This weekend in Evanston, Illinois (where I live) was the annual Custer Fair - a pretty chill and small street festival. Pretty standard street festival stuff: hot dogs, music, children’s face painting, and creepy paramilitary Department of Homeland Security vehicles:

Not to sound like a spook but it is a pretty dystopian looking vehicle. Not just the dark paint job, the giant lettering, and paramilitary like appearance but also the large camera arm that extended into the air, covered in 360 degree cameras with thermal imaging (love the huge logo FLIR puts on their thermal cameras). The arm was extended all day, I presume collecting data to ship to Amazon Rekognition. It is great to know that thanks to Amazon Rekognition Activities API they also probably know I’m taking a picture:

For example, a photo of people on a tropical beach may contain labels such as Person, Water, Sand, Palm Tree, and Swimwear (objects), Beach (scene), and Outdoors (concept). Amazon Rekognition Video can also detect activities such as a person skiing or riding a bike.

It is still very early in the street street festival season, so I am very curious to know if this truck is at other festivals. Report back to me: thayden@gmail.com.

After the first day of the festival, there were allegedly enough complaints to the city that the Police Chief asked the vehicle to leave. Perhaps a success story there about citizen advocacy or perhaps they were scheduled only for a single day worth of data collection.

On the second day the DHS camera vehicle was replaced by an even more devious villain.