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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."
Until someone invents stealth technology to circumvent it. Like covering your mouth with your hand.
There is also the low tech option and just go inside to talk where they're aren't any cameras....
A good low tech option in my mind would be to vote the dumbasses out of power that think this is a good idea.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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
And it will still not recognise them.
Germans found that out in world war 2 and used it. Apparently, no matter how good you get in a language you use different lip technique from the native speakers. As a result a professional lip reader (or a deaf person trained to lip read) will pick you out right away.
Back on the British topic. Just looking at the 7/7 and 21/7 bombers you have more than 4 different ethnic origins - Somali, Jamaican, Ethiopian and various different tribes originally from Pakistan. Each of these will be using a non-standard lip technique. While it may be possible to get some relatively low reading rate by a professional who has unlimited time to look at the tape, a real-time automated system will fail miserably right away. The only ones it will pick out will be Caucasian whites of English origin (I suspect it will fail on Scots and Welsh) who for some unbeknown to us reason have decided to discuss 7/7 instead of Chelsea vs Arsenal (that will probably be 1-2 people in the whole country anyway).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The Constitution ( and the Magna Carta, and the Articles of Confederation, etc., etc.) is just a piece of paper. It can't do anything to defend our rights... we have to do that ourselves. Once the government has made the decision to step outside of
the bounds set for it (by said Constitution) the only choice is for "We The People" to put it back in those bounds, or destroy it.
Revolution Calling? Yeah, you could say that... But we haven't reached a critical mass yet, where enough people *care* about what's happening to do anything about it.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I've some hearing loss, and recently took a series of classes on coping with it. Part of it was experimenting with lip reading. Not only do many words look similar, letters formed mostly with the tongue look identical. Look in the mirror, sometime, and say the letters t, c, g and z, and try to tell which one is which. You can't. Now, imagine security droids looking at what the computer thinks somebody is saying and taking it as the literal truth because, as we all know, computers never lie. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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