Surveillance under Surveillance associated with CCC Hansestadt Hamburg e.V.

Languages used:
CSSHTMLJavaScriptMariaDBPHP

Frameworks used:
AnsibleDockerForgejoRenovate

Target platforms:
Web

The project

In an effort to make data affecting the public visible and easily browsable, Surveillance under Surveillance is a visualization project based on OpenStreetMap contributors. Quickly browse the world and see any cameras spotted in public, their viewing angles and radius.

The project originated in 2012 and has since been used to visualize cameras in XR apps for Google Glass and hosted across multiple instances. After the announcement of the shutdown of the last maintained instance, members of the Chaos Computer Club's Hamburg branch took responsibility to both keep the project alive and modernize it to easily facilitate both hosting and maintenance.

My tasks since 09/2025

As part of the group of the CCC maintaining Surveillance under Surveillance most of my efforts were focused on modernizing the app stack and shifting left:

  • Containerization of all existing components:
    • PHP web server
    • MariaDB database
    • background sync job, continuously updating the dataset
  • Enabling self-healing services and status reports using health-checks
  • CI/CD pipeline for Docker builds
  • Local development environment overrides
  • Documentation of existing technical project structure and containerization efforts
  • Automated version updates using Renovate