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Lip-Reading Surveillance Cameras
mrogers sends us to Infowars for the following news from the UK, "which is fast becoming the front line of the war on privacy": "'Read my lips..."' used to be a figurative saying. Now the British government is considering taking it literally by adding lip reading technology to some of the four million or so surveillance cameras in order identify terrorists and criminals by watching what everyone says. Perhaps the lip-reading cameras and the shouting cameras will find something to talk about."
Quick and dirty solution: Pig Latin.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Until someone invents stealth technology to circumvent it. Like covering your mouth with your hand.
And as soon as that is possible, I'd like to license the technology for a venture of my own, involving about 40 lbs of latex and a metal skeleton. It'll be the best prom evar!11!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Just don't ask it to open the pod bay doors.
[Insert pithy quote here]
When the lip reading cameras come online, they will see that everyone is repeating this sequence of numbers;
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
" Rotate the Pod please HAL "
What's wrong with a parabolic mic? This looks like a solution in search of a problem to me.
Why not just have everyone wear microphones 24/365 and submit all emails to the UK government? It would save a lot of money on monitoring. For all the fans of big government, here is yet another wonderful example.
You could easily defeat the system by wearing a burqa or other type of veil. Then you'll never be mistaken for a terrorist. Right?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Seems like the potential for error is huge. Really scary either way.
u-bend
Daisy... daisy.....
That is what Britain needs, yesterday. This unwritten constitution business gives too much power to the political class, and they are obviously not above exploiting it to the max.
What about Jennicam?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
I'm really curious as to how this would work with people who spoke less than perfect English... as in.. Brad Pitt's character in Snatch. How long till you figure someone gets arrested when a camera incorrectly reads their lips?
This sort of thing was not acceptable even in Soviet Russia. When government included "free" wires radios in apartments where the internet KGB could listen, people would not put up with that BS. But sadly, people will probably do NOTHING in the UK to counter this *literally* 1984 (the book) ideas.
In Soviet Russia, radios listened to people and people got pissed off. In UK, they would just roll over and do nothing. Sad but true from recent examples.
"Fuck you, I'm a terrorist." This single is rising fast on the charts and is on everybodies lips.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Expect the sales of scarfs in Britain to soar.
Let's just hope it runs on Vista so we can tell it to shut itself off
Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
A real reason to grow that combination push broom/handle bar moustache I've been waiting for!!
Train yourself to talk like out-of-synch karate movies...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The odds against something like this working ar astronomical.
The odds against it being used in court (or worse, being used to "detain" someone) are just about even.
That means some poor schmuck will end up sitting in a detention cell for a decade or so because he shouted for something and the lipreaders thought he said 'bomb'.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
That's what rhyming slang was/is all about. It changes so fast that the only people who understand you are your direct peer group. At the time I was exposed to it, an acquaintance said she couldn't even understand her husband if he used it at home.
Since all terrorists have a beard and speak Arabic, the algorithms used in these cameras must really be state of the art.
God, root, what is difference ?
...that this is happening, in the country I live in and the scary thing is that everyone here thinks this is just fine and normal.........
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Oh boy... I would like to see this working on East London... "Know what'a'meeeaaan?"
Police arrest hundreds of tourists...
Sounds to me like the UK is deep in enemy territory.
-scsg
So I am a terrorist ya, do you really think I'm gonna discuss my plan on the street under the surveillance camera?
Serious, who come up with the idea ?
I know fear is a powerful stimulant, but the British seem to be willing to do anything to monitor people, what is the motivation?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Let me highlight some parts of the article: "government is considering", "Home Office is interested in a project", "Imagine a place..", "Big Brother gadgets that the government wants to or already has", "councils are considering" It's just scaremongering and full of crap.
So 'terrorists' must now suffer the inconvinience of retreating from the view of cameras to talk about terrorist stuff, and everyone else's conversations in public are recorded and monitored by the government. Brilliant.
it won't work against politicians, because they talk out of their asses, not their mouth.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Now if they could just come up with cameras that read your thoughts and react before you even finished the thought, the war on terror could finally be won!
A part of the British government is interested in lip-reading, amongst about half a dozen other, equally disturbing technologies. They'll talk the talk, but when the time comes, the cost/reliability will prevent any practical use. Biometrics, anyone?
...various despots place orders for thousands.
I could see something like this having a very chilling effect of free speech.
Think if you've ever complained about the police when talking when a friend, now think if you'd still complaining as loudly if a police officer was within earshot.
This doesn't even have to work, a lot of people walking down the street are still going to feel nervous saying bad things about Big Brother if they feel Big Brother is actually listening.
I stole this Sig
I just didn't know that our lip-reading overlords would be having the deaf hold down the masses yearning to be free from the tyranny we live under.
