A Walking Tour of Surveillance Infrastructure in Seattle

In October 2019 the coveillance.org project first ran its surveillance-infrastructure walking tour in two pilot workshops with the Tech Equity Coalition and the ACLU of Washington. The guide it produced covers a 1.3-mile route through downtown Seattle and reads as a field manual for spotting the "smart" city's technology in plain sight.

A field guide, not a list of addresses

Every stop follows the same structure: address, appearance, what the device does, how the technology works, its social importance, discussion questions and references. The authors say the page is a work in progress, not professionally fact-checked, and invite readers to walk the route and adapt it for their own city.

Cameras, plate readers and fake Wi-Fi

The tour opens with ordinary cameras watching car parks, doors, banks and government buildings, noting that networked cameras can be controlled remotely and their recordings shared with the police or private parties. At Amazon Go, overhead cameras track shoppers in a store with no cashiers, where entry needs an app scan.

The licence plate reader stop at 699 Spring Street carries the most numbers. First tested in the UK in 1984 to detect stolen cars, the technology uses optical character recognition to guess the letters and numbers in a photograph. Seattle runs three kinds: stationary readers owned by the Department of Transportation for travel-time estimates, and mobile police units for parking enforcement and law enforcement. The transport department has at least 99 stationary readers; the police have 19 vehicles with mounted units, and their plate data can be kept for up to 90 days.

Acyclica, flat black circles on traffic signal control boxes, works differently: it broadcasts a fake Wi-Fi network and listens for the probe packets phones emit while searching for networks they have joined before. Those packets carry a device's MAC address and a list of past networks — enough to build a location history.

Fusion centres and a windowless building

At 1110 3rd Avenue the guide points to the Washington State Fusion Center, staffed by 15 to 30 people including intelligence officers from the Seattle Police, the county sheriff and state investigators. Created after the September 11 attacks under the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, such centres numbered 18 at first; 78 are recognised today. The tour also stops at 1122 3rd Avenue, a tall windowless building identified as an AT&T peering site where telecoms exchange traffic.

The closing argument is regulatory. Rules on plate-reader use are described as mostly nonexistent, nationally and in Seattle, and data-sharing as rampant: California and Minnesota passed limiting laws in 2015, and Minnesota also bars police from photographing a vehicle's occupants. Plate data reaches private databases such as Thomson Reuters's CLEAR, which agencies and corporations can buy into. The authors warn about scope creep — data collected for one purpose reused for private investigation or targeted advertising.