Hackers Rebel Against Spy Cams 390
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."
Good going. (Score:4, Interesting)
Black stripe (Score:4, Interesting)
How effective is it in preventing recognition?
Or is the reason less obvious than that?
Big Deal (Score:1, Interesting)
Use the Aliens method. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Turn the tables (Score:4, Interesting)
Semi related story - after 911, I had to go to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (patent appeals court) to get a brochure of pictures of the judges for a partner at a big law firm. They made me get a signed letter of request on firm letterhead before giving it to me - for security reasons. Silly - they're public servants after all, we have a right to know who we're paying.
Re:Living in a surveillance society (Score:3, Interesting)
I hadn't used it in a while and had forgotten about it until now but now google responds to the query [google.com] with this:
We're sorry...
We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.
I'd like to see their excuse for limiting this query. All I am doing is looking to see what the watchers are watching.
Re:Living in a surveillance society (Score:2, Interesting)
You'll enjoy being able to be who you are in a society where there isn't widespread survalence, but if you were attacked you might say to yourself, "Where were the cops when I needed them?"
The survalence will give you the confidence to go into places you would ordinarily be too scared of going. Now, you may be as tough as old boots, a ninja, Batman, or whatever, but not everybody is. Remember to be compassionate to those who aren't gifted with super-human attributes. A friend of mine was raped brutally. Three men attacked her. There was nothing she could do. She was beat, and luckily, she lived.
The point is this, you might now think it's better to have your liberties, but you might regret not having the protection later. You won't always be a robust and healthy man. You'll become weak and vulnerable someday. I'm not saying that society should be under constant survalence. I'm just saying think about this more carefully.
Re:Who decides? (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, the Founding Fathers did include a mechanism for such violence within the Constitution -- that's what the 2nd Amendment is for! You can also discover their stance on this issue by their writings, e.g. Thomas Jefferson: Interestingly enough, the more you read the words of the Founding Fathers, the more you realize that they would all be called Libertarians if they were still around. I'm sure they'd be spinning in their graves if they knew how both the Republicans and Democrats are wrecking the ideals they fought for today...
Re:Who decides? (Score:3, Interesting)
What if we don't?
Re:Big Deal (Score:2, Interesting)
You may reply that "they will only raise rates, not lower them." This may be true initially. But I presume that in the long run, the average insurance rate will even out (competition, etc. One of its only benefits). So, overall, some people will pay more, and other people will pay less. Importantly, people will pay more fairly - those that take more health risks pay more, those that take less - less.
Nothing hacks a camera (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheap. Effective. If the people really decide they've had enough of surveilence that's what will happen in urban areas too. It's why you don't see cameras in rural France or Spain, people just pop them and no society can afford to keep replacing a thousand dollar camera when a one dollar bullet will fix the problem.
Well, At Least... (Score:1, Interesting)
A few years ago an ISP tier-one support guy in New Zealand shared his staff login and password with his 13-year-old kid brother, who promptly shared it with one of his little friends. That friend then logged into the ISP with it and deleted a bunch of customer websites. The local media labeled the kid an "unstoppable genius hacker", interviewing him on talk shows with his face blacked-out and voice disguised, as if he was some Mafia kingpin or something. Pathetic. But the ignorant public lapped it up.
Re:Veils (Score:5, Interesting)
Cross index ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, you know every house that has a new, valuable TV that also doesn't have anyone at home right now.
Cross index that with any sales of dog food to account for canine issues
The same with jewelry.
Grand theft auto? Even easier.
Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why people think politicians are such great guys. All they do is tell you what you want to hear; they don't understand you. Most of them are tremendously wealthy people, multi-multi-millionaires, who don't have a clue about what it's like to earn a real living or live a life outside of country clubs and fund raisers. How many people like that do you come into contact with on a daily basis? They are supposed to be civil servants, put in place to do the business of the country, pushing paper around, shaking hands, protecting the citizenry. Nothing special. We are supposed to define this country, not them. Instead we've made them demigods, leaders of our culture, and turned this country into not only a business, but a moneymaking machine. Stupid.