... that will take them a while to figure out ...
Good thing I talk in ancient Aramaic with some Swahili words thrown in
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
here's a simple solution:
flash mobs.
if every couple of days a few thousand people all said the same trigger words at the same time this technology would quickly be useless.
Deaf people / lip readers have a hard time figuring out if you said "Vacuum" or "FuckYou". What will software do?
I think the problem is obvious when there are only seven supreme court justices and over five hundred congressional members.
If they increase the Supreme Court to nine justices, that will improve the ratio.
Remember the state of the art in speech recognition? From what I've gathered, reading lips is a lot harder than listening to a person talk. So does this have any chances of working with the technology that we have today?
Looks like those US Civil War types with the long, bushy mustaches were ahead of their time.
Here we don't have big slush funds. (The Govt. can endlessly waste public money on hopeless IT projects, but that's different.) So University lecturers, especially ones from not terribly good universities (have you ever been to Norwich? Don't.), have to try and invent other ways to get funding. Since the Govt. is obsessed with finding terrorists before they manage to get the gunpowder under Parliament again, one way to get funding for a visual recognition project is to suggest it can be used for lipreading terrorists in shopping centres. Of course it won't work, but hopefully by then the guy will have written a few papers and moved a bit up the academic pecking order. And good luck to him. British Government policy with universities basically involves being nice to Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL and stuff the rest. (No, I'm not bitter. My family has degress from 3 of the 4. But I do recognise that it's not a good or fair system)
Pining for the fjords
I'm homeless. I can't afford a tinfoil hat.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Back in 2003, such a thing seemed to be an "Unrealistic portrait of a dark future", according to one of the reviewers of A.E. Van Vogt's "Computerworld" on the Amazon site: Check it out
diginferno
Open the pod bay doors, Hal.
Perhaps the most interesting and disturbing development in surveillance is gait detection systems. While a disguise will prevent facial recognition from working, and not saying anything will prevent lip reading from doing its job, there are systems being tested and deployed that can identify an individual by the way they walk (their gait). There are so many ways to positively identify people that implantable chips won't be necessary before long.
It's a well known fact that 98% of all crimes are planned outside in broad daylight. It's also well known by authorities that criminals all refer to eachother by the various unsolved crimes they've committed. It's ALSO a well known fact that when committing crimes criminals like to yell their name and address.
These lip reading cameras are the best things to come along in law enforcement since beating a confession out of a suspect!
I have nothing compelling to say
If the UK goes forward with this scheme, they're getting scammed. I know, from research and real-world experience with people with intensive speech-reading training, that lipreading will yield, at most, about 25% of speech. There are simply too many words that look alike or resist analysis to grasp more than that. You can fill in some of the blanks by the situational context, body language and residual hearing, if there is any. But frankly I see this as an effort to take advantage of gullible government agencies by touting a gee-whiz technological solution that won't work.
Not only will all of these systems rack up costs in implementation, but imagine the administrative and logistical nightmare. Forgetting maintenance (hardward and software) and all, the investment in manpower will be a nightmare. Who is going to respond to what situation? What deems a situation? What requires sirens, what doesnt? How do you handle the situation... automatic detention pending investigation? Who do I sue when I spend a night in jail for telling my friend I want to blow up my car because it has so many problems? How is information logged and accessed? Is it public or private? Who watches the watchers? Who do business's sue when the police roll out and make a scene, thus hurting your business?
I cannot see this ever happening for two reasons. First, eventually the people will stop the recession of their rights - otherwise they deserve what they will get. Second, the system will prove impossible to run for all the reasons above, and many more. Remember, the day you wake up, look at the calendar and see you are living in 1984, you will have not a single person to blame except yourself.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Woah, Insightful? Did you go for "Funny" and trip? Feel bad that jokes don't boost karma? Or do we really have mods that reckon pikeys are all crooks... based on the movie "Snatch".
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
Will they wait until you are identified as a terrorist and then "switch on the lip-reading feature? Will they have it store all readings on the fly and then go back to analyze them once something bad has happened? Will they "mine" this data on the fly looking for key phrases as they are spoken by some would-be criminal looking at the camera (James Bond style)? Or will they simply use such recognition tech after the fact when viewing or reviewing selected portions of video?
... speech, while the lip reading would be far worse. Consider the problem of alternate interpretations like this look at someone's lips with your ears covered and ask them to say several random sentences using words like 'gun', 'run', 'ghunga din', 'bomb', 'attack', etc. Now imagine doing that in poor lighting conditions from an angle well above them and some distance away. Now consider that you have no idea what the other words were and thus little to narrow the search space. If you assume that the words fit some pattern of 'terrorist speech' then you may get a 'match' but that is a big assumption to make and one that is unlikely to yield much useful info especially if it required detailed analysis by one person.
