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Next Up: the Jamming Wars
chicksdaddy writes "ITWorld has an interesting opinion piece on the next privacy battleground, which they say will be over citizens' rights to use jamming technology to (forcibly) opt-out of ubiquitous surveillance, as sensors pop up in more and more public spaces and private homes alike. 'Given the rapid pace of technological change, we don't know exactly what the future holds for us. But one thing is certain: personal privacy is going to turn from a "right" to a "fight" in the next decade, as individuals take up arms against government and private sector snooping on their personal lives.' The article mentions some skirmishes that have already occurred: employees using GPS jamming hardware to prevent employers from tracking their every movement, and the crush of new business for encrypted voice, video and texting services like SilentCircle (up 400% in the last two months). 'Absent the protection of the law, citizens should be expected to do what they do elsewhere: take matters into their own hands: latching onto tools and technology to give them the privacy that they aren't afforded by the legal system. However, there may not be an easy technology fix for ubiquitous, unregulated surveillance. Writing in Wired this week, Jathan Sadowski warns that the tendency for individuals to focus on securing their own data and communications and using technology to do may be misleading. 'The problem is that focusing on one or both of these approaches distracts from the much-needed political reform and societal pushback necessary to dig up a surveillance state at its root,' Sadowski writes."
Only outlaws will have paintball guns.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Modern cameras are easy to detect and destroy without leaving any physical evidence. All you need is something capable of sending out a pulse of near-infrared light and then looking for the highest return signal. Visible light will work too, but since we're being sneaky and all. All digital reflect light in the same direction as it is received; an optical quality not found naturally.
Just shoot a high power laser on a very short duration wherever this quality is found, and you'll burn out the CCD of any nearby digital camera. Be warned however; while this won't happen to humans, animals like cats have eyes which produce similar effect. Make sure you aren't using such a device indiscriminately. As well, the headlights of newer cars also exhibit this quality... so you should manually aim such a device towards a likely camera and then let the optics get a precise fix on the CCD.
No need to jam... fire once, move on. You can even do it from miles away, where you're not even a single pixel in the frame. All that'll be recorded is a bright flash of multicolored or white light, followed by camera death.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Jamming is broadcasting noise and would pretty trivially fall into the category of "vandalism" since it not only hides you but also hides anyone near you who may want to be tracked. It also is a poor choice for "laying low" since they can track the movements of the jammer trivially (it's the really noisy thing that's blocking out every other signal).
The reality is that privacy is and has always been an illusion created by inefficient management of information. And most of the societal issues erosion of the illusion causes are better fixed by addressing the underlying cause of the problem not by the willful ignorance that is "privacy laws".
Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Star!
This one is only good for those cameras that use a flash:
http://www.nophoto.com/
I'm thinking it might be possible to build a "clear" overlay with a bunch of infra-red LEDs built in in a pattern that is invisible to the naked eye but fuzzes the numbers for any camera that sees in the infra-red (most of them). Put that over your plate and run it all the time, even when the car is parked anywhere except in your garage.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Quite timely: http://xkcd.com/1251/
It's not a zero-sum game. One can do what one can *now* to protect one's self AND work to create the proper safeguards.
Ooh, yeah! All right!
We're jammin':
I wanna jam it wid you.
We're jammin', jammin',
And I hope you like jammin', too.
Ain't no rules, ain't no vow, we can do it anyhow:
I'n'I will see you through,
'Cos everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice,
Jammin' till the jam is through.
We don't need the NSA
To record the things we say
Or the things we dooooo
No matter how we try
we're surounded by Wi-Fi
transmissions tooooooo
Now dey watch us wid their drones
and their trackin our cell phones
I guess we scroooooooed
No bullet can stop us now, we neither beg nor we won't bow;
Info can be bought nor sold.
We all defend the right; Jah - Jah children must unite:
Your life is worth much more than gold.
If people have to resort to (illegal) jamming, what right to privacy does our legal system actually afford?
Congress is so woefully slow to help.
Too obvious. Try again, please.
If you don't want to be tracked by an employer who tracks then find and employer who does not track. I have no problem with an employer knowing where I am during working hours. I am on their time. If they track me on my time then there is an issue.
A slightly more moderate idea might be to vote for politicians that support to your beliefs such as right to privacy. For example, vote for the guy that wants to remove speed cameras from the city/county/state you live in and so forth. Or you can just commit vandalism against government property and accept the risks associated with that.
>If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
No.
Interestingly enough, there was a guy who was recently busted for putting a GPS jammer on his truck. It was discovered when he drove near an airport and impacted the testing of GPS-enhanced plane landing equipment.
Source.
