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Turning a Blind Eye to Big Brother
SiliconRedox writes: "An article in the NYTimes (user reg.) details what many of us who have worked with video or electronics have known for quite awhile: Shine a laser beam (or infrared, but the article doesn't get into that) at a video camera, and you can effectively blind certain viewpoints of the camera. The article follows one man trying to cope with the surveillence society by removing his own image from everyday video footage using this technique. The most interesting part? What kind of culpability does the individual or institution have in utilizing this kind of technology?"
And lets not forget the liability of shining a laser in someone's eye. Even though he mentions he's using low powered laser pointers, those still have the potential of harming someone. And in our sue happy society, we don't even have to wait until it actually does harm someone. All it will take is a greedy lawyer to start up a class action lawsuit.
Good job moderators [/sarcas], but if you really want to get in, just remeber the NYT Random Login Generator. It won't work directly from the website anymore because the Times has blocked all requests from his site, but just download and run it from your machine, click the button, refresh once and you're in. Works like a charm.
Hell, just think what damage Saddam could do to orbiting US spy satellites if he had a half-decent laser and some idea of where to aim it.
Hey, maybe in light (pun) of this guy's antics, the RIAA will now lobby congress to outlaw all laser diodes over a certain wattage (in the name of "homeland security" you understand). This would make CD writers illegal. Look Ma, no piracy problems!
Oh, dear, there are too many good ideas in this thread that the fringe-lunatics could grasp onto.
Argh, that text is nearly unreadable (no line spaces and such)... try the Google Partner link to bypass the login.
Yes, if people want your reflected photons they damn well better be prepared to accept ALL of them, artificial or not. Speaking of that, you could theoretically transmit the terms of a license over the laser beam to REMOVE these people's rights to your image. Of course, you cannot do this with actual people, but such is life.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
It's not destruction of anybody's property if it's temporary, which is what the article suggests.
In fact, if he copyrights his own image, he's actually enforcing his rights, and any attempt to make the camera capture his image will then be a DMCA violation...
Point a digital camera at one of those IR cordless headphone transmitters. What do you see? Why, really bright spots where those almost invisible to the human eye LEDs are! And those LEDs are really low power. High power IR LEDs pointed at a camera might not knock it out for good, but it would glare-blind it.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
"I'd hope that Big Brother wouldnt spy on us outside our legal rights"
The article mentions hidden video cameras in the bathroom [toilet] of hotels. I have actually seen these in UK service-stations (2mm hole in smoke detectors), and everyone who hears about them is disgusted at the concept.
Larger-scale, towns all over the country are rushing to install cameras. Our high-street has a particularly prominent mast being installed, which looks far too spookily like the panopticon in its placement. They don't solve crimes, they don't prevent crimes, they don't make the streets safer.
This has been proven. Video cameras covered the alleged kidnapping of a girl in our town last year, and they were no use whatever with the police investigation. We have video-footage of several thefts, and car-vandalism, again, these have not been used to solve any crimes.
Local councellors are pleading with government for money to install these things without even a clue as to their lack of effectiveness at any sort of real crime.
Italian-job style jammers may be nice playing with these cameras, ultraviolet ones like the US Army is using to permanently blind people would be better, but what can people actually do if the local council (and every other) says you will live in a surveilled society and put up with it?
While I'm glad someone is out their pushing back at all the video taping aimed at us, I don't see why this is such a huge problem. I agree everyone has a right to privacy. But when you enter a public place, you give up some of your rights of privacy. No one is putting cameras in your house or invading your privacy.
How is it invading anything to watch you where you are already watched anyway (by humans)?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
It is perfectly legal to stick a microphone out your window and record everything that happens to make sound. In NYS it is perfectly legal to record a private conversation so long as *one* of the actual participants knows it is happening.
I also happens to be legal to record the image of anything, by still or moving pictures, that happens in a public setting.
This is why the cops don't just arrest everyone with a camera.
There is an assumption, like it or not, that when you appear in public you are appearing. . . ummmmm, in public.
This is true even for celebraties who have trademarked their image.
If you don't want to be seen don't stand up from behind the bush.
KFG
SuperDuG writes:
"I do believe that it is well within someone's right to not have their picture taken if they don't wish it to be. Or at least have a warning on the entrance of an establishment that you are being videotaped. I think the law that says you don't have to inform someone that you're videotaping them, but that you do for audio is bogus. The law needs to be changed, it's an invasion of privacy no matter how you want to look at it, if someone doesn't want to be videotaped, then they shouldn't be videotaped, there is no grey area. You should be informed before proceeding that you are under video survailence."
