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

Good going.

[geminidomino]

Cracked by macrovision descramblers. Color me impressed.

Black stripe

[megrims]

What's the purpose of a black stripe over the eyes?
How effective is it in preventing recognition?
Or is the reason less obvious than that?

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

[chengmi]

Now if you REALLY don't want to be recognized, then you could/should fill in the whole head with a bright yellow smiley face!

Re:Black stripe

[dangitman]

But they aren't physically covering features. It's basically a joke or an artistic statement, depending on how you look at it. They are taking footage from their cameras with the face revealed, and digitally covering the faces with the black stripe. It's a philosophical comment, not a technological one.

Re:Black stripe

[hhghghghh]

Now if you REALLY don't want to be recognized, then you could/should fill in the whole head with a bright yellow smiley face!

Surely you mean a blue, cap-wearing smiley with text rotating around it?

Re:Black stripe

[sunwolf]

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.

That's why no one recognizes Superman as Clark Kent. He takes his glasses off!

Re:Black stripe

[Mitsugi]

For people who don't know: Laughing Man

Re:Black stripe

[WebCrapper]

Ours had faces printed on them as well. Security got upset with us because we would peel the "face" side off and stick it to something or another badge. All you need is the wire antenna and chip inside. Amazing what can open the door when you do something like that.

We got caught when security found one guy opening the door with his coffee mug too many times. He had glued the stuff to the buttom of the cup and just carried it around all day like the manager on office space.

Veils

[quokkapox]

Maybe we should all just adopt a more modest dress code. We could obscure our faces with veils that only reveal our eyes.

Then only those who wear veils will be criminals.

Re:Veils

[Alioth]

This is exactly what's behind the "hoodie" fashion amongst British teenagers at the moment. A peaked cap with a hood over it can obscure most of the face from CCTV cameras, which are almost universally mounted well above head level.

Re:Veils

[Spock the Baptist]

That sounds like a veiled threat...

Re:Veils

[Kasis]

In my area, the owners of the local shopping center (mall for you Americans) will have you removed from the premises if you enter wearing a baseball cap and hoody.

Although I have no doubt the fashion started among shoplifters, I think it has become a legitimate fashion among young teenagers. I know at least one who thinks it's cool to hide her features and she's definitely not a criminal.

Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is civil disobedience and hacking at its best. Good for them.

Re:Excellent!

[MPHellwig]

Your IP has been logged and back traced to your residential address and ID, this post has been added to your psychology profile (which btw is a good laugh).

Thank you for your cooperation.

NSA

Re:Excellent!

[BrokenHalo]

I'd like to see how "excellent" you think it is after someone beats the crap out of you, or rapes your daughter...

Rubbish. The only times we hear of a conviction arising from surveillance camera footage are when some kind of financial or political pull is involved.

If someone mugs you in the street, nobody will care, and nobody will even bother looking at the recording (assuming the camera is not a dummy), let alone follow up with any identification process.

Wake up, the real world is knocking at your door...

Re:Excellent!

[TallMatthew]

News flash, dude: The people who work in government don't care about us. They don't sit around all day and worry about what's in our best interests. They sit around all day and worry about themselves, like 99.999% of people on the face of the Earth. You think your safety means a damned thing to them? All they care about is keeping their incredibly high-paying and powerful jobs. If your safety happens to help them do that, then OK, but that's the only reason. They just don't care.

I don't know why people think politicians are such great guys. All they do is tell you what you want to hear; they don't understand you. Most of them are tremendously wealthy people, multi-multi-millionaires, who don't have a clue about what it's like to earn a real living or live a life outside of country clubs and fund raisers. How many people like that do you come into contact with on a daily basis? They are supposed to be civil servants, put in place to do the business of the country, pushing paper around, shaking hands, protecting the citizenry. Nothing special. We are supposed to define this country, not them. Instead we've made them demigods, leaders of our culture, and turned this country into not only a business, but a moneymaking machine. Stupid.

And now people like this dope want to give them absolute power. Even more stupid.

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lighten up on the guy. I was being sarcastic and he did miss it, but responses like that are important to keep the flames of individual liberty alive.

To the gp, if you read this, some of us prefer to use hard hitting techniques to highlight illogic in other people. If you look at the guy I was replying to, I simply took his thinking to the next logical step(and really, that IS the next logical step, this stuff evolves exactly along those lines), and threw in some profanity to make it sound like it was coming from my heart.

The reason I choose to reply like that to people who think like that is they reason from emotions, not from logic. They don't look down the road. They don't think in terms of long term effects of what it can lead to, where the cure becomes worse than the disease. So, I attempt to jar them with their own thinking thrown back at them, but taken a step further. IMO, it most effectively highlights the slippery slope that that thinking puts you on.

Anyways, don't let that fire die and don't be scared to fall for sarcasm if it will mean leaving something like that unanswered. When stuff like that goes unanswered, things will go from bad to worse very rapidly. G/L and great post. I'm with you.

Um...where, exactly?

[Sensible Clod]

Looks like someone can't tell where this is happening. FTA:

BERLIN -- When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers.

Okay, so how is this about "Berlin technology users"? Or am I missing something?

Re:Um...where, exactly?