The person was fined $32,000 and was fired by the company he was working for.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The whole "personal jammer" thing is a non-starter. Jammers are indescriminate, and the usual rhetoric used to make them illegal will apply.
Take for instance, with personal cellphone jammers. They are illegal in the united states, specifically cited by the FCC. The reason, is that they disrupt vital comminications infrastructure, and can therefor prevent expedient deployment of emergency services, an other vital services that rely on the availability of that communication medium.
In the case of the surveylance industry, the argument can be made that cameras make the community safer, by helping law enforcement to identify and rapidly locate dangerous criminals, and that disrupting this system places the community at greater risk.
Those are totally specious arguments in most of the applied settings they would be used in, but that doesn't matter. Think of it as a horrible cousin to the "think of the children!" Rhetoric. Or, maybe the "interstate commerce" doctrine.
Personal jamming tech is a nonstarter for legal defense against ubiquitous tracking and surveylence.
About the only thing left, then, is relentless use of it anyway, as a dedicated civil disobedience movement. Yes, that means pleading guilty to the charge in court when arrested, as per the proper use of civil disobedience as a tactic. You want to swamp the justice system with burdensome numbers of people to incarcerate, with a near 100% recidivism rate.
It has to cost them far more money than their corporate puppeteers make from the mandatory protection and employment of the surveylence. It has to do this consistently, and without fail.
Otherwise, there will always be the profit motive, and the corruption that money has on government, and the surveylence state will persist.
amazon bonus
http://amazonbonus.doomby.com/
We have been blithely feeding bits of our privacy to corporations for years. Neilsen, survey companies, members discount store cards, google, facebook, mobile phone providers. The list goes on and on. The data is there and we GIVE it away for things we ostensibly want.
Is it any surprise now that the government wants the same and more? Google is an advertising company. They have show how much can be made in this way, and the data that can be gathered. They give us the tools that we need in order to be able to better serve their customers. Government is supposed to protect the people, and as is often the case, has taken it to far. The individual NSA analyst may think he is doing a greater good sifting through your 'metadata' and believe it whole-heartedly. However he is really just feeding the military-data complex, which is simply an offshoot of the military-industrial complex. It is tied up with money galore, corporate greed and self interest, and kickbacks and graft, um I mean campaign donations, to grease up the politicians who feed it to us if they don't buy it for free
This thing has inertia, it is armed, and comes with more power than even a large group of 'regular' joes can easily fight. Especially since most of the country is apathetic and/or splintered of bullshit issues like gay marriage. This has been a long time coming, and people have fought, but they get swept up and under by the machine. People like Manning, Snowden, Assange, they are doing the things that Patrick Henry and Ben Franklin would likely be proud of. They have stood up against a government that enables people to steal away little by little the wealth that this country and its people generate. They have stood up to say, no, this is not what america is supposed to be. And whether you agree with their methods or motivations, have you stood up? Have I? Or have we both sat down to watch the Cowboys game again?
Unfortunately it will end one of two ways that I see. The continuing downhill slide until finally comes to a bloody crash, or a bloody crash now. And by bloody, I mean bloody. And after? Brave words will be said, changes may be made, some deep some superficial, but sooner or later those near the top will realize...
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"
Silence is a state of mime.
An app that randomly broadcast packets with new mac addresses constantly would be quite effective at flooding databases with crap and hiding the individual.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Unless of course it LOOKS like you are doing something wrong, even when you are not, then you DO have something to worry about.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
How has no one quoted Spaceballs yet? Slashdot, you're upsetting me.
People using jamming equipment are already attracting massive fines, and pretty soon engaging in ANY form of electronic signal interference will be a very serious criminal offence. Even the idea of keeping one's cell phone in a Faraday sleeve/case will probably be outlawed under "terms of service" regulations.
The correct solution is for the people to DEMAND amendments to the Constitution so that a Right to Privacy is enforced, especially against potential NSA activities, and the obscene actions of Bill Gate's inBloom (company name is chosen as a pedophile's joke) child monitoring database system currently being rolled out in NY and elsewhere across the USA). A Right to Privacy would clearly deny the State or its agents the right to generally spy on citizens, even when such spying is done 'anonymously' for 'statistical' purposes (the catch-all excuse used by the NSA). The Right to privacy amendment would define legitimate government spying as that which carefully targets court-approved individuals only, for direct law enforcement purpose. Pre-empive, pre-crime, or general surveillance would be utterly outlawed.
Taking this on at the other end (the point at which users use services) is not a societal solution, but the ability of informed individuals to protect themselves better. For instance, no sane person would buy Bill Gate's NSA spy box, the Xbox One. Every intelligent person knows their cell phone is location tracked in realtime, and that the microphones and cameras can be remotely activated at any time.
