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Comment by uncertainrhymes | Hacker News Reader

When I worked in NYC (mid 2010s) we were on the top floor of our building and one day a service guy came through needing access to the roof from our suite.

Turns out he was there to update some cameras on the roof that pointed out to Union Square. I talked to him for a while, and while he wouldn't specifically say who owned them, he did say "they could read a business card from 300 yards away."

This was probably before there was much facial recognition going on, but it stuck with me that we were only one of many buildings with these set ups. I always heard about London being over-surveilled, I guess the NYPD did a much better job of keeping quiet about it.

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> I always heard about London being over-surveilled

In London it's not the government that's spying on you. The reason there are so many cameras is that it was established policy for insurance companies give discounts if you have comprehensive camera coverage, and then digital cameras got so cheap that it's simply a great deal for any business owner to acquire enough cameras to surveil the entirety of their business and all the surroundings. And since there's often no co-ordination, if you are walking in Central London you are always in the field of view of at least half a dozen cameras with different owners.

Of course, it did turn out to be very convenient to the police that if something happens, it almost certainly happened on video and they just have to go talk to all nearby business owners to get a copy of it.

Sounds nice if the police doesn't have direct access to all cameras, but instead needs to talk with the nearby buildings. Some balance between capturing crime on camera, and not having a surveillance state -- from the so-many-cameras point of view.

But I suppose there are things I don't know (and wouldn't like), related to this

If the cops can demand, rather than request, the video, that's not really a check or a balance on the surveillance state. All it functionally means is that collecting footage is not automated, and there is some small back flow of information about what is being looked at.

Those may not be adequate checks, but they are checks, and personally I think it's worth worrying that the day could come when we'll look back with nostalgia on "not automated, and there is some small back flow of information about what is being looked at."

I worry about that too, but my hopeful vision of the future is when we look back in disgust at the lack of limitations on government surveillance.

Just requiring the cop to let go of his coffee and go there in person is enough. It is not practical.

I mean Stasi with all their agents could not dream of having all the PI Google and Zuckerberg have.

The stasi didn't need that much information, or automation tech, to suppress dissent and ruin lives. I'm not complaining that those checks exist, but I am saying we definitely need more than that to protect us from a surveillance state.

Stasi had like 200 000 informants and we're drowning in the shear weight of their paper archives. There was a practical limit on how much they could surveil even with total commitment.

Which is relevant to my point that the police should have some work to gather data to keep down the scale.

Obviously, Stasi did persecute people in far worse way than Google et al. do right now.

In Austin, TX and likely other US cities, https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2020-07-24/apds-secret-...

> secret citizen spying program that's active in the Austin area and across the country ... Threat Liaison Officers (TLOs), who report suspicious activity or behavior ... each TLO must sign a nondisclosure agreement with ARIC, including those not working in law enforcement, essentially creating secret citizen officers. These informants, known as For Official Use Only TLOs, are able to access the fusion centers' national intelligence database (excluding personal identifying information). The FOUO TLOs include private security officers with local hotels, malls, large venues, and local semiconductor companies.

Living in London, if anything the police lean towards not looking at enough surveillance video rather than too much. There are not many police doing this compared to the number or crimes. I had my phone snatched in central London and mistakenly ran to the nearest police station thinking they might go after them. But no - sit and wait an hour or two, fill a form. I said it was outside a business with a camera but they wouldn't apply to the owner and go through the vids because it was too much work.

Funnily enough they did have a look at bus footage - apparently all London busses have cameras - in spite of me saying there wasn't a bus near at the time. Guess that was easier for them to get.

They can request and 99% of the time people just give it to them - all completely legal. However you can also legally refuse and then they need a warrant from magistrate's court.

I believe they can demand you don't destroy it though as that will be a criminal offence once they've told you.

Even better when the public surveils the state.

Reminds me of doing a site survey at a somewhat remote cell tower, prior to performing some expansion work. Was told there was sensitive, classified military communications equipment inside the shack at the base of the tower, and had to perform work carefully around it lest we damage something.

Couldn't tell me what kind of vibrations etc I had to keep my equipment under, as those details were classified. While I was there, I watched a Verizon tech show up to fiddle with their equipment inside the shack, which happened to have the door frame somewhat out of square. The tech's solution to getting through the tight security door? Unlock it, then smash on it with a sledge hammer until it came loose and swung in.

I guess the fragility memo hadn't gotten down the line to the service techs.

Seems logically like: They'll either fix their equipment or the frame next ticket if this is too much.

In shared sites like that, infra should all have a clear and obvious owner to report issues to.

The wild aspect of this is that nothing seems to have come of it.

If you had told me 20 years ago that eventually every single house would have cameras on their front door I'd have guessed that certain types of crime would drastically drop off in response. But in my neighborhood all the cameras mean is that there's video of the package theft or car break-in to post to the neighborhood group so that everybody can complain about it. It doesn't prevent the crime. It doesn't generate more arrests.

