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Comments: 122 +-   Demo of EU's Planned "INDECT" Hints At Massive Data Mining, Little Privacy on Monday October 19, @02:33PM

Posted by timothy on Monday October 19, @02:33PM
from the greater-good-strikes-back dept.
privacy
Ronald Dumsfeld writes "Wikinews puts together some of the details around the EU's five-year-plan called Project INDECT, and brings attention to a leaked 'sales-pitch' video: 'An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube is shown to the right. The simplified example of the system in operation shows a file of documents with a visible INDECT-titled cover stolen from an office and exchanged in a car park. How the police are alerted to the document theft is unclear in the video; as a "threat," it would be the INDECT system's job to predict it. Throughout the video use of CCTV equipment, facial recognition, number plate reading, and aerial surveillance give friend-or-foe information with an overlaid map to authorities. The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursing, and capturing the document recipient. The file of documents is retrieved, and the recipient roughly detained.'"
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Submission: EU might be listening to you at last by Ronald Dumsfeld (723277)
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  • Enhance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by slifox (605302) * on Monday October 19, @02:49PM (#29798881)
    Whenever I see facial recognition enhancement, I think of this:

    http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1156 [phdcomics.com]

    Turns out... it's theoretically impossible!

    Seriously, this video plays like a bad science ficition movie... they say "let us monitor everything and we'll magically know when crimes are committed," without saying exactly *how* they plan on sorting through the incredible amount of data and coming up with "crime X being committed right now" in a timely manner.

    • FYI, MythBusters do use controls and multiple data points, at least nowadays.

      Besides, it's understood that the ultimate goal of any episode of MythBusters is one or more large explosions, regardless of the outcome of the myth.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by symes (835608)
      Not to mention all those darn kids who'll figure out how the system works. Chat rooms would be full of "if you stand on one leg and wave a small red flag at the camera you'll trigger the bomb squad... rotfl, lmas" and so on. Anyhow - I've done a very tiny bit of work in this area - more simulations than spotting criminal intent - kind of the same thing in reverse. Our simulation, if we wanted to scale it up to a realistic scenario, would have taken 32 years to run on a regular desktop. So I'm guessing that

      • It doesn't matter if the damn thing works or not because eventually it will. The truly frightening thing is the intent behind the initiative. There are people in governments around the world working as hard as they can to bring a computerized "big brother" system to life. Government's power over the individual has increased by orders of magnitude with the advent of things like internet searchable public information. It used to take some leg work to pull paperwork on someone, which acted as a natural brak

        • Re:Enhance (Score:4, Insightful)

          by stephanruby (542433) on Monday October 19, @05:30PM (#29801155)

          It doesn't matter if the damn thing works or not because eventually it will.

          Actually, it doesn't matter if the damn thing works or not, because even if it doesn't -- it can still make your life a living hell [antipolygraph.org].

          But I agree with you, eventually it will work, if newspapers have mastered fortune-telling and horoscopes technology, it means it's just a matter of time before the government gets it as well.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by QuantumRiff (120817)

      Just look at the success of the video surveillance system in London for cutting down on crimes.

      Oh, wait.. I meant solving crimes,

      Err, I meant.. Look how many jobs it created..

  • Ministry of Everything (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bmo (77928) on Monday October 19, @02:49PM (#29798883)

    Guys....

    The book 1984 was not meant to be a *manual*

    Thanks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mdm-adph (1030332)

      No, more like a prediction. :(

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dkleinsc (563838)

        See, you don't have it fully down, it's not "bad guys" (because that sounds silly). You have to appeal to fears properly, like this:
        Not giving them unrestricted access to monitor everyone continuously would only help terrorists, child predators, and unwed teenage mothers.

  • A new standard for proof... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Obfuscant (592200) on Monday October 19, @02:58PM (#29799051)
    An unreleased promotional video for INDECT located on YouTube...

    In a press release dated 18 October, 2009, the World Court announced that "'a video on YouTube' has replaced 'an entry in Wikipedia' as the best source of factual evidence for any legal proceeding meeting NWO standards. Film at 11."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sopssa (1498795) *

        The funny thing is that NWO conspiracy theories are starting to look even more and more valid every day...

  • How do warrants and probable cause work in Europe?

