Lip-Reading Surveillance Cameras

mrogers sends us to Infowars for the following news from the UK, "which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy": "'Read my lips..."' used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says. Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."

Solution

[Apocalypse111]

Quick and dirty solution: Pig Latin.

This will all work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

Until someone invents stealth technology to circumvent it. Like covering your mouth with your hand.

Re:Solution

[caramelcarrot]

Better solution: Paintball markers. It might be temporary, but frustrating.

lip-read a speaker?

[Red Flayer]

Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."

Sure, as soon as camera manufacturers start putting realistic mechanical lips[1] on their shouting cameras.

And as soon as that is possible, I'd like to license the technology for a venture of my own, involving about 40 lbs of latex and a metal skeleton. It'll be the best prom evar!11!

Re:This will all work fine

[badboy_tw2002]

Ah, but then you have something to hide. And they know it and will soon be picking you up to have a chat about it. After all, if you weren't doing anything wrong, why would you care if your Big Brother knew about it? He just wants to make sure you're living a comfortable and safe existence!

Re:This will all work fine

[olego]

You know, I used to think that everyone who said that was being sarcastic and was merely making fun of the government... Until I watched a couple of press releases by the government and realised that these things are actually said.

And that really freaked me out.

Written constitution and bill of rights.

[Palmyst]

That is what Britain needs, yesterday. This unwritten constitution business gives too much power to the political class, and they are obviously not above exploiting it to the max.

Market Prediction

[TheCreeep]

Expect the sales of scarfs in Britain to soar.

Re:Written constitution and bill of rights.

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Having a written constitution and a bill of rights isn't helping much on this side of the pond. The politicians have found that everything can be explained to the satisfaction of the voters by saying "interstate commerce" and "terror". Those voters who aren't sufficiently convinced are gradually pushed into lower income brackets so they'll have to spend more time at work and less time asking questions of their political leaders.

I don't know what the solution is anymore.

Be very afraid

[boyfaceddog]

The odds against something like this working ar astronomical.
The odds against it being used in court (or worse, being used to "detain" someone) are just about even.

That means some poor schmuck will end up sitting in a detention cell for a decade or so because he shouted for something and the lipreaders thought he said 'bomb'.

Re:Written constitution and bill of rights.

[Rakishi]

The US is nowhere near as bad as the UK in these regards. Also do you have any idea how the US government even works, voters are irrelevant in this regard. The bill of rights and constitution do not prevent any law from getting passed. They allow the supreme court to strike down laws that they deem to not conform to them. Then again you seem to be one of those nut cases who thinks there is some grand conspiracy in place so I guess your knowledge of the US government is average for a person of such views.

Re:Written constitution and bill of rights.

[HomelessInLaJolla]

What you've described is a system which is easily defeated by flooding. You're asserting that Congress has no duty to stay within its defined boundaries and that it is the Supreme Court's job to strike down illegitimate legislation. I think the problem is obvious when there are only seven supreme court justices and over five hundred congressional members.

But don't let the obvious prevent you from insulting me. If it makes you feel better then go ahead and do it to your heart's content.

Re:Would this work?

[Timesprout]

as in.. Brad Pitt's character in Snatch

Pikeys! I fookin hate pikeys! They are always guilty of something or other so arresting them is OK.

Re:Solution

[Shakrai]

There is also the low tech option and just go inside to talk where they're aren't any cameras....

A good low tech option in my mind would be to vote the dumbasses out of power that think this is a good idea.

Re:What is the motivation for all this?

[Anonymous Cowpat]

power - the politicians want power, and have given the police those powers necessary to stop the people objecting in any worthwhile fashion.

Free Speech

[quantaman]

I could see something like this having a very chilling effect of free speech.

Think if you've ever complained about the police when talking when a friend, now think if you'd still complaining as loudly if a police officer was within earshot.

This doesn't even have to work, a lot of people walking down the street are still going to feel nervous saying bad things about Big Brother if they feel Big Brother is actually listening.

Re:Solution

[arivanov]

And it will still not recognise them.

Germans found that out in world war 2 and used it. Apparently, no matter how good you get in a language you use different lip technique from the native speakers. As a result a professional lip reader (or a deaf person trained to lip read) will pick you out right away.