My money would be on the latter but I fail to see how this is either a) a real big "Gee whiz" or b) likely to impact their investigations much.
From what I know of present tech the lip readings are unlikely to be that accurate. Cutting edge tech on speech to text is not all that robust and that is processing the actual audio, you know
So when you couple that problem with the ongoing question of whether these cameras ever help to prevent and deter crimes or only seem to be useful in producing evidence once criminals have already been caught or crimes already committed then it begs the question as to whether this will help, hurt (by producing false 'evidence' and wasting police time and implicating good people), or do nothing at all.
Given that I find it unlikely any of the tube bombers were dumb enough to spell out their plans while staring at a camera I suspect it will be one of the latter two.
I mean, sure, lots of people made the connection with HAL 9000, but this post actually got the quote right. "Open the pod bay doors" came after the lipreading scene.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
listening outposts up in their citizens' butts. A ministry of internal affairs spokesman said that it was a surefire way to know what passes inside citizens' personal worlds. Spokesman dismissed allegations about the method invading citizens' privacy as being "Ridiculous".
Read radical news here
Nothing quite says "we're watching you" like a camera that actually says "we're watching you".
I was always wondering if we would ever find a need for a language like Klingon... I think we might have found one...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
...from "United Kingdom" to "Airstrip One"?
That and starting up the purges is pretty much all they've got left to do over there.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
So, who, exactly, has an expectation of privacy when they're in public? Yeah, yeah, surveillance bad, privacy good, rah rah rah, but seriously, if you don't want your business to be public, then keep it in private.
Either that, or talk about incredibly private things that are virtually guaranteed to make whatever poor schlub is reading the transcripts incredibly uncomfortable. Or say things that are so unbelievably suspicious that they'll have no choice to investigate, and when it turns out to be complete fabrication remind them it was their ill-conceived idea to read your lips in the first place.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
This must be more of a scare tactic than anything else. We all know facial recognition is less than perfect and have seen several tests in public places fail to recognize any bad guys. I have to believe lip reading is much more difficult that facial recognition. Therefore, this should be totally ineffective for the next decade or two.
If the systems doesn't work, then does it really matter?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
To those who are confused: it might help to read this.
$META_SIG_JOKE
Just combine this with the mind reading technic in a cnn-tech article and we might have a Minority Report.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
This is not my sig
ventriloquism.
It'll be the new thing. All those kids that got their asses kicked in grade school will now be heros.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Now, the camera operator will hear what I'm saying when I say "Fuck Big Brother" to the camera.
Seriously, we are having our privacy reduced to only whatever is enclosed within our skin.
The solution to reducing crime is not to punish everyone by putting them under constant surveillance and making them legally liable for defending themselves. The answer to reducing crime is to train police better, giving them less paperwork, giving victims more rights, and taking away rights from criminals during the commission of their crime.
One of the problems, especially here in California, is that if you hurt a criminal in the act of robbing/assaulting you, they can sue you and take you for everything you are worth. We need to give the police better training and less paperwork, and victims a thick legal sheild from criminals and their families who are unhappy with reaping the consequences of the crimial committing crimes.
I hate it here in Kalifornia. You have to think about how you could get into trouble by defending yourself from a violent criminal before you actually begin to defend yourself. In a crimes, you have to defend yourself FROM THE CRIMINAL during the commission of the home invasion, and then IN COURT when he or his family sues you when you put two shots into him.
If you don't want to put yourself in danger and suffer pain and/or death by committing a crime, then don't committ the crime. If criminals knew they could not sue the homeowner who shot or beat them while they committed their crime, then I'll bet crime would go down.
This is such a fucked up state. I SHOULD have the right to defend myself from criminals without having to worry about defending myself in court, but I don't. The criminals have more rights than the victims.
In California, criminals sue YOU!!!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
So, they're outlawing ventriloquism? They're criminalising Orville?
Stick Men
Please, why are you linking to kooks like Infowar? Here is the original article, which they conveniently don't link to. Compare and contrast. Infowar:
Of course, the lip reading technology isn't even in existence yet, let alone any kind of government plan to use it or secret police squad. From the original article:
It's just hype to promote a new research project. Infowar seeks out anything that can possibly be used for bad purposes, and spins it out of all recognition. It's a site run by a paranoid kook, not a legitimate news source.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
OK, I admit I just wanted to use that subject line. But it does seem rather quaint that it'll be Scarface who winds up toppling the British Crown now.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Or at the very least I'd like to see a week where people walk around public areas saying things like:
"I just got this new 400mm lens and I'm going to take some pictures of Big Ben, and then a few close-ups of parliament, and then this afternoon I'm going to shoot the Queen."
or
"I'm glad Parliament has a visitor's gallery, I'm going to plant my bum there at 10:00, and then go off in time for lunch."