In an ideal world, the monsters for whom that evil murderous puppet Obama fronts for would see their powers over the ordinary people hamstrung by an updating of the Constitution. However, in OUR world, the opposite is happening. Obama (and his successors) are now fixed-term dictators, and are free to ignore any aspect of the Constitution. As the police state expands, and police state methods become even more commonplace and vicious than now, ordinary people will have no options left, as we witnessed in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany at their peak. Under such circumstances, ordinary people simply comply and survive as best they can.
either participate in the world or not. that is your option people.
Jam? Funny, with ToF sensors and signal maps, I can now find your location (jamming source), back trace your trajectory and find out who you are in about 20min.
Once you enter the system [of life?], you change the measurement, I can ID you. Welcome to the new world order.
(and the cat in the box smiles).
I'm going to be using the Cone of Silence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence/
...and it hasn't even started yet. I just read an article yesterday about a guy who went to jail for using a GPS jamming device to thwart employer monitoring. Appaently it was affecting nearby aircraft. Raise your hand if you're willing to give up your freedom (ie. go to jail) for your right to privacy. See all those hands? What, you don't? Yeah, that's why they've already won. Unless you are wealthy enough to buy several congressfolks and change the law expect to be bent over by those with the money.
Trying to hide one's location from your employer when on duty is possibly a bad idea too. One would assume that the employer had a valid interest in knowing where their equipment was and had installed the GPS based equipment for that purpose. The driver's attempts to mask his location was inexcusable and leads to a whole lot of "so where where you exactly?" questions that he likely could not answer truthfully and keep his job.
GPS is being adopted fast in the transportation industry as a way to gain extra profit. Some trucking companies are starting to charge their employees or contracted drivers for the 'privilege' of driving company equipment outside of a designated route or taking too long getting to the next destination. Those designated routes never take in to account little things like construction, traffic, map updates, and weather. Fees incurred range from fuel expenses all the way up to their mileage rate, fuel, and 'maintenance fees'. It can easily be over $100 an hour simply because the automated route software did not know about a detour or traffic accident in advance.
It could very well be that obfuscating his GPS data was the only thing from being required to, on occasion, pay his employer simply for working that day.
I don't do anything illegal in private, so why should i fear all this surveillance. My life is so boring, I dont care if some anonymous govt agency sees where I am or what Im doing in public.
I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear. Im not a criminal, pedo, gun murderer or turrist... Governments need some way of fighting the turrists, we dint want the turrists to win, so spy away I say. I feel safer already.
Anyone know where I can buy a cheap GPS jammer? My insurance company wants to install a GPS tracking box in my car, but I'd rather they didnt!
Its people committing a crime. Its not legal to interfere with communications. FCC takes a dim view on it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Trust me. As a hunter, I know: Bears are very well armed. As a matter of fact, unless a man is well armed in a match up with a bear, the man will lose.
Just sayin'...
If you lack the will or the stamina to fight this through the ballot box, then why do you have voting rights? Might as well dispense with them right now, yes?
It's fundamentally wrong to indiscriminately interfere with or obstruct devices (cellphones, GPS) near you just because you might be tracked through them. In doing that you're overstepping the boundaries of your own rights and encroaching on other people's rights. The proper response would be to turn your cellphone off if you don't want to be tracked, or to ditch the GPS tracker you object to.
There are very good reasons to outlaw the possession or operation of e.g. GPS jammers in public places and to enforce such laws simply because jammers can also interfere with other people's legitimate use of the same..
Besides which, any store or mall is free to refuse people who operate any kind of jammer entry, or to kick them out if they switch one on while inside. And absent legal protection, your boss might just make it a condition of employment that you remain traceable. That's where your spunky "fight" will lead you. Defeat.
The way through the ballot box starts looking a lot brighter compared to that.
It sounds like you're confused by the difference between the rule of law and the law of rule. Obviously the reciprocal of one is not necessarily congruent with the set of the reciprocal of the other.
Only the slowest man.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
... the next privacy battleground...
I didn't know there had been a previous "privacy battleground".
Personally, I don't feel there is an issue. Sure, it is slightly uncomfortable to know that there are unsavoury character out there collecting information about who you are and what you do with the intent to use it against you - advertisers spring to mind - but that is the way it has always been, and we have always found ways to live with it, one way or another.
I am sure I will be modded way down for expression this as my view, ironically (free speech, eh?), but I really think it is a non-issue. We give out private information without a second thought all the time, when we use credit cards, mobiles and God knows what else; it is part of opening your front door and showing yourself outside in the public space, where other people are likely to observe your presence, whether by means of technology or simply by looking at you. Privacy is not about a right to pass through life completely unobserved, but about things like the sanctity of the home: you have a right to a place that is your own, where nobody else has a right to enter without your persmission.