[GWSuperfan]

If one actually reads TFA, the project was presented in Berlin, but the hack was done in Austria. The reporter was in Berlin, hence the "BERLIN-"

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............

Re:RTFA?

[ms1234]

You must be new here ..

Re:RTFA?

[suzerain]

Yeah, but the first word of the article is BERLIN...so, we really should excuse the submitter.

Besides, Germans and Austrians are all the same anyway, right? I mean, both of those countries are outside the United States, and thus populated by 'foreigners'.

Turn the tables

[Alcimedes]

I think the only thing that MIGHT actually get the laws changed would be as one person suggested in the article. Turn the tables on those passing the laws. Find key political figures and start saving all the video footage of where they go. I'm sure with tens of hours of video footable between dozens of people you're bound to come across a wide variety of embarassing moments.

Put those up on the web and away you go. Might actually get something changed then.

Re:Turn the tables

[bezuwork's friend]

While I'm with you I would guess that this would only result in the politicians exempting themselves by making it illegal to do this to them. You know, like how it's illegal to threaten the president of the U.S. but generally not to do so to an ordinary citizen, at least if you can claim it's in jest.

Semi related story - after 911, I had to go to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (patent appeals court) to get a brochure of pictures of the judges for a partner at a big law firm. They made me get a signed letter of request on firm letterhead before giving it to me - for security reasons. Silly - they're public servants after all, we have a right to know who we're paying.

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:Living in a surveillance society

[HD Webdev]

Interestingly enough, I used to use a saved google query to look for interesting Axis webcams.

I hadn't used it in a while and had forgotten about it until now but now google responds to the query with this:

We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.

I'd like to see their excuse for limiting this query. All I am doing is looking to see what the watchers are watching.

Re:Living in a surveillance society

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is pretty obvious. Take a look at the search query and notice how it requests a list of sites that host a specific CGI program. Then read the text and let your gray matter work for the first time this year. Google is telling you that some current worm/virus/whatever is doing automated queries on Google to find new victims for a specific exploit in Axis webcams.

This is a Good Thing (tm)...

Re:Living in a surveillance society

[peterfa]

Here's the deal. On one hand, you have your civil liberties. On the other, you have your personal risk.
You'll enjoy being able to be who you are in a society where there isn't widespread survalence, but if you were attacked you might say to yourself, "Where were the cops when I needed them?"
The survalence will give you the confidence to go into places you would ordinarily be too scared of going. Now, you may be as tough as old boots, a ninja, Batman, or whatever, but not everybody is. Remember to be compassionate to those who aren't gifted with super-human attributes. A friend of mine was raped brutally. Three men attacked her. There was nothing she could do. She was beat, and luckily, she lived.
The point is this, you might now think it's better to have your liberties, but you might regret not having the protection later. You won't always be a robust and healthy man. You'll become weak and vulnerable someday. I'm not saying that society should be under constant survalence. I'm just saying think about this more carefully.

Re:Living in a surveillance society

[Frogg]

i tried the url in the original post, and it gave an error, as discussed... i then cleaned up the url, resulting in this google query, which is working just fine for me.

hth? ;o)

Who decides?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

This is a scary as the survaliance system is to me. If we do live in a democroacy then the people who put the survalence systems in were elected officials who we have decided are compenant to make improtant decisions. So a vigilante group has decided that they don't like this decision and have taken action themselves instead of organising a grass roots political oposition to the decsion. That is scary. We have as much to fear from vigilante groups of hackers as we do from overzelous goverments. I know I'll get the typical responses pertianing to the failure of democroacy and the lack of properly educated voters in the system, but on sheer principle its still scary. I also suppose that I could throw in a terrible potential if acts of this nature continue, but I think thats obvious and my example would be either too far fetched or too plausible, giving other people with a lower moral standard another idea.

Re:Who decides?

[Sensible Clod]

Did you know you'd get the typical responses pertaining to the failure to spell-check and the lack of properly educated posters in the system? Yeah, it's scary, all right.

(You've got some interesting points, but if you want to be taken seriously, take your words seriously, okay?)

Re:Who decides?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah, actually I did. I thought about it for 2 seconds but spell chekcing for slashdot is like um I doun't know... Getting a hair cut before visiting your parents..? Spitting int he ocean? Seperating your trash before dumping it in the occean? You may or might not get the idea based on these. I'm just drawing blanks here. If I want to be taken serously.. I'm not going to stop at posting on slashdot.

Re:Who decides?

[Upsilon Andromedea]

That is scary. We have as much to fear from vigilante groups of hackers as we do from overzelous goverments. I know I'll get the typical responses pertianing to the failure of democroacy and the lack of properly educated voters in the system, but on sheer principle its still scary. I also suppose that I could throw in a terrible potential if acts of this nature continue, but I think thats obvious and my example would be either too far fetched or too plausible, giving other people with a lower moral standard another idea.

Of course, the early American Tories made very similar arguments about safety and vigilantes. The Patriots, or rebels, started as a radical minority. Neither were 100% wrong or right.

The question remains, is privacy an unalienable Right? Otherwise this issue is very academic, and the hackers, vandals.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence does not pretend to list all unalienable Rights:

" . . . that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

However, The Declaration does clearly deem the right of the people to extensive action against a government denying unalienable Rights:

" . . . --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it . . ."

