Vid: These White Boxes Could Track Your Every Move

First published on July 9, 2014. Original text below:

In fall 2013, Seattle, WA, residents noticed mysterious
white boxes installed on street corners throughout downtown
Seattle. Their interest only grew when curious WiFi networks with
the names of those street corners began to pop up on their mobile
phones as available networks to connect to. The boxes and WiFi
turned out to be a wireless mesh network set up by the city for
emergency personnel to communicate in case of a
disaster.

“Ultimately it’s designed to keep our community safe, to help out
with criminal investigations and just to be a part of effective
government,” says Sgt. Sean Whitcomb, a public information officer
with the Seattle Police Department (SPD). The network was paid for
with a $2.7 million port security grant from the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS).
But privacy advocates say the network may be capable of much more
than its intended use, including tracking the location of Seattle
residents. After the story broke in The Stranger newspaper, it was
met with so much concern from the public that the SPD turned off
the mesh network in November 2013 and promised to develop protocols
for its use.

“Protocols would give the Seattle police the opportunity to show
how they are going to use surveillance technology to protect people
and show how they are going to protect their privacy,” says Brian
Robick, senior policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties
Union of Washington.
But, with focus turned finding a new police chief, the city has
gone nine months without a finalized privacy policy for the
network. Robick says that the policy is important because—although
the SPD says its intention is not to track users and Aruba
Networks, the company that manufactured the network, told Reason TV
that the product bought by Seattle is not designed to track
users—things could change in the future with a new police chief or
software updates.

“The city council has asked that every single time you add
something or change something that the police disclose it, and
we’re still waiting for them to disclose what they are going to do
with the base line, but without that we have no assurances of what
they are going to add onto the network to change it to do other
things,” says Robick.

Although it’s hard to predict what a city might do with newly
acquired technology, the city’s 2012 Request for Proposal shows
diagrams that would have given the Washington State Fusion Center a
direct connection to the mesh network. The Washington State Fusion
Center tries to stop major crimes and terrorist acts by collecting
and analyzing massive amounts of data submitted by local law
enforcement agencies like the SPD and federal agencies like DHS and
the FBI.

“That has been a surprising bit of information to some of the folks
we have spoken with in the city and the police department when we
bring it up,” says Robick who points out that he doesn’t think it’s
their intention to have that connection anymore.

“But I do think that it’s interesting that when cities are
campaigning for grants that they build in additional information
sharing and, in a way, barter the people’s privacy in order to get
the funds to put up these systems.”

UPDATE: The city of Seattle has confirmed that the $2.7
million cost of the mesh network only covered equipment and
services and after installation the total cost of the network was
$4.4 million.
Written and produced by Paul Detrick. Camera by Alex Manning and
Detrick. Music by Ergo Phizmiz and Podington
Bear.

About 6:12 minutes.