What Are The Off-White Boxes That Are Going Up On Utility Poles All Over Seattle?
November 11th, 2013 By Michael Snyder
The Big Brother control grid is constantly growing and expanding all over America. Right now, a “wireless mesh network” is in the process of being installed in Seattle thatsome believe will ultimately have the capability of tracking the location of every wireless device in the city. If you live in downtown Seattle, just look for the little off-white boxes that are being attached to utility poles all over the place. You can see a bunch of pictures of these little boxes right here. Meanwhile, other major U.S. cities have been installing vast networks of surveillance cameras and listening devices. We are being told that such measures will help police “solve more crime”. We are being told that such measures will “keep people safe”. But what about our privacy? Doesn’t that count for something? What about the Fourth Amendment? Are our most cherished liberties and freedoms going to be thrown into the trash just because we live “in a more dangerous world”?
The Stranger is a Seattle newspaper that recently did a major story about this “wireless mesh network” that has been going up all over the city. What they found out is extremely disturbing…
If you’re walking around downtown Seattle, look up: You’ll see off-white boxes, each one about a foot tall with vertical antennae, attached to utility poles. If you’re walking around downtown while looking at a smartphone, you will probably see at least one—and more likely two or three—Wi-Fi networks named after intersections: “4th&Seneca,” “4th&Union,” “4th&University,” and so on. That is how you can see the Seattle Police Department’s new wireless mesh network, bought from a California-based company called Aruba Networks, whose clients include the Department of Defense, school districts in Canada, oil-mining interests in China, and telecommunications companies in Saudi Arabia.
The question is: How well can this mesh network see you?
How accurately can it geo-locate and track the movements of your phone, laptop, or any other wireless device by its MAC address (its “media access control address”—nothing to do with Macintosh—which is analogous to a device’s thumbprint)? Can the network send that information to a database, allowing the SPD to reconstruct who was where at any given time, on any given day, without a warrant? Can the network see you now?
The Seattle police did not want to talk to the newspaper about this.
Neither did the Department of Homeland Security.
But the newspaper did find some technical experts that actually work with Aruba products that were willing to talk…
After reviewing Aruba’s technical literature, as well as talking to IT directors and systems administrators around the country who work with Aruba products, it’s clear that their networks are adept at seeing all the devices that move through their coverage area and visually mapping the locations of those devices in real time for the system administrators’ convenience. In fact, one of Aruba’s major selling points is its ability to locate “rogue” or “unassociated” devices—that is, any device that hasn’t been authorized by (and maybe hasn’t even asked to be part of) the network.
Which is to say, your device. The cell phone in your pocket, for instance.
The user’s guide for one of Aruba’s recent software products states: “The wireless network has a wealth of information about unassociated and associated devices.” That software includes “a location engine that calculates associated and unassociated device location every 30 seconds by default… The last 1,000 historical locations are stored for each MAC address.”
Will these kinds of systems soon be going up in major cities all across the country?
That is a very good question.
Meanwhile, it has also been revealed that very powerful listening grids have been installed in more than 70 cities around the country…
The Washington Post recently published a feature length article on gunshot detectors, known as ShotSpotter, which detailed how in Washington DC there are now, “at least 300 acoustic sensors across 20 square miles of the city,” microphones wrapped in a weather-proof shell that can detect the location of a sound down to a few yards and analyze the audio using a computer program.
While the systems are touted as “gunshot detectors,” as the New York Times reported in May 2012, similar technology is already installed in over 70 cities around the country, and in some cases it is being used to listen to conversations.
“In at least one city, New Bedford, Mass., where sensors recorded a loud street argument that accompanied a fatal shooting in December, the system has raised questions about privacy and the reach of police surveillance, even in the service of reducing gun violence,” states the report.
That same article from Infowars.com also discussed the “Intellistreets” lighting systems that are being installed around the nation that are capable of listening to and recording conversations on a massive scale…
As we have also previously highlighted, numerous major cities in the Unites States are currently being fitted with Intellistreets ‘smart’ street lighting systems that also have the capability of recording conversations and sending them directly to authorities via wi-fi.
As we reported on Sunday, the Las Vegas Public Works Department has begun testing the devices, which act as surveillance cameras, Minority Report-style advertising hubs, and Homeland Security alert systems. As ABC 7 reported in 2011, they are “also capable of recording conversations.”
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