert-Systems.com one is clever, but would take dangerous work to install properly. But then, it could maybe communicate via power grid.

These are huge! Why not use little ones?

Problem is the FBI will see people doing this, and most likely profile/track these individuals... Wait, you're one of them aren't you!

If they're on all the poles, the FBI has no reason to take them off.

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