It also claims these unalienable Rights for all people, not just Americans.

I believe that sets the precedent for a pretty active debate. Clean and orderly would be nice but when has it ever been?

Re:Who decides?

[bezuwork's friend]

However, I can guarantee you that if their government sat still and did nothing, only to later on have a massive terrorist attack on their hands, there'd be some serious inquiry as to why there had been no systems in place to gather intelligence to prevent such a thing, or some sort of monitoring to catch the culprits.

And that's as it should be. That's still not a valid reason to rob us of our civil rights, be them rights enshrined in the Constitution or rights that were not articulated in the Constitution because at the time of the founding of the U.S. there was no concievable threat to them (i.e. the right to not be tracked without a warrant, etc.).

The world's a dangerous place. I am sure if nothing had been done post-911 and there had been a few more attacks, the chance of falling prey to a terrorist act would still be far lower than that of being in a car accident.

I'm not saying we should do nothing, but I think that alot of what we are doing has more detriments for us than benefits - their saying it is being done in our benefit doesn't placate me.

But I also know that the government does this every time there is a crisis of some kind - goes way back to the Sedition Act of 1798 - so I hold out some hope for us.

Re:Who decides?

[mrchaotica]

Now, after they created a form of governemnt that allows us to make those changes in a peaceful way, there should be no need to perform such actions.

That's true, if the government doesn't change in such a way as to preclude that. For example, using gerrymandering, huge campaign funds, and excessive election rules to effectively give most incumbents lifetime positions of office, and forming powerful political parties (with powerful corporate allies) to create a ruling class that's capable of ignoring and distracting the citizenry to furthur its own ends, could mean that violent revolution is justified even with a system that -- on the surface -- seems democratic and fair.

Besides, the Founding Fathers did include a mechanism for such violence within the Constitution -- that's what the 2nd Amendment is for! You can also discover their stance on this issue by their writings, e.g. Thomas Jefferson:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Interestingly enough, the more you read the words of the Founding Fathers, the more you realize that they would all be called Libertarians if they were still around. I'm sure they'd be spinning in their graves if they knew how both the Republicans and Democrats are wrecking the ideals they fought for today...

Re:Who decides?

[dangitman]

If we do live in a democroacy then the people who put the survalence systems in were elected officials who we have decided are compenant to make improtant decisions.

What if we don't?

Re:Who decides?

[Eivind]

could mean that violent revolution is justified even with a system that -- on the surface -- seems democratic and fair.

From the rest of your comment, I assume you're talking of the US system.

I can assure you that for anyone not born, raised and indoctrinated in the USA your system seems neither particularily democratic, nor fair in the sligthest. Infact it's pretty close to the least fair imaginable system that can still claim to be "democratic"

I'll give a few examples. There's literally dozens, but Slashdot ain't the rigth venue for a deeper discussion.

One: If the citizens of say Florida vote (invented numbers) 40% Democrat, 35% Republican, 15% Green, 10% Others, how is it "fair" that the people of Florida then send 27 members of the Electoral College from the Democratic party ? Fair would be to divide the members as the votes are divided. Giving someone with 40% of the votes 100% of the influence is not my idea of "fair".

Two: If you live in the state above, and are aware of the aproximate likely distribution, how can you vote anything except Democrat/Republican and not have your vote wasted ? The real question, for many of the voters is not "Which party do you prefer?" but instead: "Which of the two large ones do you dislike the least?"

Third: If you live in a state where it's very very obvious that say the Republicans will win, then you are indeed free to vote for whomever you prefer, since your vote doesn't matter anyway!

Basically *all* election-systems are more "fair" than the ones you use. Furthermore, your current system favours the two parties currently in power. And the only ones who can (peacefully) change your system are those two parties.

Thus you've got the fox guarding the henhouse: The only two parties with a fair chance of changing the election-system are the only two parties with no interest whatsoever in doing so, since it'd lead to less influence for themselves.

Re:Who decides?

[smoker2]

So a vigilante group has decided that they don't like this decision and have taken action themselves instead of organising a grass roots political oposition to the decsion. That is scary. We have as much to fear from vigilante groups of hackers as we do from overzelous goverments.

Just 2 things:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Who watches the watchers ?)

and ...

... so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those
who wish to tyrranize(sic) will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent,
and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious
and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.
-- Voltarine de Cleyre

Re:Who decides?

[DoctorFrog]

I think someone is trolling, or else someone needs to pay attention and think a bit. If the former, proceed to congratulating yourself for 'winning' your peurile little game; I really don't give a rat's ass.

Assuming you were serious:

Even taking only the single sentence you quoted, bereft of context, the grandparent still doesn't take the position you ascribe. Far from claiming that "there is no terrorist threat" the GP specifically acknowledges that a "chance of falling prey to a terrorist act" would still exist.

S/he simply expresses doubt that the chance of dying in a terrorist act would be as high as that of dying in a car accident, even had nothing been done. Read it again, it's right there in the sentence you quoted.

Car accidents have killed more than 3000 people and arguably may cause a chronic drag on the economy equal or worse than the acute impact of losing the Trade Towers. The rest of your comparisons relate not to the actual damage done but to the over-wrought perception of the threat, which is precisely what the GP is positing to be the problem.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[Swift Kick]

Of course, in your rush to make a post with a inane little political statement against the administration, you failed to read the article.