    I mean I realize that the video is just a sales pitch. However it bothers me that they never showed someone reporting something missing. The video gave the impression of "He looks suspicious, lets mobilize the cops to pick him up".

  • Who the hell are they trying to catch? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Absolut187 (816431) on Monday October 19, @03:12PM (#29799287) Homepage

    WTF is this??
    We know that Osama Bin Laden is in Pakistan, yet we don't have him 8 years later.

    Is this system going to track down terrorist training camps somehow??

    I guess the next best thing to actually fighting terrorism (hard, scary) is to stomp on the privacy rights of passive citizens (easy, safe).

    • Two possibilities:

      Osama isn't in Pakistan (or Afghanistan) at all - he's disappeared, or died, or retired to Florida to drink pina-coladas all day, or -
      The security forces don't actually WANT to find him, as once they do there's no reason for them to continue in the region: Job done, game over, go home. And then what will they do to keep the contracts flowing to their friends in low places?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Ronald Dumsfeld (723277)

        Two possibilities:

        Osama isn't in Pakistan (or Afghanistan) at all - he's disappeared, or died, or retired to Florida to drink pina-coladas all day, or - The security forces don't actually WANT to find him, as once they do there's no reason for them to continue in the region: Job done, game over, go home. And then what will they do to keep the contracts flowing to their friends in low places?

        Osama Bin Laden is, truly, the modern-day Emmanuel Goldstein.

  • As any slashdot reader would already know, the document obviously had a RFID chip in it and that alerted security when it passed through exit to the building.

    • I say they simply skip a few steps and have each person marked on their forehead and right arm for easy identification.

  • When they find the guy who stole my bike.

  • Redundant... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "The police proactively use this information to coordinate locating, pursing, and capturing the document recipient".

    It seems to me that once the recipient has been pursed, capturing them is kind of redundant. Don't you already have them in a relatively small bag?

  • ...security-technophilia, paranoia, directionless data aggregation, and nanny-state politics. Look, I'm all for security, and I hate terrorists, but you can't just throw millions of cameras at the problem, accrue massive amounts of civilian info without having a reason why, a vague and vaporous set of goals, and, to top it off, let a computer define what is or is not a "threat" instead of giving it solid guidelines and clear directives on what to search for. Yeah, that won't cause any problems. I'm honestly

  • I feel so warm and fuzzy that all of these governments are so concerned about my safety..

  • This nice young politician, Harold Saxon [wikipedia.org], explained to me why it was so important. Said if any terrorists did something horrible, like a UN scientific adviser or a member of a secret government organization went rogue, we could track them and get them before they did something bad.

    Nice fellow, that Saxon. I'd vote for him. It's not like he'd use all that power for anything evil, would he?

  • For some reason their acronym reads and sounds in my head like "Indecent".
  • So this is supposed to prevent crime by scanning the internet and mobile phones and other electronic stuff.

    Well, I guess in that case the baddies will have to resort to the old fashioned way of doing badness without all these high-tech toys. Just like they successfully managed to do for hundreds of years. Luckily the EU is only planning on spending 15 million euros on this - over 5 years. So it won't matter very much when they discover the money's been wasted as the criminals go back to holding face-to-fa

  • If this kind of technology were made available to EVERYONE, there'd probably be a lot less resistance to it. It's the fact that these politicians, corporate entities and governments think they are above other people that, at least, tick *me* off the most.

    • [slap]

      BRIAN: Aaah!

      CENTURION: Oh, and, uh, throw him to the floor, sir?

      PILATE: What?

      CENTURION: Thwow him to the floor again, sir?

      PILATE: Oh, yes. Thwow him to the floor, please.

       

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sopssa (1498795) *

      A report accidentally published on the Internet provides insight into a secretive European Union surveillance project designed to monitor its citizens, as reported by Wikileaks earlier this month. Project INDECT aims to mine data from television, internet traffic, cellphone conversations, p2p file sharing and a range of other sources for crime prevention and threat prediction.

      If this doesn't sound like breaking privacy, I dont know what does. And I bet it's UK that is trying to bring this into all EU countries.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sopssa (1498795) *

          Aren't cell phones fair game, as they're broadcast over open airwaves, while stuff transmitted over a landline has that "reasonable expectation of privacy" that no one's listening?