I'm an amateur photographer. I have tons of photographs of people who I never asked to be in my pictures. Generally, they're ancilary to my subject, but occasionally not.
For example, I shoot subway pictures in Boston. You'd like to see this made illegal unless I get everyone'ss permission, presumably in writing?
I've taken pictures of the Rocky Horror Picture Show being performed. Are you suggesting I need to get the signatures of the audience first?
I've taken pictures of street intersections. You feel I should be compelled to ask each pedestrian before I do it?
Are these absurd examples? I don't imagine you'll want to argue that only subjects of the photo need to provide their consent, but if you do, how in-focus are they allowed to be? How close to the center of the picture can they be before I am in violation of your ethic?
Besides, what gives you the idea that you are somehow entitled to the exclusive rights of the photons that have bounced off your body?!
I think it's your obligation to stop scattering light!
My
Limekiller
Silicon is basically transparent to light of wavelengths longer than about 1000nm, so only very near-IR will work. The LEDs and photodiodes that let you surf from your LaZBoy with a remote operate at about 800nm, and a CCD is sensitive enough at this wavelength to be affected by an 800nm laser -- but this is invisible so you aren't going to find laserpointers in this "color." (Experiment -- shine your remote at your handicam... see anything? Cool, eh?)
Anyway, many surveillance cameras are black and white, with no color filtering or separation, so really, any color laser is useful as long as the CCD is sensitive to it. The quantum efficiency of most CCDs peaks around 400-600nm, but it is still quite high at the most common laser diode wavelength of 650nm, so there isn't really a problem. At 300nm and lower, CCDs are virtually blind without expensive processing called "backside thinning," and you won't see backside-thinned devices on common surveillance cameras because they are very expensive.
Yes, color surveillance cameras are more and more common. For a color camera, a strong enough laser beam will still overwhelm a color CCD that uses a mosaic filter (as opposed to a three-chip camera with beamsplitters). This works because the princple that the author uses is that of "blooming." Basically, if your bright source creates too many photoelectrons, the excess flows over the walls of the pixels (which are really just potential barriers, not physical walls) into neighboring pixels. Make even a one-pixel source bright enough and you can flood a whole region of the array. Since the readout electronics can't tell which pixel any given electron originated in, it just looks like one big, bright extended source on the image.
This phenomenon is often encountered by anyone who works with focal plane arrays or uses data collected by them... ever seen an astronomical photograph with long bright lines emanating from either side of the brightest stars on the image? That's blooming, and it looks like bars instead of a smudge because astronomers pay extra for CCDs with "antiblooming" sinks to the substrate -- think of them as drains between pixel columns. But the chipmakers can't put drains between rows because that is the direction in which the pixels are shifted to be read out. In addressable pixel devices, like CMOS active pixel sensors, 2D antiblooming is easier, but it cuts down on the available area for collecting light, so it often isn't used on inexpensive CMOS APS chips found in surveillance applications.
Three-chip color cameras are only used for professional video production -- they're just not cost effective for surveillance or consumer applications when color mosaic CCDs are so much cheaper. There may be some high-end consumer cameras with three-CCD technology but they aren't common at all.
Of course, all bets are off for military applications -- only the military and their suppliers know for sure what's in their surveillance gear, and I suspect that they have already contended with the problem of laser-blinding CCDs used in night vision.
I can see the fnords!
No they don't. Casually shining a single laser pointer across someone's eye is not going to cause anyone any damage - unless they punch you out for it.
Most laser pointers are less than 1 milliwatt in power. That's really, really low. Factor in vibrations and movement and there is no way your going to damage an eye.
The reason a laser can harm your vision is that the eye sees a laser beam as a point source - it is unable to focus on it directly. Instead, the eye focuses to infinity. The beams light is also virtually parallel, allowing for the entire beam to be focused onto one very small part of the retina.
The good thing here in terms of pointers and safety is that any movement of the beam in relation to the eye (be it a person in motion, or the natural jitters in your hand) will cause the focal point on the retina to move.
Thus, in order for a laser to damage your eye it must have sufficient power to burn quickly - the spot being affected changes before cumulative affects can take place.