If you had read it, you'd learn that the cameras are not in Britain. Even the article submitter failed to use basic reading comprehension, since the article is about a conference hosted by the Chaos Computing Club in Berlin, where they describe the actions taken by a Austrian civil liberties group against recent legislation that enable police to install cameras in public places.

In Austria. Not in Berlin, Germany. Also not Britain.

Reading comprehension seems to be sorely lacking here.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[RLiegh]

Christ, even the comments are dupes these days.

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Skippy,

EYES are one thing. Cameras that record, and software that analyzes are quite another! This combination allows authorities to do all sorts of things that EYES alone cannot, allowing for a much greater potential that this information can be abused.

I suggest you dial your paranoia up a notch. You seem to have entirely too much faith in the system.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[netsharc]

I was about to make the same comment to yours along the lines of "If it's in Austria, then it's not Berliners!".

Yeah, it's either reading comprehension, or lack of geography knowledge. ;-)

How to block face rec

[Anonymous Coward]

Make a hat that has eyes painted on the top, the damn thing can't handle two sets of eyes. Two dots that look like eyes may work too and not get you busted so easy.

Want to know why intersection cameras are everywhere?

If you are going to track someone you need to aquire them first, probably near where they live, then it's easy to follow them from there because they can only go a few ways from there.

Now you know why the cameras are in places where there's hardly any traffic, like near homes way out in the boonies.

The way to get these taken out is to track or let the politicians know that they can be tracked this way, they hate it when we the people can track their bad habits even though they love being able to track ours.

Re:How to block face rec

[dangitman]

Want to know why intersection cameras are everywhere?

Maybe because that's where people run red lights?

Use the Aliens method.

[forgotten_my_nick]

In the UK on one of the CCTV cop TV shows they have there was a good instance of dealing with cameras. Basically the owner of a house had complained that every night the camera was pointed at his house. One instance he had even seen a mugging take place outside (in London) and the camera was busy looking at the mugging but no cops showed up for some time. So one night he dressed up like what can only be described as a cross between a demon/predator (really cool looking). And he wandered around where the camera was pointing. Within 5 minutes the whole road was cordened off by numerous cops.

Re:Use the Aliens method.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nod, his point was that enforcement of the law was selective. If he wears a costume and wanders around, the police come a running. But their constant surveillance was not deterring actual crime. The police were choosing which laws to enforce and enforcing social norms instead. Or just gawking at the 'interesting' disturbances.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[Swift Kick]

As I said:

"... the article is about a conference hosted by the Chaos Computing Club in Berlin, where they describe the actions taken by a Austrian civil liberties group against recent legislation that enable police to install cameras in public places."

i.e. Austrian civil liberties group members are in a conference in Berlin, Germany, describing what actions they have taken to fight legislation that they see as infringing their rights in their homeland, Austria.

Lemme guess, you didn't read the article either, did you?

Let me spell it out to you, just in case:

1) Austrian government passes some law allowing police to put cameras in public places(IN AUSTRIA);

2) Austrian civil liberties group comes up with imaginative ways to screw with these cameras (IN AUSTRIA);

3) Chaos Computer Club from Germany hosts a conference in Berlin (IN GERMANY);

4) Said Austrian hackers are invited to come to Berlin (IN GERMANY), and talk about the methods they used to defeat these cameras' effectiveness (BACK IN AUSTRIA).

Now, is that better?

Re:Big Deal

[YrWrstNtmr]

Yes, it sure would be terrible if someone knew I was walking down a certain street at a certain time. What is the BFD?

Yes, it is a 'big deal'. Just as with all these vehicle tracking plans...it logs everywhere you go, everything you do, everyone you talk to. And by inference or assumption, what you are doing.

Logged on someones server, forever.

5 years from now, J. Random Asshat, whom you just pissed off by beating him out of a promotion, can, for the price of a case or two of beer, ask his idiot cop buddy for your log. Have fun explaining to your (future) wife that, "No dear, I did NOT have sex with that hooker. I was only asking her for directions."

Everywhere you go, everything you do, everyone you talk to. Forever .

Vigilantes aren't dangerous in this case

[mrchaotica]

Think about it for a second: a surveilance system like this requires vast capital and labor to implement. Generally speaking, vigilantes (or rather anti-vigilantes, since they're preventing vigilance!) are small groups with relatively few resources. At best, they'll only be able to destroy infrastructure, rather than create it, or they'll only be able to manage small things. In fact, if the activist group gets big enough, they'd be able to just elect themselves into office or overthrow the government entirely, and get rid of the problem that way.

War on terror anyone

[manavendra]

The general perception about politicians lately is CCTV will eliminate all problems. After the London bombing on 7/7/05, the Met spent hundreds of man hours sifting through CCTV "evidence" to find more information about the hackers, while for all practical purposes is shutting the barn door after...

Even the Dutch, once known as hacker-friendly, politically progressive Europeans, are now fearful and demanding more cameras on their streets.

Whilst recording and monitoring activities in parts deemed dangerous, not easy to patrol, prone to mugging/thefts/incidents may be worthwhile, recording public spaces is similar to littering the motorway with speed cameras...