          Please explain why you think so. It's still listening over to people's private conversation, just the transmit is done via air instead of landline.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by icebraining (1313345)

            Especially since GSM is supposed to be encrypted [wikipedia.org], even if there are already methods to break it.

            • Re:They like it rough. (Score:5, Interesting)

              by sopssa (1498795) * on Monday October 19, @03:20PM (#29799417)

              Privacy should only be assumed if you control the wires, or if you encrypt the message YOURSELF. To simply say "this is private, you can't listen" is silly.

              Maybe so, but there's no way one can build and maintain all of that themself. They would also have to be on their own internets thats only on their own lines. It's just not possible to do that.

              Thats *why we have privacy laws in place*. Like any other law, yeah they could be broken by someone. But there will be consequences for the people breaking them. When goverments will remove those laws and actually start breaking them by themself you will have problems. That is what we're trying to prevent here.

              • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

                by Obfuscant (592200)
                Maybe so, but there's no way one can build and maintain all of that themself.

                That implies that you think there is some natural right to "private conversations using other people's stuff". I'm sorry, but if you use my telephone in my house, it's my wires and you have as much privacy as I decide to give you. The fact you can't build the infrastructure yourself has no relevance to that.

                They would also have to be on their own internets thats only on their own lines. It's just not possible to do that.

                So? Th

                • While I'll admit that it's stupid to expect radio signals to be "private", there is something inherently wrong with a system where I pay someone to follow me around all day, just to spy on me. Or, in this case, I pay taxes so that the government can mount cameras, and intercept all electronic signals from devices I own, just to spy on me. Tell me again, why do I pay taxes?

                  Orwelle's story was right, he just got the year wrong.

                • ignorant people having ignorant expectations about what is private.

                  No we have ignorant people or perhaps I should say people who are not cultured, enough to obey those laws. And people like you who assume that simply because it can be done it should be done. While I agree it will be done that doesn't mean that we can't restore civilization and culture by not doing what you claim is physically impossible.
            • To simply say "this is private, you can't listen" is silly.

              It's also what we like to call "civilized". An expectation of privacy comes from having civilized ourselves enough to NOT listen even though we obviously can. Any one listening to what should be a private call is obviously not civilized. Unless probable cause is present to require a court order to listen. I don't understand why we all seem to have become less civilized lately.
            • [same anonymous poster as above]
              did anyone hear something? I saw something go by but it was not identifiable. Not important I guess.
        • cell phones fair game? Depends if your talking about the towers and tracking or just enjoying an iphone.
          Thinks back to Adamo Bove and Costas Tsalikidis.
          Adamo Bove was the head of security at Telecom Italia and exposed the CIA (Abu Omar rendition in Italy traced after the fact with mobiles), SISMI ( ~ the Italian CIA) and his own bosses. He was found under a freeway overpass.
          Costas Tsalikidis was a 38-year-old software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece.
          He uncovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sopssa (1498795) *

      No one, and they know that. But they also know that they have to bring it in slowly. Take just little bits of privacy away from time to time and no one will notice we've soon lost it all.

      I hope it takes longer than my lifetime tho.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rvw (755107)

      ...should we really even bother trying to prevent this kind of future anymore?

      Wouldn't we be better off solely trying to discuss ways to circumvent it when it does inevitably happen?

      ...

      Who's going to stop this?

      We are! Slashdot is thé community to do this. We have the brainpower, the knowledge, and lots of time. If we can't do this, who can?

      • Why do you think Slashdot is smarter then everyone else?

        I can't find proof in these comments.

      • > Who's going to stop this?
        >> We are! Slashdot is thé community to do this. We have the brainpower, the knowledge, and lots of time. If we can't do this, who can?

        No, Anonymous could stop this. Unfortunately, they only care if "they" disrupt the flow of porn.

      • Because humans are horribly bad at assessing actual risk. That's why people are afraid of flying, but more people are killed per passenger mile when driving [observer.com]. A plane crash is much more dramatic, and hence, takes hold of people's fears and makes them go WAY out of their way to avoid it, even at the expense of actual safety. Same with the markets, terrorism, and thinking of the children with all our various "war on X" movements.

    • Well, to bring this back on topic, how will you feel when the government sends you to a reeducation camp because you smell your own farts?

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