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
"hal9001" or "spaceodyssey"?
Speech reading technology is based on...human speech. It won't tell the difference between "mom" and "bomb". Just look in a mirror yourself when saying those two words. Just 30% of spoken speech is on the lips anyway so it's hard as hell to speech read anyone, and I've been doing it my entire life.
I still can't tell if someone is saying "I love food" versus "I love you".
Has anyone else here figured out how accurate this recognition package is right now?
...but we do have a written constitution and a bill of rights - the constitution just isn't codified. We also had these Acts far longer ago than "yesterday", the bill of rights was passed in 1689. The Magna Carta was passed in 1215; this is a very old constitution
/. always forgets - people really want this stuff.
Other than that I would say that the lack of monarchical power has caused a few issues with regards to our "elective dictatorship", but you would be a fool to think that this doesn't have popular support. This is something that
Of course if you follow Hobbes then the government is only doing its job when it does this kind of thing; the sovereign only exists to protect us, no matter how invasive this protection is...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I'd go up to every camera I saw and HOPE they were reading my lips.
Vacuum!
VaaaacUUUUUM!
...Open the pod bay doors please HAL.....
... if all the tongue studs and lip piercings will throw off the algorithm?
Have gnu, will travel.
Wonder if these cameras will be able to distinguish between "God save the Queen" and "God shave the Queen"?
I can see masks and bandana's becoming popular in the future.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
I have an idea to add on to cameras a listening device that can record audio of nearby people. I think this is a really neat idea that may have many crime fighting uses. Please provide 3 years of research funding for me to get some duct tape and connect a microphone to a camera.
Seriously - why do we need lip reading cameras? Haven't we had microphones on video cameras for 50 years?
If you are going to do lip reading, wouldn't it make more sense to do it on the video player, so you can get the audio of prerecorded video too? This would reduce cost too. I'm sure there are many fewer players than surveillance cameras
That will confuse the morons who assume that every Muslim is a terrorist.
mustache.
females need hormones for at least 3 years.
Kill your TV
" As any badengineer can tell you, one revolution always gets you back to where you started."
I know when I make a wheel, after one revolution, it is exactly 1 revolution from where it started.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Vacuum!
moustache
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Seem to be "thwart the cameras". And I concur. My initial ideas are: * learn a foreign language (Iraqi may not be a good one there?) * learn to sign * develop the "touch language" mentioned in Dune (Frank Herbert) - where you communicate through touching And WTF is going on in 1984 land, er I mean Britain? Is the Orwellian development accelerating there or what?
"...my boat..."
(Unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent...)
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Real terrorists will avoid the system. What you'll get is a lot of false positives from crazy people talking to themselves while imagining they're in video game or movie scenarios.
Push the button, Max!
And in related news... the newest fad to be sweeping the UK is ventriloquism.
"If it's got a switch... it's my bitch!!"
As people become desperate to circumvent this, we will return to the Charlie McCarthy era...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Always bugs me in the movies, where a team of people have kitted up, carted all their equipment etc. to a target site, then stand around the front gate and tell each other the plan.
Do the UK authorities expect the terrorists to strap their bombs in place, wander into a crowded location, then stand about in front of the camera telling each other what the bomb is for?
Come on, I know they have some kind of deficiency in their heads to contemplate blowing up themselves and other civilians, but are they really going to be stupid enough to have not discussed their plan beforehand?
That wont be a problem, You see in England they can actually speak the English language correctly, Words like ain't and mom simply aren't spoken and are considered offensive. In England and most of the world, we say mum.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
darn! I knew that I should have patented that ugly lady mask from TR!
.... :((
Oh wait, patents are immoral
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
...they wouldn't have enough resource to do anything about it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6613885.stm
Okay so I don't know foreign politics (hell I barely know US politics), but what is the Queens position on this? Can she do anything about it? We may have a stupid, inept president, but you guys are getting scary 1984 scenarios. I'm not sure whats worse (and I bet they're related too)
Stewie: Well you have ultra sensitive hearing.. hear this..
(Stewie mouthing to Brain)
Stewie: Fuck You.
Brian: I'm telling.
Stewie: No no! I said vacuum! Vacuum!
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer.
funny pics
What I need now is both a tin foil hat and a mask! Go figgure.
Funnily enough a few weeks back for a business practice module I was dragged into the office of my tutor (a certain Richard Harvey) and asked what our ideas were.
:)
His verdict? 'Issuing entry cards to people would be too big-brotherish and generate a hell of a backlash'. Oh the irony