Hackers Rebel Against Spy Cams

Wired is running an article looking at the little ways in which Austrian technology users are striking back against surveillance. From the article: "Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it's transferred from DVD to VHS tape. The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices. And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded."

Laughing Man

[Intocabile]

Albeit relatively low tech in comparison. A real life counterpart none the less.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laughing_Man_(ani me) [wikipedia.org]

RTFA?

[avidday]

The group in question is an Austrian civil liberties group, not German hackers and not based in Berlin. How do I know this? I read the first sentence of the article............

Re:Black stripe

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a joke, more that anything. Most CCTV systems are intended to track people, and allow them to be identified, which is often seen as an invasion of privacy.

They basically used the signal they recieved from the cameras, rigged up some face recognition software, and used it to draw black bars over the faces on the recording itself. Hence "anonymous survailance system".

Living in a surveillance society

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of an old MIT article, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove [mit.edu]. It describes what is involved in living in a surveillance society. It also defines the attributes of a surveillance society:

1. Transcends distance, darkness, and physical barriers.
2. Transcends time and its records can easily be stored, retrieved, combined, analyzed, and communicated.
3. Is capital-rather than labor intensive.
4. Triggers a shift from targeting a specific to categorical suspicion.
5. Has as a major concern the prevention of violations.
6. Is decentralized-and triggers self-policing.
7. Is either invisible or has low visibility.
8. Is more intensive-probing beneath surface, discovering previously inaccessible information.
9. Grows ever more extensive-covering not only deeper, but larger areas.

I think surveillance, even when used with the best of intentions, will interfere with people's lives. The authorities will investigate anyone that does anything different. Yet doing things different is what life is all about. When used with less noble intentions, surveillance could lead to a much more troubling society as the East Berlin residents. described in the article may well remember.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[Swift Kick]

Of course, in your rush to make a post with a inane little political statement against the administration, you failed to read the article.

If you had read it, you'd learn that the cameras are not in Britain. Even the article submitter failed to use basic reading comprehension, since the article is about a conference hosted by the Chaos Computing Club in Berlin, where they describe the actions taken by a Austrian civil liberties group against recent legislation that enable police to install cameras in public places.

In Austria. Not in Berlin, Germany. Also not Britain.

Reading comprehension seems to be sorely lacking here.

Re:RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had read the rest of the article, you would have realized that they met in Alexanderplatz, in Germany (formerly East Germany).

Re:Black stripe

[raoul666]

Size of eyes, how deep they go into the skull, and the distance between them is a big part of what makes a face unique. Also, depending on the size of the black stripe, it could cover eyebrows and a good chunk of the nose. It's the most effective area to black out if you don't want to be recognized.

War on terror anyone

[manavendra]

The general perception about politicians lately is CCTV will eliminate all problems. After the London bombing on 7/7/05, the Met spent hundreds of man hours sifting through CCTV "evidence" to find more information about the hackers, while for all practical purposes is shutting the barn door after...

Even the Dutch, once known as hacker-friendly, politically progressive Europeans, are now fearful and demanding more cameras on their streets.

Whilst recording and monitoring activities in parts deemed dangerous, not easy to patrol, prone to mugging/thefts/incidents may be worthwhile, recording public spaces is similar to littering the motorway with speed cameras...

Re:Um...where, exactly?

[GWSuperfan]

If one actually reads TFA, the project was presented in Berlin, but the hack was done in Austria. The reporter was in Berlin, hence the "BERLIN-"

But its not shutting the barn door .....

[Macka]

The general perception about politicians lately is CCTV will eliminate all problems. After the London bombing on 7/7/05, the Met spent hundreds of man hours sifting through CCTV "evidence" to find more information about the hackers, while for all practical purposes is shutting the barn door after...