Coming soon to your country:

[voice_of_all_reason]

"It is a period of civil war. Rebel starships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire." Yes, even the United States. And it will be bloody. Songs will be sung about this day...

Re:Big Deal

[hazem]

Consider these scenarios:

VonSkippy, I'm afraid we have to decline your application for health insurance. We've monitored your travel habits via public cameras and determined that you spend too much time at your local pub. Furthermore, the records from your grocery-rewards cards indicate you purchase foods that are too high in fats and cholestorol.

VonSkippy, I'm afraid we can't offer you a job. From your the records of the license plate tracking system, we see that you spend a significant amount of time at the republican headquarters. Clearly your political activities are not in alignment with those of this corporation.

VonSkippy, I'm afraid we must deny your application for a home mortgage. From tracking your cellphone travel, we see that you are often speed to work because you are late and are likely to lose your job or die in a traffic accident. We cannot assume that risk.

Get the idea? All public information - all things that the casual observer could see. Do you really want it aggregated so it can be used against you?

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[willpall]

They weren't neo-nazis you freak. They were Arabs who kidnapped Israelis.

and to quote the grandparent: But since the 1972 olympics security failure, and neo-nazi activities,

Notice that "and"? Your parent poster did not say, "which were," he said "and". He was making a (short) list of things that would tend to make Germany a not-so-friendly-to-terrorists type of place. It wasn't a statement about those that did the kidnapping... you freak :-)

Then only those who wear veils will be criminals.

[mrchaotica]

If you don't think that's already the case, try walking into a bank wearing a ski mask.

Re:Big Deal

[Aranth Brainfire]

It's less an issue of someone, somewhere, knowing where you are at some time. It's more of an issue of the fact of where you are is in a single stream of data all the time.

If it's okay to take pictures of people who run red lights with automatic cameras, then it's okay to keep those cameras on at all time, then it's okay to install new cameras all over, then it's okay to track people and flag them for investigation if they deviate from normal patterns, then it's okay to preemptively arrest them if they display patterns normal to people about to commit a crime... are you ready for the knock on the door at two in the morning, announcing the men who say you need to be detained based on information only they can have access to? You might think this is overly paranoid, nothing like this could actually happen. You might also be a fool.

Something else: this information is obviously insecure. If you're okay with the government knowing all this, are you okay with the local criminal organization(s) knowing all of this? Do you think it's actually possible to perfectly secure any data?

(by the way, whoever modded parent flamebait is a jerk)

People....this can be a good thing.....

[jjh37997]

The rich, powerful or corrupt have always had the power to invade our privacy because it's just an illusion and will alway be so. Privacy laws just protect the powerful from being watched by the masses.

Instead of fighting a lossing battle to stop this technology we need to ensure that it will be available to everyone and that the information will be open to the public. Put cameras on the streets, in the police stations and in government buildings. I don't mind being watched as long as I can watch everyone else. Living in a fishbowl can be a wonderful thing. Imagine a world where everyone is equipped with their own personal cameras and recording devices... with so many eyes spreading their light everywhere the world might become a more peaceful and civilized place.

Re:People....this can be a good thing.....

[Buddy_DoQ]

Problem is, someone has to build such a system. Someone has to maintain such a system. Therefore someone has to be given a position where they can possibly abuse such a system. The peace will only last until the people are shown something offensive. If we always know what's going on, our entire social order will break down, the world and the people in it would become dull, and to cure the boredem people will start to do some crazy shit. Hey, maybe the revolution will be televised after all!

Another thought: I don't know about you, but sometimes I just don't want to see what other people are up to, and I know for damn sure that I don't always want people to know what I'm up to. There's something primitive about the desire for privacy; even as an illusion people require it from time to time in order to function properly.

Obligitory Anime Reference

[Admiral Justin]

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.

I want my blue and white laughing man logo with "I thought what I'd do was pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes" spinning around.

Re:Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

[HermanAB]

I think "Dirty deeds, done with sheep" was better...

Re:Big Deal

[VonSkippy]

Hazen: That's a nice scary story to keep your kids frightened, but it won't play out in the real world. What you describe is self regulating in the long run. NO ONE is a perfect person, if the government, or big business, or your neighbor wants to set the "standards bar" that high, they will soon realize people like that don't exist. People need to stop worrying about their own little peccadillo's and focus on the real problems. I keep a tin foil hat handy (just in case), but I really don't think the sky is falling on this one.

Re:Big Deal

[kripkenstein]

You present the negative cases. But how about if they REDUCE your health premiums because they see you go jogging every other day?

You may reply that "they will only raise rates, not lower them." This may be true initially. But I presume that in the long run, the average insurance rate will even out (competition, etc. One of its only benefits). So, overall, some people will pay more, and other people will pay less. Importantly, people will pay more fairly - those that take more health risks pay more, those that take less - less.

Nothing hacks a camera

[Anonymous Coward]

like a shotgun.

Cheap. Effective. If the people really decide they've had enough of surveilence that's what will happen in urban areas too. It's why you don't see cameras in rural France or Spain, people just pop them and no society can afford to keep replacing a thousand dollar camera when a one dollar bullet will fix the problem.

