Ugh - the DEA is such a blight on American society. Who the hell is working for them?
As drug prohibition has become less popular, the DEA seems, at least to me, to be more desperate and childish. The raids on Amtrak trains are an example of this (which I myself suffered last year).
Can't we just end the drug war and have them go quietly like adults?
The whole 'war on X' meme should just go away. It is a ridiculous kind of analogy that implies that these things can be won, when in fact at best you can get to some kind of stalemate or a temporary advantage.
As someone who casually follows the state of freedom and civil rights in the US the first thing that goes through my mind when I read a headline like this is "oh, so ICE and the ATF are doing this too". It's kinda sad that things have gotten this bad.
That would be one very impressive DSP hack if you could eliminate the motor and other contact sounds. I highly doubt that you could cancel it out effectively but it is so tempting to try this to see how far you'd get.
A couple of approaches would be:
- bandpass filter in human voice range
- two mikes, only one facing outward, opposite polarity
- a lot of mechanical isolation
- a digital sample of the audio stored and subtracted from the input
And more such tricks. It would be a very interesting project to see how far you could push that.
My Amazon Echo can hear me fine over my vacuum cleaner, and far better than a human could. That makes me think general-purpose techniques alone might work.
You're assuming they didn't just put a little rechargeable battery in the vacuum too. Id assume people weren't doing drug deals while people were shop-vacuuming. Id definitely want to be able to film while it was off.
"...video can be live-streamed - presumably to agents parked in a van nearby..."
How does this work? Does the camera act as an AP that a client can connect to? Or do you have to configure the camera to join an existing network that you control?
I bought a SQ-13 camera off AliExpress for $20ish, which streams over Wifi (it acts as an AP) and is about an inch by an inch cube. (It's small enough to be carried on my N-scale train cars for a train-eye view.)
I was interested in this one or a similar model (sq20) to be used as a dash cam with external supply as the internal cell doesn't last much. Can it be configured to connect to a wireless network and stream the video to a standard encoder/player on given address? I would use it to stream to a small NAS in order not to destroy the flash doing continuous recording. Hopefully it doesn't require a smartphone and a proprietary app to connect to its stream.
Not as far as I can tell - the SQ13 has a really dinky, shitty app that I wouldn't want to use for anything serious. I was unsuccessful finding any hacked firmware for it.
It could be over radio, analog or digital. Or perhaps some other em frequency. Or hyper-sonic transmission. Perhaps x-ray frequencies despite the poor irradiated cleaning lady. It doesn't have to be a script-kiddie solution.
As drug prohibition has become less popular, the DEA seems, at least to me, to be more desperate and childish. The raids on Amtrak trains are an example of this (which I myself suffered last year).
Can't we just end the drug war and have them go quietly like adults?