"City Lights Spy on Farmington Hills"

[Lowell]

So runs the title to this interesting article. LINK

What's the old saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you?" Well chew on this...

In Farmington Hills, Michigan, things just got a whole lot creepier. Officials say the installation of ten new high-tech light posts will curb crime and cut energy costs for the Midwest community.

All the townspeople have to do in return is give up their privacy.

Farmington Hills just became the first city in America to host a state-of-the-art system of lampposts that make up something called the Intellistreets system. Farmington Hills native Ron Harwood worked over ten years to make the project a reality, and as of Friday his dream had fully come to fruition. For his neighbors that dream of a future where their every move won’t be monitored, however, they might want to think about heading out of Michigan.

Simply put, the Intellistreets project is a system of Internet-connected luminaries that communicate with one another across the city. In addition to lighting the area, they can broadcast verbal and written messages, monitor rainfall and give directions.

According to their own website, the system is also great for “data harvesting.”

Not only does Intellistreets offer information about the neighborhood and provide light, it also monitors the conversations of pedestrians, records video, monitors foot-traffic and counts heads — all of which is recorded and stored for possible analysis. And according to Harwood, the tiny 80,000 community of Farmington Hills isn’t going to be the only town using his technology — Detroit, Chicago and Pittsburgh have placed orders and the inventor claims that he is in talks with the Department of Homeland Security.

The abundance of intersection cameras in Farmington and Farmington Hills is already disturbing enough. The Orchard Lake and 12 Mile intersection has eight - but no street lights for one of the highest accident incident intersections in the state. Go figure.

Oh well, I guess it is for our safety and we should be thankful that they are watching over us so closely, all the time, with such great care. I tell ya It's a brave new world out there.

[Orthophonic]

This description strikes me as more like 1984 than Brave New World! But let's not quibble about the preferred dystopian analogy. The full article says that the funding for this system comes from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program [[EECBG). But the article is primarily about the surveillance capabilities of the Farmington Hills program. Maybe the city stepped a bit too far outside the parameters of the grant? The FH website does not provide any detail about what they did with the money http://www.fhgov.com/SustainableWeb/...ects/EECBG.asp:
"The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant [[EECBG) Program was enacted into law in 2007 during the administration of President George W. Bush. Despite its creation, the EECBG Program was never funded. The EECBG Program was intended to be a multi-year funding program that would provide $10 billion over five years to local governments, states, and Indian tribes to implement strategies that would reduce fossil fuel emissions and total energy use.
In 2009, in an effort to stimulate the economy, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [[ARRA) was signed into law on February 17 by President Barack Obama. ARRA provided a $3.2 billion cash infusion to the EECBG program and use energy efficiency efforts to create jobs. Funds were distributed as both entitlement and competitive grants.
As an entitlement community, the City of Farmington Hills received $791,300 from the Department of Energy. To implement the grant, the City of Farmington Hills not only invested in public information efforts, energy efficiency and renewable energy at its facilities, but also in financial incentives to the community."

The other puzzling thing about the article is that is says that 10 new lamp posts are installed, and these cost $3000 each. At a total of $30000 that's a long way from the $791300 total grant amount. I think $3000 is pretty cheap for a lamp post, so maybe that was a typo?

[MikeM]

The intersection cameras are Autoscope cameras used for monitoring traffic flows and adjusting traffic light timing.

http://www.rcocweb.org/Commuters/FAST-TRAC.aspx

[Scottathew]

The abundance of intersection cameras in Farmington and Farmington Hills is already disturbing enough. The Orchard Lake and 12 Mile intersection has eight - but no street lights for one of the highest accident incident intersections in the state. Go figure.

You're sure they're traffic cameras?

Here's a picture from 2009: http://g.co/maps/scw3n

The things pictured there are just the typical sensors that help time lights and feed traffic congestion data into Oakland County's real-time traffic system:http://www.rcocweb.org/Pages/Real_Time_Traffic_Map.aspx

The only video cameras I've ever seen in the Detroit area are highway cameras. And the only surface road camera's I've seen are in Chicago to catch the light-runners.

But I could be wrong, I haven't been to that intersection in a while and the picture I linked is old.


EDIT: MikeM was typing the same thing as I was typing.

[wolverine]

The recorded conversations bit just seems creepy, the rest not so much. These things just run in a dumb auto rotation mode with one operator behind the whole system. They are only called to switch a cam into manual mode when police are called to the scene and they need an assessment before they arrive.

People seem to think they are being spied on when the reality is these cameras tend to be ignored and only used after the fact, at best to grab a license plate number leaving a crime scene.

[Novine]

"The other puzzling thing about the article is that is says that 10 new lamp posts are installed, and these cost $3000 each. At a total of $30000 that's a long way from the $791300 total grant amount. I think $3000 is pretty cheap for a lamp post, so maybe that was a typo?"

The entire grant wasn't spent on the light poles. If I recall correctly, most of the money was spent on improvements at city hall in Farmington Hills.

[Novine]

"The things pictured there are just the typical sensors that help time lights and feed traffic congestion data into Oakland County's real-time traffic system"

From what I've read of the system, the cameras do have the capability to do a least still photos and maybe even video, but they are not normally used in that manner.