And now people like this dope want to give them absolute power. Even more stupid.
Re:Nothing hacks a camera (Score:4, Interesting)
I am fascinated by the British phenomenon of Gatsos [wikipedia.org] which are well hidden cameras that take pictures of speeding cars.
These are of course justified by officials as needed for public safety, but are in reality revenue generation devices. There is a modern-day Robin Hood character in Britain named Captain Gatso who along with his merry-men have destroyed [p]hundreds of Gatsos.
This page [speedcam.co.uk] displays some of their handiwork.
Two points. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
2. On the Light side. . , taxation is THE common denominator; it is the common woe and injustice felt across all racial and political/idealogical boundaries. Even Pro-Life and Abortionists both hate paying taxes to a corrupt government. This is one major spot where the mighty will begin to topple. --The growth of healthy community is where the elite begin to lose control.
Without interference, people can quite easily build and maintain healthy community. I've witnessed it. Politics and divisive issues, media and the highly manipulative/manipulated economic forces are primarily designed and maintained to keep people disconnected. --To keep them in tightly controlled boxes so that they don't do exactly what the elite fear; come together to communicate rather than yell at each other, to solve problems and grow in body, mind and spirit. This kind of growth leads to real freedom, and real freedom leads to the elite loses their slave nation and status as the 'popular kids'. (Hm. It occurs to me that the elite really are like the popular kids in high school; they like the artificial environment where they 'rule', and they want to maintain it. It has always amused me how most popular kids are really upset when they graduate to discover their artificial power status dropped to zero and having to work on themselves in real ways like everybody else. --Usually several steps behind the curve because of the wasted years riding egotism bourn on their parent's money rather than working to actually improve themselves and learn skills beyond fashion sense and one-upmanship through gossip.)
Anyway. . . taxes are the one area where the elite will simply not be able to let up, and it is the one area which hurts unilaterally across the board, and where people from all the different boxes can truly come together to form real community.
Re-read the story about the British group destroying surveillance cameras [guardian.co.uk]. Their motives are not privacy related. They are destroying traffic cameras because they believe them to be an unfair form of taxation.
"The more you tighten your grip, they more systems slip through your fingers. .
-FL
Re:Black stripe (Score:1, Interesting)
I had a nice collection of numbers harvested from payroll slips and car parking permits and used other peoples identities for years. I never had the nerve to charge my parking to the Dean's account, though.
Re:Living in a surveillance society (Score:5, Interesting)
i tried the url in the original post, and it gave an error, as discussed... i then cleaned up the url, resulting in this google query [google.com], which is working just fine for me.
hth? ;o)
Re:Who decides? (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming you were serious:
Even taking only the single sentence you quoted, bereft of context, the grandparent still doesn't take the position you ascribe. Far from claiming that "there is no terrorist threat" the GP specifically acknowledges that a "chance of falling prey to a terrorist act" would still exist.
S/he simply expresses doubt that the chance of dying in a terrorist act would be as high as that of dying in a car accident, even had nothing been done. Read it again, it's right there in the sentence you quoted.
Car accidents have killed more than 3000 people and arguably may cause a chronic drag on the economy equal or worse than the acute impact of losing the Trade Towers. The rest of your comparisons relate not to the actual damage done but to the over-wrought perception of the threat, which is precisely what the GP is positing to be the problem.
Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't doubt it. Their commitment to the law is laudable. However, there is precedent [epic.org] to suggest that law enforcement powers expand continually over time but never contract. As the law enumerates more and more things that the police are allowed to do, I'm sure they will follow those laws seriously as well.
What concerns me is:
Even if these issues were addressed, I do not want my government tracking my movements. It's none of their business.
Indexing (Score:3, Interesting)
Since the facial recognition software is doing this in "real time" as the video flows in from the camera, it is essentially "pre processed" at collection time, thus making it TRIVIAL to extract the information. And we've all seen news stories since '01 that show facial recognition software pulling 100 faces out of a frame in real time with desktop hardware........ sorry to say, brother, but you're spreading misinformation.