Back on the British topic. Just looking at the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers you have more than 4 different ethnic origins - Somali, Jamaican, Ethiopian and various different tribes originally from Pakistan. Each of these will be using a non-standard lip technique. While it may be possible to get some relatively low reading rate by a professional who has unlimited time to look at the tape, a real-time automated system will fail miserably right away. The only ones it will pick out will be Caucasian whites of English origin (I suspect it will fail on Scots and Welsh) who for some unbeknown to us reason have decided to discuss 7/7 instead of Chelsea vs Arsenal (that will probably be 1-2 people in the whole country anyway).

It's all about funding

[Flying pig]

In the US you have endless proposals for blue sky research projects that "might" in 20 years or so lead to something that "might" have a military application. Didn't the DoD even spend money on psychics not so long ago?

Here we don't have big slush funds. (The Govt. can endlessly waste public money on hopeless IT projects, but that's different.) So University lecturers, especially ones from not terribly good universities (have you ever been to Norwich? Don't.), have to try and invent other ways to get funding. Since the Govt. is obsessed with finding terrorists before they manage to get the gunpowder under Parliament again, one way to get funding for a visual recognition project is to suggest it can be used for lipreading terrorists in shopping centres. Of course it won't work, but hopefully by then the guy will have written a few papers and moved a bit up the academic pecking order. And good luck to him. British Government policy with universities basically involves being nice to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL and stuff the rest. (No, I'm not bitter. My family has degress from 3 of the 4. But I do recognise that it's not a good or fair system)

Re:This will all work fine

[InfiniteSingularity]

So How long until it becomes ILLEGAL to cover your mouth or try and talk without showing your lips?

Re:Written constitution and bill of rights.

[Khisanth Magus]

The problem is that we have no ability to vote on laws. We can only elect people we HOPE will represent our interests when those laws are proposed, and also write to our representative and hope they listen to us. But they can just as easily ignore the people who elected them. Throw in things like attaching bad laws onto other bills that need to be passed and you have the makings for a government that the people have very little say in.

Re:Written constitution and bill of rights.

[psykocrime]

The Constitution ( and the Magna Carta, and the Articles of Confederation, etc., etc.) is just a piece of paper. It can't do anything to defend our rights... we have to do that ourselves. Once the government has made the decision to step outside of
the bounds set for it (by said Constitution) the only choice is for "We The People" to put it back in those bounds, or destroy it.

Revolution Calling? Yeah, you could say that... But we haven't reached a critical mass yet, where enough people *care* about what's happening to do anything about it.

Re:It's a scam

[techno-vampire]

I've some hearing loss, and recently took a series of classes on coping with it. Part of it was experimenting with lip reading. Not only do many words look similar, letters formed mostly with the tongue look identical. Look in the mirror, sometime, and say the letters t, c, g and z, and try to tell which one is which. You can't. Now, imagine security droids looking at what the computer thinks somebody is saying and taking it as the literal truth because, as we all know, computers never lie. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Re:Solution

[Shakrai]

As somebody said a couple of elections ago, we're faced with a choice of being forced to eat s*** and being forced to eat s*** with razor-blades.

Then do something about it! Run for office yourself. Setup your own party. Try to convince people to vote for the existing third-parties.

Will any of those be successful? Who can say? But I give them a much bigger chance of success then apathy....

Re:This will all work fine

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because thjey believe it.
Hell I'm willing to give the people who want to implement the benefit of the doubt, but not the next people who will be in charge.
Get involved.

I am sooo cynical with your everyday people these days.

Most folks think everyone who's arrested is guilty.

Everyone accused of being a terrorist is a terrorist.

If you don't do anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about.

Law enforcement doesn't make mistakes.

I'm sure more can be added...

But my point is, those of us who question authority are in the minority. People think that if you're in Government and in power then you deserve it, NOT that you were the big man's buddy and got there because you are one of his drinking/golf/church buddies. When I question Government I'm called a "Liberal" or "Paranoid".

People have too much faith in their Governments. We, in the Western World, have become too complacent and we will lose our democratic governments one day. Not because of us minorities, but because of the great unwashed who are more concerned about wrestling and who's winning the big ball game or American Idol.

Bread and Circuses is still the method of controlling the masses.

Re:Expectation of privacy

[Travelsonic]

"No" expectation of privacy is a far cry from it being ok to basically stalk people and pry into their lives that way, and too many people who carry the tagline about expectation of privacy, in my opinion at least, ar (intentionally or not) using a red herring to distract from the real problems raised.