I'm sure you meant bombers, not hackers, but anyway. So you think its shutting the barn door after the event. That certainly was not the case for the second set of (failed) bombing attempts a few weeks later. CCTV footage gave the Met and us the faces and (eventually) names of the second crew. Exposing them on TV forced them into hiding (or to flee) before they could strike again and it ultimately led to their capture. It also led to the Police finding more bombs in the back of a car in a train station. Without CCTV there is no way we could have identified them and stopped them from fixing the problems with their bombs and striking again. In the case of the 7/7/05 bombers the Police were able to identify them, track them back into their community and investigate what they had been doing for the last year or so, where they had been, who they associated with, etc. A vital step to try and make sure there was not a queue of future bombers waiting to strike. In both cases CCTV footage helped the Police to discover bomb making factories and chemical stores and to dispose of them safely.

Frankly, I'm glad they're there. The speed camera thing is a separate issue and I won't go into that here.

 

Re:Black stripe

[Mitsugi]

For people who don't know: Laughing Man [wikipedia.org]

Austrian speakers at CCC Conference in Berlin

[billstewart]

Yes, they're Austrians, speaking at the Chaos conference which is currently happening in Berlin.

Re:Big Deal

[Tim C]

I'd like to make a couple of points, as I have some experience in a tangentially-related area.

Firstly, the amount of storage space you're talking about for keeping all this stuff forever is huge. Hundreds of thousands of cameras (if not millions), all filming 24/7 - I can't be bothered to do the maths, but if you assume no audio, grey-scale and a crappy resolution (but still high enough to identify "everyone you talk to" and "everything you do") you're talking about hundreds of megabytes per camera per day, if not gigabytes.

Secondly, those cameras are fixed. They're not following you around, you move from camera to camera. In order to produce a file on any one person, you'd have to check through the logs of every single camera they passed and extract the relevant clip(s). To do that for any non-trivial period of time would be a very time-consuming process; image processing software isn't good enough (yet?) to do it automatically. You'd be sat trawling through hours of footage. I wouldn't do it for a "couple of cases of beer".

Finally, I've worked with the (UK) police on a couple of information storage and retrieval type projects (I can't say any more than that - I'm under NDA and besides, it's classified). I can assure you that they take their legal responsibilities extremely seriously, especially when it comes to controlling and monitoring access to the data and application we were working on. Around three-quarters of the development effort revolved around protective monitoring of the application - everything anyone does with it is logged, and those logs are searchable. Misuse of the application is a criminal offence, and will be prosecuted.

Now, that said I'm not saying that you're not right to be concerned about this sort of all-pervasive monitoring of the general population; you should be concerned. I'm also not saying that one day, we won't find ourselves in the situation you describe. I don't think we're very close to it now, though, and certainly not only 5 years away.

Vehicle tracking, on the other hand, is a different matter. The licence plate is a very easily processed (nominally) unique id. Given sufficient resources it would be a relatively simple matter to build up a log of all vehicle movements, at least to the detail of what camera was passed at what time in what direction (and at what speed). That I think we should be worried about now.

Re:Veils

[Kasis]

In my area, the owners of the local shopping center (mall for you Americans) will have you removed from the premises if you enter wearing a baseball cap and hoody.

Although I have no doubt the fashion started among shoplifters, I think it has become a legitimate fashion among young teenagers. I know at least one who thinks it's cool to hide her features and she's definitely not a criminal.

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever heard or the word "sarcasm"? I suggest you go look it up [wikipedia.org] before you make yourself sound like an ass again.

Re:Big Deal

[metamatic]

First off: they don't need to keep all the video. Once they get facial recognition sorted, they can just log your ID against a set of waypoints, perhaps with a few reference clips of video. They can probably cross-reference with your mobile phone's location data too, to help identify you. (If cellphone X is the only one to be traced to six locations where face Y is seen, it's a pretty safe bet that X belongs to Y.)

Secondly, it doesn't matter that the cameras are fixed. So long as they're networked and have accurate timestamps, you can reconstruct the likely route across the few places not under surveillance.

In case you missed the story in The Independent, the UK is aiming to keep a 2 year rolling log of every journey made by every car starting this year. Replace the license plate with a face and a cellphone trace, and you can do the same with people.

I happen to believe, like David Brin, that it's inevitable. What we need to be doing is forcing reciprocal transparency.