I looked at one of those websites for finding devices. I wanted to find traffic cameras in my town. They’re there, but evidently not accessible to the public. But on this website, I found a bunch of cameras that were from the DOT. Yay! The bad news is that these cameras weren’t in my state after all. They were in a different state. I identified the city, and found out that they are public on purpose, so I called it a day.
Except… there was one camera that didn’t match the others. It was blurry. I wanted to try and focus it, so I logged in. There was no manual focus. Bummer. But it had a PTZ function. So I panned, tilted, and zoomed, and what I found shocked the hell out of me. The camera is attached to some little switch, a Cradlepoint cellular bridge, and an uninterruptible power supply. It’s in a tiny little box, the inside of which is painted black. There’s a window, held in place with electrical tape. Not an ordinary window, though, but a very familiar one. It’s a Faraday cage from a microwave oven. My guess is that even when the sun is shining directly on this box, it is impossible to see what’s inside it.
Sometimes I find the camera pointed at cars in the street. Sometimes it’s zoomed in on the windows of the apartments across the alleyway.
I find this very, very, disturbing. One the one hand, say that it is an legal surveillance. Then the cops are inept at InfoSec and OpSec (par for the course, but something that should be improved). Say that it’s not the cops… who is the scumwad creeper doing this?
I didn’t attempt to gain root. That’s too intrusive, and probably illegal, so not for me.
Geolocating the IP points to a default location for Verizon wireless hot spots. All I could figure out based on daylight is that it’s in the Western timezone.
Maybe I can use weather images and daily satellite images to figure out a more specific locale based on whether or not there’s snow on the ground.
I reached out to Super Tech Support on Reply All – no response so far.
I don’t like this. I get a bad vibe from this. It feels like some one is up to something creepy.