On Thursday, October 23rd, 2003 I'm hosting another PGP key signing event. For those not familiar with the concept here's a four paragraph primer on public key cryptography:

Each person in the system has two matched "keys": a public key and a private key. A message encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted the complementary private key. Thus public keys are distributed far and wide while private keys are carefully guarded. When someone wants to send me a secret message they need only grab my public key from one of many freely accessible public repositories, use that key to encrypt their message, and then send the newly encrypted message to me.

I got permission from Derek Tonn at tonnhaus design to use his map on the site, and I got the new site fully setup at http://mpls-watched.org. With all that done I figured it was time to send out press released and fired them off to the Strib, City Pages, Rake and Skyway News. Who knows, maybe one of 'em will run something.

When I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use the tonnhaus map, I was trying to figure out ways to make my gathered location data still useful. As mentioned I took some GPS points to test the theory that the map was to scale. I then marked those same four points on the tonnhaus map and calculated the X and Y pixel/degree ratios for each of the six ( (4-1)! ) runs.

It took most of a weekend to do it, but there's now a nice website for the Minneapolis Surveillance Camera Project at http://sarinity.com . I'll be moving it to its own domain eventually, but that'll be a week or so.

The look is entirely owed to the Open Source Web Design site, http://oswd.org. I love being able to just go snarf a well coded template for a new project. Those people are doing a real service.

I got the surveillance camera location reporting stuff working tonight. It's amazing how easy Perl's CGI.pm can make stupid little web input forms. I'm sure I'll think of some other fields that I want in the data before this thing goes live, but for now this should do nicely: https://ry4an.org/surveillance/report/

The map I'm using is nice, but doesn't include all of downtown, and I still haven't heard back from its creators about getting permission to use it. Since I might have to change maps in the future (or might want to expand project scope) I'm hoping to store the camera locations as GPS coordinates rather than as useless pixel locations.

Target Corporation is donating a quarter million dollars to the city of Minneapolis, which city council rapidly accepted, to install 30+ police monitored security cameras. I'm not able to articulate why stuff like this scares me as much as it does, but I just get a queasy feeling when I think of government surveillance of the citizenry.

The ACLU has found that police cameras do not yield any significant reduction in crime, and there are many documented instances where police cameras have been used to illegally and inappropriately infringe on the privacy rights of citizens. That said, I think keeping camera counts down is a losing battle. Most people just can't get worked up about privacy rights in general and security cameras specifically.