Re:Nothing hacks a camera

[PrimeNumber]

Fire, dynamite or simply knocking them down also work.
 
I am fascinated by the British phenomenon of Gatsos which are well hidden cameras that take pictures of speeding cars.
These are of course justified by officials as needed for public safety, but are in reality revenue generation devices. There is a modern-day Robin Hood character in Britain named Captain Gatso who along with his merry-men have destroyed hundreds of Gatsos.
This page displays some of their handiwork.

Re:Ha! I'd dare them to pull that crap here!

[PHPfanboy]

LOL - I thought he was referring to the confectionary items in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and couldn't understand the link to Syria. Thanks for clearing that up ;-)

But its not shutting the barn door .....

[Macka]

The general perception about politicians lately is CCTV will eliminate all problems. After the London bombing on 7/7/05, the Met spent hundreds of man hours sifting through CCTV "evidence" to find more information about the hackers, while for all practical purposes is shutting the barn door after...

I'm sure you meant bombers, not hackers, but anyway. So you think its shutting the barn door after the event. That certainly was not the case for the second set of (failed) bombing attempts a few weeks later. CCTV footage gave the Met and us the faces and (eventually) names of the second crew. Exposing them on TV forced them into hiding (or to flee) before they could strike again and it ultimately led to their capture. It also led to the Police finding more bombs in the back of a car in a train station. Without CCTV there is no way we could have identified them and stopped them from fixing the problems with their bombs and striking again. In the case of the 7/7/05 bombers the Police were able to identify them, track them back into their community and investigate what they had been doing for the last year or so, where they had been, who they associated with, etc. A vital step to try and make sure there was not a queue of future bombers waiting to strike. In both cases CCTV footage helped the Police to discover bomb making factories and chemical stores and to dispose of them safely.

Frankly, I'm glad they're there. The speed camera thing is a separate issue and I won't go into that here.

Re:Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

But it has played out in the real world before, but then it was people keeping notes in logs that they passed to the government not videos. China, North Korea, East Germany, and many other places had/have huge files on every person, East Germany went as far as to have a smell sample of every citizen on file just in case they need to track them down with dogs. To assume that it couldn't happen again when it has happened before without the assistance of technology is just plain foolish.

Re:Well, At Least...

[geminidomino]

Don't get me wrong. It wasn't the hackers that failed to impress me. Good ingenuity on their part.

It was the security system that the Austrian people probably spent a few hundred thousand tax dollar-equivalents on.

Re:modesty

[geminidomino]

Argh... flashback of my Senior year in high school...

What the bloody hell was I thinking?

Re:article exposes the zero-sum game

[shmlco]

"Basically make CCTV networks accessible by everyone like OSS..."

Never happen. And if it did, the first lawsuit by the guy whose wife used the cameras to track his indiscretions would shut it down. And if a pedophile ever used one to track a kid back to their house... OMG.

Re:Big Deal

[pretentiousPPC]

Because I'm not a criminal and therefor should not be treated as one.

Austrian speakers at CCC Conference in Berlin

[billstewart]

Yes, they're Austrians, speaking at the Chaos conference which is currently happening in Berlin.

Cross index ...

[khasim]

Cross index the sale of new plasma screen TV's from local shops with the monitors showing people leaving those addresses.

Now, you know every house that has a new, valuable TV that also doesn't have anyone at home right now.

Cross index that with any sales of dog food to account for canine issues ... and you have the list of homes for a quick crime spree.

The same with jewelry.

Grand theft auto? Even easier.

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.

Re:Huge difference with speed cameras

[drsmithy]

What's "arbitrarily" illegal about apeeding?

Some random person walks out onto a road, licks his finger and sticks it in the air then says "the speed limit for this bit of road is X km/h. That's how arbitrary choosing speed limits typically is.

Now, there *are* scientific methods of choosing speed limits, but they're typically only applied so the posted limit is set a bit lower, so as to maximise revenue intake.

This is before we even get to the simple fact that driving X+Y km/h is not inherently dangerous and that fining somehow after they've done it is a textbook example of closing the barn door long after the horse has bolted.

It is one of the most commonsense laws ever.

No, it's one of the dumbest ideas ever. Taking a huge brush and painting anybody exceeding an arbitrary number on the side of the road with the label of dangerous driver, taking no other factors into account, even though they might be driving ten times more safely than the guy beside them doing 5 under the limit with his bald tyres, broken brake lights and rusted-through car, is simply idiotic (assuming your objective is to make the roads safer, of course).

Secondly, they are extremely effective, if used widely. Speeding has almost been entirely eliminated since speed cameras were installed all over my city.

Great. According to the standard propaganda, that should mean the accident rate in the area should have dropped to nearly zero. Has it ? Do the statistics say the roads are safer at all ? Don't forget to compare against an area that hasn't had similarly strict speed policing, so you have something like a control group.

If there's one thing you don't want to do here, it's speed. What are the ineffective cases you are speaking of?

Stopping people from dying in cars. You don't do it by brainwashing people into believing that slower == safer. You do it by teaching them to drive and removing those who drive dangerously.

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality

[rocket rancher]

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.

Replace the black stripe with the laughing man logo from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex...technology blurring fiction and reality once again.