Laser pointers don't have that power. Short of bolting someone's head to a table, along with a pointer, then forcing their eyelids open, AND keeping the eyeball still, it's not going to happen.
This is not to say that staring into your pointer for kicks is a good idea! Don't do it. Don't do it to others. Don't say I told you you could. If nothing else it is incredibly annoying. But it's not about to permanantly blind anyone.
Now, if you have an unusually high powered pointer (ie those groovy YAG pens) you might be talking a different story.
I've had much nastier beams in the eye than any laser pointer will ever generate - luckily I've gotten away with it too.
Frankly I'm much more worried about these yahoos who are taking a wad of them and bundling them together and pointing the results at low flying helicopters or other aircraft.
Note to anyone tempted to do this: lasers in the sky make a very nice YOU ARE HERE indicator. You're basically pinpointing your position for the Cops. None to bright (ack, pun) if you ask me.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Any use of my image with out my consent will be punishable to the full extent of the law.
Plantiff "We have here your honor is video tape footage of the defendent attempting to steal a Macintosh Computer worth over $3,000 from his local CompUSA a dozen video games also a leather chair, a box of M&M's and even the store manager's goldfish.."
Me "Your honor, those images are copyrighted 2002 Treeluvinhippy and they do not have written consent of the copyright owner. I motion that the video tapes be removed as evidence and returned to the copyright holder immediatly. If the tapes are allowed as evidence I will have to force to remmind your honor about the FBI warning agaisnt public viewings of copyrighted materials. Your honor is most certainly familar with such warnings
as it appears at the beginning of every purchased video cassete. You know the one with the blue background and white letters threating five years imprionment and/or a $25,000 fine, certain death and other such unpleasantries."
>
Am I a rapist, that you must know where I am at all times?
Am I a burglar, that I must explain my reasons for being in a particular place at a particular time?
Am I a murderer, that I may not move about freely of my own accord?
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I've always thought it would be possible to construct license plate frames that bathe a license plate in infrared and/or ultraviolet light, thereby making it "invisible" to speed control cameras (or, for the truly criminal out there, tollboth cameras), or any other CCD device. Would such a scheme actually work? Maybe put some sort of "diffuser" over the license plate to better diffuse the energy...
Ah. Mister KFG has learned the first lesson in the art of not being seen. Don't stand up. Mister KFG, would you stand up now? KA-BOOM!
-----Chaz
It is really not that easy to put in line filters at 635, 650, 670 (need that one, too), and 532 without really losing a high fraction of the desired signal. And that impairs the ability of the cameras to work in low light, which is a big deal for survalence. While a given laser has a very narrow linewidth, cheaply manufactured laser pointers have wild variations in the actual laser frequency, and cooling or heating the diode can shift that even more. Bare diodes are available relatively cheaply at probably 20 different wavelengths between 600 and 800nm.
If someone seriously wants to block out all handheld laser pointers, they are going to have to throw out everything over 600nm, as well as 532 in the green. That is hard to do with high enough extinction that the laser doesn't overwhelm the CCD while maintainting high sensitivity.
Here's Michael Naimark's current draft article:
How To ZAP A Camera
DBordello writes:
"Isn't it just as much your right to be not seen as it is to seen?"
Oh what basis do you have this right? And am I now obligated to avert my eyes? No, I think that if you don't want to be seen, find a way to not absorb part of the spectrum and reflect the rest back.
I think you've got it backward. You don't have a right to not be seen -- that's placing an emcumbrance upon me, and a "right" that you have yet to provide a basis for, I might add. You have a right to not be seen if you can figure out how. That places no encumbrance upon me to provide you this so-called "right."
My
Limekiller
Quite interesting reading this discussion - in the UK we've had cameras everywhere for some time now and the excuse is always that it "would have prevented [insert recent crime]". Problem is they have been proven to not really affect the level of crime, but can seriously improve investigations.
If governments could get away with it, we'd all be subcutaneously tagged with GPS tracking devices with cameras in our homes, this, naturally would also "would have prevented [insert recent crime]" which is the generic argument that "they" use.
We've sadly had a few prominent child abductions and murders recently in the UK, and I predicted that someone would bring out some form of implanted child tracking device. Lo and behold the nutter Kevin Warwick has the same idea and uses it to get some publicity.
So we all get our kids chipped... now - how many people think that once it becomes "standard practice" to have children chipped at birth, how long will it be before it's illegal to remove the chips?
Oh hello Big Brother - you're late.