It doesn't, as far as I can tell, do much of anything.

It lowers insurance premiums.

Part of that is that it seems the police are very reluctant to do their job. That is from secondhand anecdote, I'll give you, but I've seen several stories that people have related of bringing Find My results or video to the police only to have the police refuse to follow up on it.

I've heard two differing explanations of this (all the cameras having no effect), one of them from a cop:

1. The police can't do anything with your home surveillance videos mainly because of the trustworthiness of the evidence, most of the videos don't clearly show the crook. But there's also the issue of authenticity, which will be a major issue in any court case.

2. Cops are lazy and arrogant. They don't want more work. They don't want a higher expectation of catching crooks. And they certainly don't want people telling them how to do their jobs.

A lawyer told me #1. A cop told me #2.

Yeah, the thing I've heard from a cop is to always say "oh, that looks like me, but that's not me". Apparently it's very difficult to prove a person in a video (particularly a grainy surveillance cam video) is a specific person. They apparently tend to rely on the person admitting it's them, and if they refuse, it's a real uphill battle and the footage is borderline useless. Dunno how accurate that is, just what I have heard from a police officer.

> he did say "they could read a business card from 300 yards away."

Almost certainly made that up. You'd need a telescope mounted there to accomplish that. The mid-2010s video output would still be pretty bad, and you'd only be monitoring a FOV of maybe the width of a doorway or two, not anything like street-wide monitoring.

Maybe this is why the NYPD's clearance rate is so low? Hyper advanced surveillance, as long as the criminal stands exactly where we're already looking?

Normal zoom levels aren’t that useful from the top of a ~30 story buying. Looking down you’ll just see the top of people’s heads, and looking sideways means an even longer distance.

You need a Samsung phone - they’ll add the detail you want.

Are you sure about that?

https://youtu.be/0Sx3rAdz2SA

A mountain is a little bigger than letters on a business card.

> Almost certainly made that up. You'd need a telescope mounted there to accomplish that.

Which they very well might have had. Surveillance setups often pair a wide field of view "situational awareness" camera with an extremely high level optical zoom PTZ camera for getting things like license plates or seeing handoffs of items.

Resurrected a memory in me:

Back in ~2002 I lived in San Jose, and my neighbor across from me was a satellite designer at Loral Space Systems...

We often had the same "wash car in driveway" schedule - and I would ask him a bunch of questions about his work, which he couldnt talk about...

But we had a system - I would ask yes/no questions and he would just wash his car - btu if he "waxed left" it was a yes, and if he "waxed right" it was a no...

Now, I dont know how truthful he was, but I would ask about the resolution and size of the spy satts... and he indicated that, yes, they did in-fact have satellites that could read your license plate from space.

Doesn’t surprise me. Maxar sells CNN photos where you can make out with reasonable clarity what is going on at the surface of the earth. The stuff the government has probably makes that look like a child’s attempt at satellite imagery.

I totally believe they have satellites with this level of clarity, and probably did 20+ years ago as well.

But how do you read a license plate at a 90° angle from space?

The earth is round my dude.

Here is a great example from the company planet: https://youtu.be/GPgU5OYpwCs

The angle changes as the satellite counties on its orbit.

It could be that he meant that you could read something 'license plate sized' from space.

There is no license plate reading from space. It is physically impossible to achieve such resolutions from LEO with atmosphere in the way. It gets worse with off axis viewing through a longer column of air.

Aren't adaptive optics a thing for telescopes? The giant laser beam might be a bit conspicuous though I suppose (if it even works looking downwards)

adaptive optics cant change the diffraction limit. The only way to overcome that is with a bigger lens or synthetic aperture post-processing. SAR at optical wavelengths from orbital distances and velocities? Yeah, good luck

Given the quality of unclassified photos released to the public at times [1], it's not unreasonable to assume the classified stuff is an order of magnitude better (or more). Note the angle of some of the photos!

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42510783

I'd imagine spy satellites don't always look directly down on their targets. Especially if they want to look at something not directly under its ground track, the satellite would need the ability to look at things off to the side. So that'd enable reading something vertical. Still would need to look at it from the _correct_ angle though.

IMINT satellites are never GEO (if only because GEO is so far), so they don't "sit above" some area but fly over it at high speed, so it can get a 45° or 30° picture and the only issue is the target is a bit further than when you're straight above it.

If only you'd taught him wax on, wax off instead, now he'd know karate, instead of getting questioned by stern-looking people next week about security practices.

When I was in college before Hubble was launched, my astronomy professor told me that the original design for the Hubble space telescope was for a smaller mirror, but got upgraded because the larger one would be cheaper to make the larger mirror, because larger mirror size was already being made. Also the Space Shuttle was sized for the larger mirror diameter. The strong inference is that the US DOD was already making that size, so existing tooling could be used. Consider Hubble pointed at a target only 200-3mmkm away...

