Hackers Rebel Against Spy Cams

Wired is running an article looking at the little ways in which Austrian technology users are striking back against surveillance. From the article: "Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it's transferred from DVD to VHS tape. The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices. And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded."

Comments

Laughing Man

[Intocabile]

Albeit relatively low tech in comparison. A real life counterpart none the less.
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laughing_Man_(ani me)

RTFA?

[avidday]

The group in question is an Austrian civil liberties group, not German hackers and not based in Berlin. How do I know this? I read the first sentence of the article............

Living in a surveillance society

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of an old MIT article, The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove. It describes what is involved in living in a surveillance society. It also defines the attributes of a surveillance society:

1. Transcends distance, darkness, and physical barriers.
2. Transcends time and its records can easily be stored, retrieved, combined, analyzed, and communicated.
3. Is capital-rather than labor intensive.
4. Triggers a shift from targeting a specific to categorical suspicion.
5. Has as a major concern the prevention of violations.
6. Is decentralized-and triggers self-policing.
7. Is either invisible or has low visibility.
8. Is more intensive-probing beneath surface, discovering previously inaccessible information.
9. Grows ever more extensive-covering not only deeper, but larger areas.

I think surveillance, even when used with the best of intentions, will interfere with people's lives. The authorities will investigate anyone that does anything different. Yet doing things different is what life is all about. When used with less noble intentions, surveillance could lead to a much more troubling society as the East Berlin residents. described in the article may well remember.

Re:Black stripe

[raoul666]

Size of eyes, how deep they go into the skull, and the distance between them is a big part of what makes a face unique. Also, depending on the size of the black stripe, it could cover eyebrows and a good chunk of the nose. It's the most effective area to black out if you don't want to be recognized.

Re:Black stripe

[Mitsugi]

For people who don't know: Laughing Man

Re:Big Deal

[Tim C]

I'd like to make a couple of points, as I have some experience in a tangentially-related area.

Firstly, the amount of storage space you're talking about for keeping all this stuff forever is huge. Hundreds of thousands of cameras (if not millions), all filming 24/7 - I can't be bothered to do the maths, but if you assume no audio, grey-scale and a crappy resolution (but still high enough to identify "everyone you talk to" and "everything you do") you're talking about hundreds of megabytes per camera per day, if not gigabytes.

Secondly, those cameras are fixed. They're not following you around, you move from camera to camera. In order to produce a file on any one person, you'd have to check through the logs of every single camera they passed and extract the relevant clip(s). To do that for any non-trivial period of time would be a very time-consuming process; image processing software isn't good enough (yet?) to do it automatically. You'd be sat trawling through hours of footage. I wouldn't do it for a "couple of cases of beer".

Finally, I've worked with the (UK) police on a couple of information storage and retrieval type projects (I can't say any more than that - I'm under NDA and besides, it's classified). I can assure you that they take their legal responsibilities extremely seriously, especially when it comes to controlling and monitoring access to the data and application we were working on. Around three-quarters of the development effort revolved around protective monitoring of the application - everything anyone does with it is logged, and those logs are searchable. Misuse of the application is a criminal offence, and will be prosecuted.

Now, that said I'm not saying that you're not right to be concerned about this sort of all-pervasive monitoring of the general population; you should be concerned. I'm also not saying that one day, we won't find ourselves in the situation you describe. I don't think we're very close to it now, though, and certainly not only 5 years away.

Vehicle tracking, on the other hand, is a different matter. The licence plate is a very easily processed (nominally) unique id. Given sufficient resources it would be a relatively simple matter to build up a log of all vehicle movements, at least to the detail of what camera was passed at what time in what direction (and at what speed). That I think we should be worried about now.