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Good luck finding and buying one as a civilian but what you want is an active sensing laser denial system... It's going to be expensive and I've only seen them in military gear but they work... Mostly. Link: http://www.naimark.net/project...

You can blind a camera using lasers that produce near infrared light. Check out http://www.naimark.net/project... for some examples.

That leaves detecting the camera and pointing the laser at it. You can either detect the reflections from the lens or the light from the autofocus.

Overall, it's not an easy problem to solve. I don't know that I'd waste my time/money on it.

it's that cameras are getting so small and integrated that such bans are pointless. In a few years, everybody will carry body-mounted cameras everywhere. You might as well get used to it now.

No, they won't. If cameras become that ubiquitous, so will camera detectors and jammers, as well as lawsuits about the publication of photographs without signed releases.

Surveillance is what governments do. You're not "the anti-surveillance crowd", you're the "anti-photography crowd". And photography in public places is perfectly OK in our society, and that includes restaurants.

First, video is not the same as photography.

Second, surveillance is not limited to government action but means only "the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime". Photography or video need not be done by the state to be surveillance.

Third, restaurants are not public places. In fact the blog to which you link acknowledges to authority of business managers to ban photography on the premises.

My life is a creative work: my choice of dress, my manner of movement, my speech, everything I do is a . Photographs or videos of me in any but the most incidental manner (i.e., I happen to be walking down the street and you capture me in a street scene) are derivatives of that work. I do not grant Google any license to make or distribute such derivative works.

As Steve Mann put it, surveillance is theft.

But all in all, I suspect law won't be willing to address this, and we apparently can't rely on people doing the right thing on their own. We need ubiquitous jammers. Just cheap laser pointers could be an effective means to deal with "glassholes".

I could be wrong, but I don't think the actual application of laser pointers to cameras does any burning out of the hardware.
As for Burn Notice, with many of their stunts leaving out crucial middle steps or over-exaggerating the effects, I think a more likely true usage of bundled lasers would be through the utilization of multiple colors (red, green, blue) to prevent analysis/countermeasures that apply color specific filters. (like using red to still figure out that was M. Westin in the corner using a bundle of red lasers)

Here is an example of one gentleman's pursuit in defeating cameras with lasers/light:
http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html

For those of you too lazy to follow the links, the Aspen Movie Map was a project done in 1978-81 by the MIT Architecture Machine Group (precursor to the Media Lab) to create an interactive map of the town of Aspen Colorado. Similar to Google, they mounted sideways facing cameras on a car, drove around the town collecting "street-view" imagery and loaded it all into an interactive map. They built an interactive videodisk and interface that allowed you to "drive around" the town. Video clip Here. I don't know if they patented any of the ideas, but I expect any patents would have expired by 2007.

The US Army has had technology like this for a while: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/stingray.h tm

A good article to read about blinding cameras is here:
http://www.naimark.net/projects/zap/howto.html

Conventional projectile weapons are not going to be an issue (see other child posts for the physics). I can see a bit of fun with high energy lasers however. Even a low wattage laser pointer can mess up a camera. Get your hands on something with a bit more juice and a stationary target...

The military solution is to use "wavelength-agile" lasers that can randomly change color, rendering any filtering useless.

Using Lasers to Temporarily Neutralize Camera Sensors

If you're interested in stereoscopes, you'll probably like this:
motion stereoscope art.

It's pretty cool stuff. I vaguely remember Naimark shooting a bunch of stereoscopic 16mm of a Survival Research Labs show in San Francisco, but I never saw the resulting footage.

Take out security cameras in a good chunk of downtown London....

Laser pointers nicely mess up video camera... It probably won't hurt the camera, but here is a fun read if you have a bit of time on your hands.

Of course, this won't prevent me from using a techincal exploit to rob them. All I need to do is find an ATM in a somewhat secluded place (not hard), put on a ski mask just before I go to work and not take it off while I'm robbing the thing blind.

Or a well aimed laser-pointer while you rob a somewhat public ATM when it is blind....

Yeah a laser pointer should do it as shown in this article.

But with any scheme that attempts to use light, you have to consider the safety of the audience topmost, including audience members that may suffer from photosensitive epilepsy.

His web site is back up. The paper is here.

Here's Michael Naimark's current draft article:
How To ZAP A Camera

clark625 writes:
"If I swamp out the reds, a smart technician could just look at the other colors to determine what's going on."

You probably should have bothered to read his site. He quite specifically covers this scenario and how military jammers switch between colors to make filtering useless.

Wow! This guy is now suffering from Big Brother with the Slashdot Effect?

Slashdot Effect, because his website is already down, and Big Brother, because the website isn't even
linked to on the ./ article!