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Sousveillance in Seattle - Watching the Watchers
Eh-Wire writes "At the recent ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, Steve Mann - cyborg numero uno - led a troop of conference attendees on a surveillance camera hunt and digital capture. Their antics confounded rent-a-cops in a downtown Seattle shopping mall who had difficulty with the concept of having their surveillance cameras surveilled."
Karma be damned, correct the spelling in the titles, please.
As to Cameras...
Have you ever taken a tour of your local 911 call center? I am sure you may have spotted the camera at that busy street you buzzed through at +10mph over limit, but, from the vantage point of the watcher's seat you can see pedestrian ways, many sidewalks, fronts of buildings (complete with hordes of people making use of now illegal cigarette lighters).
Some larger cities have direct hooks to the feeds from malls, public buildings, many office skyscrapers, heck even some MacDs and other such places.
I realize that fear of scratching my privates in public and having that magic moment recorded for all eternity in some bureaucrat's get_my_jollies file is not in the same league as "combatting terrorism" (tm). I realize that "bend over and cough" is the new standard of good citizenship, but, it would really be nice if just once, all busybody types would experience a busted snoot when they poke it into other people's business.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Haha. I'd like to take that before a judge. "Yeah, judge...I'm going to go ahead and sort of...disagree...with that law...Yeah, I don't really like it that much, mmmkay?"
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Let's drop the to the fundamental level, shall we?
They don't object to them absorbing photons with their eyes, why do they object to them absorbing it with a CCD or a piece of silver halide film - so long as the camera isn't allowing them to see something that they couldn't otherwise see with their eyes (infrared band, through tiny holes with fibre optics, etc) I fail to see what real reason they've got for saying that they can't use them. Or maybe I'm just fed to the back teeth of paying through the nose to go to some historical attraction to be told 'no photography' even though the photography is an entirely passive action (if you turn your flash off). Blech.
Someone needs to get around to making an "if it's open to the public then they can take photos" law. You can't open something to the public and then be selective about which 'public' you let in because you don't like the slightly non-normal people (whatever 'normal' is).
FGD 135
"Equiveillance through sousveillance"? Too hard to say. I prefer "getting even through covalence": punching out the cameras, like Sean Penn in his Madonna period.
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make install -not war
You take a rather bright view of ex-military and reservist effectiveness in protecting things like malls. Without a platoon, Bradley, M16, aircraft carrier, or nuclear arsenal to back them up.
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make install -not war