As far as storing the video, you could use a simple decay algorythm that would decay the image over time in order to save space while keeping as much important information as possible. Say you have 30fps video at 1000x1000 resolution. Then, using the aforementioned index, you could assign a value to a clip based on the faces present. For instance, if there are no faces (IE, no index entries) the frame would get a value of 0. Ten faces would be a 10. Then you assign a "half life" to the clips (different half lifes for different cameras, of course) that determines how much raw information from the camera is saved and for how long.
For instance, frames from camera A have a half-life of 10 days. That means during processing, frames that haven't been touched in 10 days are reprocessed. Based on their value from the facial recognition engine, frames are either kept or deleted. Also, you'd use a log curve to increase the value of adjacent frames to a very high value frames. For instance, a frame has 20 faces, the immediately preceding frame has only 10 faces, it should get a value closer to the 20 because of it's relation to the 20. Frames become more valuable as they are surrounded by more valuable frames. Anyway, the software decides the most non-valuable images, and then removes frames up to the point where there are half as many frames as before. Touch times are reset and the timer is set again for 10 days. The process is repeated until: all the frames are gone or only frames with a value of 1 or greater remain. The thing is that you are doing this over time so you will only require a maximum of twice the power of the real time processing running continously to degrade the images (and once they are at their lowest quality, they are no longer checked.). In addition, the less valuable images don't necessarily have to be removed--they can be more compressed or moved to some other storage medium yet they still stay in the index.
When all of this is combined with GIS systems (as they are already using in those speed cams), it would be possible to (using only the index, not the imagery) generate a map showing a probable track of any one face either in real time or after the fact.
Suspect A is suspected of posting a sign in front of the capitol saying something negative about the corporations. Suspect A is photographed by officers and is assigned a face hash of 0A3F901...0A3F9FF. Index is queried for possible matches. A number of hits come up. Camera One one block from the capitol has a possible match on the Face. 5 minutes later, there is another match one block in the opposite direction. A plot on the GIS mapping shows that in that five minutes, the suspect could have walked right past where the sign was found.
Unfortunately, Suspect A did not commit the crime, he was merely a jogger who, at a party with a few friends, had mentioned something negative about the corporations and one of his "friends" decided to report him to the authorites, just to be "safe". The actual culprit made a simple rubber mask out of commonly available materials used in the
Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Interesting)
My employer's hold over me begins and ends with the time I'm scheduled. What I do on my own time should be no concern of theirs.
Nephilium
sousveillance & shootback (Score:3, Interesting)
Steve Mann [wearcam.org] [1] has a lot of intelligent things to say on surveillance [idtrail.org] [2], sousveillance [sousveillance.org] [3] and the intersection of technology & privacy. The earliest I can find is in a 1995 paper [wearcam.org] [4]. In an article predating the Austrians, Mann advocates shooting back [wearcam.org] (with your own camera) [5].
More links can be found here [del.icio.us]. [6]
Reference
[0] Steve Mann, 'definition from Sousveillance as an alternative balance':
http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm [wearcam.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[1] Steve Mann, 'Cyberman':
http://wearcam.org/steve.html [wearcam.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[2] Steve Mann, 'Identity Trail - Stream 3 - technologies that identify, anonymize and authenticate':
http://idtrail.org/content/view/47/43/ [idtrail.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[3] Steve Mann, 'Sousveillance: A Gathering of the Tribes':
http://sousveillance.org/tribesissue/ [sousveillance.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[4] Steve Mann, 'PRIVACY ISSUES OF WEARABLE CAMERAS VERSUS SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS, Feb. 24, 1995':
http://wearcam.org/netcam_privacy_issues.html [wearcam.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[5] Steve Mann, 'Shooting back article & pictures':
http://wearcam.org/shootingback.html [wearcam.org]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]
[6] Delicious 'my delicious links on steve.mann':
http://del.icio.us/goon/steve.mann [del.icio.us]
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]