I actually asked this question multiple times on HN and other places, asking "what if we take hubble and point it at earth? Now that you have that thought, dont you think there are many objects that are "micro hubbles" that are already pointed at earth? MIC bots downed me to heck.

Lets just imagine, in a sci-fi/Black-Mirror sense, that all the constellation class of satts (starlink, the EU one, the chinese/russian one) have additional sensors for 'ocular-patt-downs-from-sattelites' -- Lets get our hands on some of these units and inspect?

Is Starlink a classified object?

> dont you think there are many objects that are "micro hubbles"

you reply to a comment about the size of the mirror, and then ask if there are "micro hubbles". no, there literally cannot be a micro hubble, because the mirror is enormous.

the mirror in hubble alone is larger than a starlink satellite

https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

https://www.nasa.gov/content/about-facts-hubble-fast-facts

It could be done, you could make a virtual image from many small sats. Since you see from different angles, if you timestamp data with high resolution you could even cancel out a lot of atmosphere.

By now, it's well-known that HST was based on spy satellite designs via the mirror-making technology, as you say.

See under "size and mass" at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

According to that page, NASA moved the primary mirror diameter from 3.0m to 2.4m to match the already-developed mirror-making technology.

the NRO is the craziest US government agency. iirc all their workers are contracted and all their expenses are highly classified. About the KH-11, trump accidentally tweeted an image from one of them (see https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t...) and its resolution was an international incident. This technology was developed in the 70s. The NRO has sci-fi technology.

Reading newspaper headlines from satellite imagery was possible in the late 1960s. Source: my father, who worked at Kodak and Hughes Aircraft on such systems.

DEAR GOD I hope you have some images which you can share?

I don’t; they were all classified projects (NRO and others), so if he took anything like that home, I’m sure it would have been trouble.

uname checks out, move along.

With due respect, everybody's got a story. Stamp "Classified" on something and you can bet your ass the tall tales are going to flow.

From orbit, no it wasn't and still isn't for that matter. It's beyond the diffraction limit of any real or made up lens or mirror we have ever put in space to do this. As far as I am aware, synthetic aperture optical techniques aren't there yet either.

Source: Physics

I live in Portland and watching the Portland Police planes circle downtown all night with their data hidden on https://www.flightradar24.com/, (but visible on https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ (for now)) is a little unnerving. I have no clue what tech they have onboard, but I assume high res + night vision.

It was every night last summer and I think most residents are completely unware that they're up there.

You can find the auditor’s report and learn more about how the ASU works. The cameras are 90s tech and not suitable for identifying individuals - just good enough to track the movement of someone they already know about.

The plane is particularly useful for reducing the need for car chases.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tVI6fn4YGFo

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j0jTuCj7Qeg

Auditor’s report link directly to air support unit info: https://www.portland.gov/audit-services/news/2022/4/6/police...

>he wouldn't specifically say who owned them

That sounds a little concerning. Was the implication that it was a government agency at some level?

Exactly. Why would you let a random person into your building if there was no answer who they worked for? Was it because they claimed to work for business and you blindly trusted they were doing what they said or did you have some heads up from your boss saying let them in? There must be more to this story or maybe op just didn’t care about random people entering and accessing equipment.

It wasn't their building, it was clearly a building they rented a suite in. And, at a guess, the tech was let in because the landlord called and asked them to let the tech in.

More likely the person telling the story isn't the person who authorised their access, and just happened to witness it / have a conversation about it.

The parent comment did not claim to have let the person into the building themselves.

It's quite likely they had no idea. Easy to imagine a scenario where there is a company owning the building, one owning the cameras and maintenance, one owning the data/recording, all wrapped up in management partners mergers shells etc.

With government, unless it's an organization mature enough to do something deliberately covert, it's more likely theres so much bureaucracy to deal with that everybody knows who they are working for.

The NYPD does do deliberately covert things including counterintelligence. No information one way or another whether that’s true in this case.

there are a lot of rich foreign nationals in NYC, so its no surprise

The NYPD has covert operations not only all over the country but in many foreign countries so I'd say they're operating at a pretty high level of sophistication in that sense.

Apparently referring to the “International Liaison Program” run by the “NYPD Intelligence Bureau“ which has only executive oversight and is funded by the “New York City Police Foundation” instead of the city itself.

Are NYPD personnel sent outside their jurisdiction to fulfill these roles? Or do they contract it out?

> Through its International Liaison Program, the Intelligence Bureau posts officers in law enforcement agencies in major cities around the world.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/bureaus/investigative/intellig...

I was curious about this so I did some Googling. Apparently it's called the International Liaison Program, a subdivision of the Department Intelligence Bureau. More info here. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...

It really is Gotham, isn’t it?

Shouldn't the NYPD be in charge of local stuff and leave this to the FBI?

Cut the 'server hard line' and see who shows up!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System

"they could read a business card from 300 yards away."

What's the field of view?

Probably just the business card.

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