Two points. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

1. On the Fear side. . , people who rebel are among the first to be recorded as rebels and then collected when the hammer falls. It will fall.

2. On the Light side. . , taxation is THE common denominator; it is the common woe and injustice felt across all racial and political/idealogical boundaries. Even Pro-Life and Abortionists both hate paying taxes to a corrupt government. This is one major spot where the mighty will begin to topple. --The growth of healthy community is where the elite begin to lose control.

Without interference, people can quite easily build and maintain healthy community. I've witnessed it. Politics and divisive issues, media and the highly manipulative/manipulated economic forces are primarily designed and maintained to keep people disconnected. --To keep them in tightly controlled boxes so that they don't do exactly what the elite fear; come together to communicate rather than yell at each other, to solve problems and grow in body, mind and spirit. This kind of growth leads to real freedom, and real freedom leads to the elite loses their slave nation and status as the 'popular kids'. (Hm. It occurs to me that the elite really are like the popular kids in high school; they like the artificial environment where they 'rule', and they want to maintain it. It has always amused me how most popular kids are really upset when they graduate to discover their artificial power status dropped to zero and having to work on themselves in real ways like everybody else. --Usually several steps behind the curve because of the wasted years riding egotism bourn on their parent's money rather than working to actually improve themselves and learn skills beyond fashion sense and one-upmanship through gossip.)

Anyway. . . taxes are the one area where the elite will simply not be able to let up, and it is the one area which hurts unilaterally across the board, and where people from all the different boxes can truly come together to form real community.

Re-read the story about the British group destroying surveillance cameras. Their motives are not privacy related. They are destroying traffic cameras because they believe them to be an unfair form of taxation.

"The more you tighten your grip, they more systems slip through your fingers. . ." (Or something like that. The princess said it better.)

-FL

Re:Big Deal

[metamatic]

First off: they don't need to keep all the video. Once they get facial recognition sorted, they can just log your ID against a set of waypoints, perhaps with a few reference clips of video. They can probably cross-reference with your mobile phone's location data too, to help identify you. (If cellphone X is the only one to be traced to six locations where face Y is seen, it's a pretty safe bet that X belongs to Y.)

Secondly, it doesn't matter that the cameras are fixed. So long as they're networked and have accurate timestamps, you can reconstruct the likely route across the few places not under surveillance.

In case you missed the story in The Independent, the UK is aiming to keep a 2 year rolling log of every journey made by every car starting this year. Replace the license plate with a face and a cellphone trace, and you can do the same with people.

I happen to believe, like David Brin, that it's inevitable. What we need to be doing is forcing reciprocal transparency.

Re:Well, At Least...

[ePhil_One]

What they achieved doesn't impress me at all, because it is akin to standing next to the camera and saying: "Hey, I can see what the camera sees".

The cameras they are protesting is police surveillance cameras, hidden in a public place to monitor the activities of "suspects". They are locating the general area with signal monitors, then tapping into the picture to get an exact fix. So it is significant.

Now comes the moral question. These cameras seem to be the legal equivalent of a "police stakeout" without the suspicious looking van. Disseminating information on how to locate them is roughly equivalent to spray painting "surveillance van" on all the police vehicles, putting black bars on the faces is perhaps more equivalent to standing infront of the van to block their view. Which brings up the moral questions, and doesn't seem to be useful in accomplishing the hackers claimed goals:

"It must not be cool anymore to have access to this data," said Rieger, who argued that Western societies are becoming democratically legitimized police states ruled by an unaccountable elite. "We have enough technical knowledge to turn this around; let's expose them in public, publish everything we know about them and let them know how it feels to be under surveillance."

A simple media campaign would be far more effective.

Re:Big Deal

[Coulson]

I can assure you that they take their legal responsibilities extremely seriously.

I don't doubt it. Their commitment to the law is laudable. However, there is precedent to suggest that law enforcement powers expand continually over time but never contract. As the law enumerates more and more things that the police are allowed to do, I'm sure they will follow those laws seriously as well.

What concerns me is:

1. Legislators will continue to expand the legal powers of the police until they can keep a record of everyone's movement at all times (to the extent technology allows). Even though the police are fastidious to never break the law, there is a chilling effect on liberty.
   
2. Someone corrupt could come to power and abuse the authority of law enforcement (e.g., J. Edgar Hoover). When giving the government power, we must consider not what the best man could do with it, but how the worst could misuse it.
   

Even if these issues were addressed, I do not want my government tracking my movements. It's none of their business.

Indexing

[inKubus]

Actually, facial recognition software could be used to index the clips in real time and make entries into a very simple database (camera 12812, frame 20060102110201, face 1828182) Then the authorites would just need to run a simple query on the index that says "select * from index where face=1828182" and they would have a list of all the frames from all the cameras where that face is present. After that it's a simple matter to extract one long video clip showing the face moving from camera to camera.

Since the facial recognition software is doing this in "real time" as the video flows in from the camera, it is essentially "pre processed" at collection time, thus making it TRIVIAL to extract the information. And we've all seen news stories since '01 that show facial recognition software pulling 100 faces out of a frame in real time with desktop hardware........ sorry to say, brother, but you're spreading misinformation.

