Baltimore transit wants to use microphones to record all conversations on trains and buses
Update:: Thanks to Jackie31337 in the comments for pointing out that the MTA withdrew the proposal, "Maryland Transportation Administration Acting Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley said Monday evening that she has withdrawn the following request to the attorney general for a legal opinion, saying the matter should have been reviewed at the department level before the MTA sought legal advice." I translate this as meaning, "We didn't know that sunshine laws meant that floating this kind of insane balloon within government meant that the public would find out how totally, completely, creepily nuts we are, whoops!"
The MTA is considering installing audio surveillance equipment on its buses and trains to record conversations of passengers and employees, according to a letter sent by the MTA's top official to the state Attorney General's Office...MTA thinking of listening in (Thanks, Patrick!)"As part of MTA's ongoing efforts to deter criminal activity and mitigate other dangerous situations on board its vehicles, Agency management has considered adding audio recording equipment to the video recording technology now in use throughout its fleet," Wiedefeld wrote.
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Did anyone else have a The Wire flashback?
McNulty!
That's just insane. Apart from the obvious fact of breaching civil rights, who is supposed to listen to all the crap you usually hear on trains or buses? Quite often, there's hardly any entertainment to it, just people talking to keep their brains from overheating.
The post has been updated. The suggestion has been withdrawn:
I honestly can't see theme getting a favourable legal ruling on this, thank goodness
I understand that here in the UK, the are plans to install microphones in lamp posts - supposedly for different reasons other than 'general' surveillance - but maybe this is just some bullshit excuse for trial before a national rollout:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-347184/Lamp-post-microphones-beat-noise-pests.html
How do people even learn to suggest things like this?
@ #5, I'm betting because some bright spark in the MTA thought, hey, we have cameras in place and no one minds. How bad could it be to add mics?
I tell ya, the "success" of CCTV (at spreading, not actually solving anything) has created a generation of bureaucrats who'd do the old East Germany proud -- they wouldn't lift a finger to stop a real criminal, but they'd think nothing of destroying our civil liberties on the off-chance that they could get photographic evidence that'd land said criminal in jail for a couple of weeks.
Sigh. I sound like a Daily Mail reader, don't I? :-(
Obviously the main problem here is that people may have started their conversations before getting on the bus, or carry them on after they've left. It's rather limiting to have these mics stuck in one place.
It wouldn't work to insist that people conduct their conversations within range of static mics; far better to have mics surgically implanted in the people themselves. It wouldn't be too costly, simply do it at the same time as the GPS permatagging technology is installed.
So who is going to pay for this? People are losing their jobs because da gubmnt is too stupid to understand you can't spend more money than you have. But they got money to spy on us? I feel SO much safer.
....and this is why the government has a set of checks and balances built-in.
Certainly this illustrates the need for sunshine. What daft politician thinks this kind of draconian Orwellian boondoggle is a good idea? Honestly?
God Damn.
Dude, seriously. Seriously. 2009.
Seriously.
Schmod: but it doesn't work if they're duplicitous. ;)
The adjective "Draconian" means very harsh punishments for breaking any law; it does not mean anything about the laws themselves or means of enforcement.
[/offtopic pedantry]
Here in Vancouver, all the shiny new buses and skytrains came with cameras and microphones pre-installed, and warning stickers that YOU ARE BEING RECORDED FOR SECURITY PURPOSES. And I don't remember this being pubicly debated at all beforehand.
I'm liberty-minded person who has lived in Baltimore a long time, and I tend to think that something that makes the light rail or the (even worse) subway feel like a safe place for passengers is a good thing.
It is easy for people who feel safe in their daily lives to complain about big brother. But a new way to reduce crime, or at the very least hold criminals accountable seems like a good thing. Especially on an transit system that is underfunded and underused in part because of the crime associated with it.
Shouldn't the expectation of privacy be guaranteed at home, but be necessarily limited in public places?
Don't judge a public safety measure until you've walked a mile (from say Lexington Mkt to Hopkins) in its shoes.
Step one - tape conversation about "packages" "Destination" and "zulu time"
Step two - buy inflatable sex dolls, put them in trench coats, and set them on the train late at night, and hide small tape player with decent speakers next to them
Step three - install your own wireless CCTV cameras
Step four - overdub ensuing hilarity with Yackity Sax
Of course, given the volume of audio recorded, you'd need speech recognition software to transcribe the recordings, tagging them with timestamps and GPS coordinates and matching the voices to voiceprints. And then you'd want the database to be searchable by voiceprint, just in case someone plans a crime in two separately innocuous-sounding conversations on two different buses.
And then someone would point out that budget shortages are an even graver threat to the municipality than terrorism (in terms of probability, anyway), and that all that keyword/voiceprint data would be worth a lot of many to targeted-advertising companies.
Well, this is certainly one way to bringing LOADS of people back onto public transport. Yep, this is how you do it ...
btw it does sound draconian, and something the Stasi were certainly thinking up ... but then again, what will it take to do something about the gigantically massive amounts of conversation that they would pick up? Not to mention, complete silence where no one says anything (lots of snoring on 6am buses from shiftworkers coming home, which could be construed from "zzzzzzz" to "destroy all humans")
Me thinks they would have a computer do this. Fine. But again, what are they left with? Loads of conversations that have words that authorities aren't keen on hearing.
For this to be effective, it needs to be a super flowing system, efficient, and to the point. Which I doubt highly.
Conspiracy theories seem to rest on the belief that people are competent in everything they do imo. This MTA thingymabob will not be a competent system, and will have to submit to the will of an illogical everyday bunch of languages (all those bar Esperanto).
Good luck to whoever got a wet dream in commencing this bit of stupidity.
I live in Iowa City, and periodically on every bus a recorded announcement plays that says "For your safety, this bus is under audio and video surveillance."
Legality aside, I suspect that whoever thought this one up didn't think it through very far. Not sure what Baltimore it like but here in Vancouver, you can travel on transit for an hour and not overhear a single full sentence in english. Seven other languages, but not english.
So they'd record everything, hire a small army of tranlators to attempt to decipher the conversations, then a week later after it's all been filtered out, discover that elderly Mrs Wong got a great price on chicken at the deli.
Three words: White Noise Generators. For literally peanuts, you could make their expensive gear essentially worthless.
@ Sparrowhawk #20:
I assume that by "for literally peanuts" you are proposing that we noisily consume snacks from crinkly wrappers, thus ruining the audio like annoying movie patrons?
again, the basic idea is not eavesdropping on forbidden speech. Rather, it is to manufacture justification for elimination of whatever target the government wishes to dispose of. Just the fact that all conversations are recorded means that: "of course they were guilty". After all, "everyone knows" there is a microphone everywhere.
Marvelty 15, I'm very sorry to hear that, because it means I have to cross Canada off my Free Countries list. Time to tear out the page, actually, because Canada was the last one.
Sigh.
Brainspore, thank you for defending the proper use of the word 'literally'. Linguistic change is a force of nature, but I hope we don't lose that one in my lifetime. No offense, Sparrowhawk.
Xopher: OT, but as regards abuse of 'literally', god help you if you ever watch any footage of Jamie Oliver. You will gnaw off your own limbs in frustration...
Good luck with translating!
Jeb'o im pas mater glupu!
Maryland Transportation Administration Acting Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley said Monday evening that she has been smoking crack for the following reasons: to get with the attorney general - to become even more paranoid about everyone and everything - saying bla bla bla bla all the time. The matter should have been reviewed at the department level and found to be completely, totally and utterly stupid as well as a further breach of personal privacy even on public transit before the MTA sought legal advice.