A more relevant and pressing issue is about what is done with the data afterwards, and to me the most worrying part is not what the government or its agencies will do, but what private companies are up to. To me there is nothing more odious than being targeted by manipulative advertisers trying to extract money from you and enticing you to get hooked on products that are harmful to you. At least in our part of the world, governments are tightly regulated in most of what they do, whereas big businesses are not. And with some trans-national corporations being bigger than many governments, that is a real cause for concern.
Even the fastest man is slower than a running bear.
http://www.backpacker.com/ask_a_bear_how_fast_can_bears_run/skills/15225
What he means is this: If more than one man is running from the same bear, only the slowest man need worry. When the bear catches up he will forget about the others and only care about the one he caught.
It's the old joke: Two men sit in a tent when they hear a bear outside. The bear is obviously mad and about to attack. One of the men starts putting on his shoes. "Why are you wasting time doing that?!" the other yells. "I can run faster with shoes on" he replies. "You can outrun a bear!" the other yells back. "I don't need to" the first replies, "I just need to run faster than you" he says and leaves the tent and start running.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Hey, I have the right to bear arms and I don;t care what the government says. Now as for my pasty white legs that is something totally different.
The company had a right to use GPS tracking on one of THEIR trucks. It is their equipment and they have a right to know where their drivers are. They also have the duty to make sure all truckers get their OSHA mandated rest period. Woe to any trucking firm that has GPS tracking and use it only for driving up profits instead for profit and safety enforcement for they will face the wrath of the Federal Government, as they should.
What was that? I can't hear you!
Cory Doctorow's "Little brother" deals with this subject.
What people who write about this do not understand is that spectrum regulators cannot give permits to equipment that will interfere with licensed transmissions. That is just impossible legally.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
We see that Bob Marley was ahead of his time.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
But as described, it's only something that Americans can act upon.
Having said that, I've been involved in pushes against privacy breaches in the UK in the past, and will be in the future. But I suspect that an American identical twin of mine would have greater global effect. That's not right, but it is real.
Oh, but I am going to enjoy the live broadcast of the US President opening Sino-US talk by publicly giving the Chinese Premier a blowjob. Bareback, with swallow.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
but rest assured that a REFLECTION of red light is what is causing red eye.
Whereas, cat's eyeshine is due to RETROFLECTION.
It reflects light like a mirror, but a special mirror that is always pointing exactly back to you.
Cats have eyeshine only on your photo. Other persons in the same room won't have seen it (unless they where also holding a light source).
(It works that way, because cat's eyes are sphere of refractive material. But unlike humans and most other daytime animal, they aren't coated with pigment that absorbs light, instead the background is reflecting)
Also the, in the case of the red eye, SCATTERING (light shining back in all direction, like any normal object underlight) would be more apropriate (usually, REFLECTION make you think about a mirror: something on which light bounces symmetrically on the other side). You're slimply seeing the blood vessels being lighted by your light source (with better focusing, you could even see the individual vessels, that's what doctors do). If your eyes where big enough, other people in the room could also be seeing the red eyes.
To test: make a pulse of light.
- Scattering material will be lighted by the pulse. you'll get something back, not all signal, but still a fraction (That's the case with red eye) you get a funny colour (red, from the blood vessels) but it doesn't give the impression to glow, you don't get that much more light than the rest of the environment.
- Perfectly Reflective material: you won't get any signal back directly. The light will bounce on the mirror and continue it's path elsewhere (it could scatter back there so even if you don't see the mirror it self, you could see the object reflected in it).
- retroflective material: you'll get your pulse back almost at the same intensity you sent it. The object seems glowing because it seems much more brighter thant the environment ( that's NOT the case with red eyes)
retroflection was evolved by night life animals because each beam crosses precisely twice the photo receptor of the cat's eye - signal gain.
humans and day life animals evolved a light-absorbing layer to avoid too much light bouncing and reflecting in all directions inside the eye which would have made the vision more blurry.
retroflection is also used in roadsign and other road marker: by shining all the light back, they are more visible (seem glowing), instead of scattering the light in all directions.
Funny stuff: next time you're driving during a rainy night, when you see road sign over head, while driving under them, try turning of the high beam and only leaving low beam headlights. They will be dark to you (no more light going up to them from your car to shine back), but still visible in their reflections on the road (your low beam's light bounce on the road up toward the signs, and the reflect it back to the road)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
..."You can outrun a bear!" the other yells back. "I don't need to" the first replies, "I just need to run faster than you" he says...
That joke is so old that it has whiskers !
The problem is that many bears are smarter than that. They are fully capable of disabling all of you and then coming back to dine.