As far as storing the video, you could use a simple decay algorythm that would decay the image over time in order to save space while keeping as much important information as possible. Say you have 30fps video at 1000x1000 resolution. Then, using the aforementioned index, you could assign a value to a clip based on the faces present. For instance, if there are no faces (IE, no index entries) the frame would get a value of 0. Ten faces would be a 10. Then you assign a "half life" to the clips (different half lifes for different cameras, of course) that determines how much raw information from the camera is saved and for how long.

For instance, frames from camera A have a half-life of 10 days. That means during processing, frames that haven't been touched in 10 days are reprocessed. Based on their value from the facial recognition engine, frames are either kept or deleted. Also, you'd use a log curve to increase the value of adjacent frames to a very high value frames. For instance, a frame has 20 faces, the immediately preceding frame has only 10 faces, it should get a value closer to the 20 because of it's relation to the 20. Frames become more valuable as they are surrounded by more valuable frames. Anyway, the software decides the most non-valuable images, and then removes frames up to the point where there are half as many frames as before. Touch times are reset and the timer is set again for 10 days. The process is repeated until: all the frames are gone or only frames with a value of 1 or greater remain. The thing is that you are doing this over time so you will only require a maximum of twice the power of the real time processing running continously to degrade the images (and once they are at their lowest quality, they are no longer checked.). In addition, the less valuable images don't necessarily have to be removed--they can be more compressed or moved to some other storage medium yet they still stay in the index.

When all of this is combined with GIS systems (as they are already using in those speed cams), it would be possible to (using only the index, not the imagery) generate a map showing a probable track of any one face either in real time or after the fact.

Suspect A is suspected of posting a sign in front of the capitol saying something negative about the corporations. Suspect A is photographed by officers and is assigned a face hash of 0A3F901...0A3F9FF. Index is queried for possible matches. A number of hits come up. Camera One one block from the capitol has a possible match on the Face. 5 minutes later, there is another match one block in the opposite direction. A plot on the GIS mapping shows that in that five minutes, the suspect could have walked right past where the sign was found.

Unfortunately, Suspect A did not commit the crime, he was merely a jogger who, at a party with a few friends, had mentioned something negative about the corporations and one of his "friends" decided to report him to the authorites, just to be "safe". The actual culprit made a simple rubber mask out of commonly available materials used in the

Re:Big Deal

[Nephilium]

How about the idea of whatever the hell I do on my own time is no one's business but mine? If I were to spend every night at the pub, drinking until I can't stand up, what business is it of my employer? (Assuming that I'm not late to work, and my performance doesn't suffer.)

My employer's hold over me begins and ends with the time I'm scheduled. What I do on my own time should be no concern of theirs.

Nephilium

sousveillance & shootback

[goon]

(sousveillance) '... watchful vigilance from underneath ...' [0] and (shootback) turn camera back on them

Steve Mann [1] has a lot of intelligent things to say on surveillance [2], sousveillance [3] and the intersection of technology & privacy. The earliest I can find is in a 1995 paper [4]. In an article predating the Austrians, Mann advocates shooting back (with your own camera) [5].

More links can be found here. [6]

Reference
[0] Steve Mann, 'definition from Sousveillance as an alternative balance':
http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.htm
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[1] Steve Mann, 'Cyberman':
http://wearcam.org/steve.html
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[2] Steve Mann, 'Identity Trail - Stream 3 - technologies that identify, anonymize and authenticate':
http://idtrail.org/content/view/47/43/
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[3] Steve Mann, 'Sousveillance: A Gathering of the Tribes':
http://sousveillance.org/tribesissue/
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[4] Steve Mann, 'PRIVACY ISSUES OF WEARABLE CAMERAS VERSUS SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS, Feb. 24, 1995':
http://wearcam.org/netcam_privacy_issues.html
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[5] Steve Mann, 'Shooting back article & pictures':
http://wearcam.org/shootingback.html
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

[6] Delicious 'my delicious links on steve.mann':
http://del.icio.us/goon/steve.mann
[Accessed Tuesday, 3 January 2006]

Try renewing your U.S. driver's liscense

[mattr]

All I can say is I just tried to renew my U.S. driver's liscense, which is harder than entering the country with a U.S. passport. You need for example a passport, proof of billing address, social security card (which nobody I know even has), old college photo ID, etc. totalling 6 points or more (that is 7 points I think above) where different kinds of documents are assigned different point values. I believe this is because the driver's liscense is likely a major the key to surveillance across databases, you know what used to be illegal. This struck home when I realized the EZ Pass system used for automatic toll payment in your car is quite useful in tracking where you move and when linked to gas station payments, credit cards, and photo ID it comes full circle and is perfectly enabling for facial identification over the innumerable security cameras you come across even in suburban life.

Personally I just wanted to update my liscense so I can rent a car when I come back home (I live overseas most of the year) and get a local driver's liscense to rent a car here. It is not impossible but obviously the country takes it much more seriously to be able to track people's movements than actually entering the country per se. As far as I can see every U.S. driver now has to supply these various documents each time he or she wishes to renew a driver's liscense.

It was not so clear to me how well this in fact would catch a terrorist especially one who was planning a suicide attack, and only hope it is just one of the more visible ways they are trying to make the country safe and not in fact the key to the whole strategy.