No one could've ever seen this coming...

Here’s a fun trick: If you have N microphones on an area you can filter the audio to N -1 voices using just linear algebra, no AI.

It’s a very cool trick.

Now imagine what happens when you add AI and blanket an area.

Does this mean the people playing their crappy music at full blast on speakers as they walk are now providing a public service?

Oh no, who could have possibly foreseen that this was their endgame?

Flood them with signal so that it's all noise

Should be fun flooding these with false positives and adversarial noise.

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.

What do these devices look like? I'm happy to just put really loud white noise machines right next to them.

Personal white noise generators?

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?

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.

I always knew one day rap music would probably put me on a list

Find nodes near you and report any that are missing

https://deflock.me/

Imagine all the false positives from children screaming during play.

Also, fuck this dystopian bullshit.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!

Anyone else like to watch horror movies with the windows open and the volume turned up?

Totally unrelated of course but people should try it, apparently it can create quite an immersive spectacle.

Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices

Spanish

Flock "Safety" read Orwell's 1984 and decided to be the infrastructure supplier for Big Brother

What a surprise.

I wonder what the resonant frequency of those mics could be? Wonder how loud it would have to be to ruin a mic?

I can think of another company with microphones all over the place, mostly in living rooms and attached to front doors.

This will exclusively have the effect of deploying police to the location of mentally I'll homeless people, making things worse.

Allegedly, the physical construction of the gunshot mics don't make them particularly suitable to listening to conversations on the street. Like a lot of flock marketing and products, it is over promising but it can still be useful for detecting "unrest". So think less "it will hear you say 'fuck trump"" and more "it will hear a crowd of people in a starbucks realizing how fucked everything is" or "it will hear someone yell out a warning that ICE is in the area".

What is inevitable and will actually cover the individual will be the drone detection mics. The actual act of hearing a Terrorist Drone is REALLY easy from a technical standpoint and is a very similar concept to the gun shot detectors but have MUCH more sensitive mics.

Can we just shoot the dystopian mass surveillance devices please?

So what ways could these devices be disabled with the minimum amount of risk? I suspect a strong enough laser could damage the image sensor. But what about the microphones?

Because I highly doubt we can count on the law to protect us from this.

As a surprise to precisely no one.

As long as Lucius Foxx is the only one with the key...

It's to detect ICE agents sobs when their feelings get hurt, so military can be deployed in the area

Sound of Silence

Yeah...no.