TECHDIRT NEWS: The lesson here (one of many) is that if you can't adequately protect your secrets, maybe you don't deserve to have them

Let's just get right into this and let Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) harvest some accolades and encouragement to continue to deploy its particular brand of intrusive transparency on historically secretive entities.

The lesson here (one of many) is that if you can't adequately protect your secrets, maybe you don't deserve to have them.

===================================================

The DDoS release shows law enforcement agencies aren't just deploying choppers to keep an eye on suspects in motion.

They're also using them to engage in extended surveillance of people suspected of nothing, hovering over large gatherings and deploying infrared cameras to peer inside of buildings just for the fuck of it.

===================================================

BLOGGER INSERT:

Dallas police investigating how hundreds of hours of aerial surveillance videos were hacked

Dallas Morning News

8 hours ago · Axon, the company that stores police body camera and drone footage, ... including in infrared, scanning over a crowded Fair Park.

 

Activists leak 600 hours of mostly Dallas police helicopter footage after city’s 22 terabyte loss of ...

Courthouse News Service

2 days ago · Activists leak 600 hours of mostly Dallas police helicopter footage ... with the helicopter camera switching in and out of infrared imaging...

 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The transparency activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, posted a 1.8-terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website on Friday. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that her group doesn’t know the identity of the source who shared the data and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given.

The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure.

Transparency Activists Dump 1.8 Terabytes Of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

News

from the you've-let-us-down,-Dr.-Whirlington-Spinblade dept

Mon, Nov 8th 2021 12:26pm — Tim Cushing

And there are plenty of secrets to be had here. It's not that people aren't aware police helicopters are circling overland at all hours of the day. Episodes of COPS and YouTube collections of high-speed chases have made that fact common knowledge.

 

Putting your stuff in the cloud means opening up additional attack vectors for those seeking your secrets. That appears to be the root source of this new leak. What a time to be alive!

I mean, sure there's more surveillance than ever. But the reliance on (apparently unreliable) private contractors means government secrets are only a hack away with being shared with everyone on the planet. That's definitely good news for the policed, who often have no say in how they're surveilled and are routinely denied access to information about government surveillance tech.

There's an amazing amount of irony contained in this latest DDoS release.

Just a couple of months ago, the Dallas PD was being raked over the coals by pissed off city officials for inexplicably deleting more than 22 terabytes of data. According to the cops, the city IT employee handling the transfer of data from the cloud to Dallas PD servers screwed things up, resulting in the mass deletion. Some of it was recoverable. Most of it wasn't. At best, 7.5 terabytes were permanently lost during the botched transfer.

Good news is in the eye of the beholder. Transparency enthusiasts will obviously love this new set of leaks from Distributed Denial of Secrets. And this new leak may allow the Dallas PD to recover more of the data it thought it had lost forever, as David Lee points out for Courthouse News Service.

Data transparency activists released a massive 600-hour leak of mostly Dallas Police Department helicopter footage, raising more questions about the city’s data security protocols three months after DPD admitted to a 22-terabyte deletion of case data that resulted in the release of criminal defendants awaiting trial.

I hate to laugh at the turntables, but try and spin this, DJ DPDPR. RAISE ALL THE QUESTIONS!

> If an entity wants to be entrusted with the power to deploy warrantless surveillance provided it has enough downwash, it should be expected to protect the hundreds of hours of footage it's gathered.

> And if it can't manage a data transfer with losing at least a third of its 22 TB of data, it should probably allow transparency activists to perform its archival duties for it, considering how much better they are at preserving data and making it easily accessible. "

Filed Under: dallas pd, helicopter video, police surveillance, surveillance, transparency
Companies: distributed denial of secrets 

_____________________________________________RELATED CONTENT

https://www.vortexskymedia.com/2020/05/27/thermal-imaging/