Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
Worse - you don't bring a paintball gun to a tactical nuclear weapons fight. Sure, us little guys can buy gizmos and change habits but if you have the power of any major government after your ass, you're toast. Even sophisticated people like Laura Poitras are hassled to the point of having to leave the country.
Unless you've got some major new technology that can defeat the status quo, the only answer is to fight them at the ballot box.
Goodluckwiththat.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
What we really need is the right to arm bears.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
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.
Exactly. The right to bear arms didn't do Edward Snowden or Bradley Manning a fat lot of good either.
Manning gave up that right when he enlisted. He traded it for the responsibility to bear arms.
But this brings up an interesting point: encryption tech is still (although not as much as it used to be) treated as munitions by the US government. As such, does the right to properly encrypted data fall under the right to bear arms? Or is the US interpreting the constitution these days to say you can bear as many arms as you want, but munitions are off-limits?
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.
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
How has no one quoted Spaceballs yet? Slashdot, you're upsetting me.
I'm going to be using the Cone of Silence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence/
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'...
Unless you've got some major new technology that can defeat the status quo.
Asymmetric warfare, you keep your energy hogging jammers and I'll hide out in my Tora Bora (patent pending) Faraday cage. Try and find me suckers.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
ref: The Company Store. Really, it's not much different than the gov't. We get paid in scrip (fiat currency), don't actually own real property (eminent domain, property taxes), can't even subsist apart from gov't, which forces participation in the government economy (property taxes, again).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Not like either of them tried that I know of. I know that after Dorner was the most wanted person in the USA, full resources out to get a single man on the run, with a gun in the city. While he did get killed, but I think he killed 2 police before becoming the most wanted, and shot like 5 more police (killing 3 of them) before getting burned to the ground in a cabin. So if 1 trained person, after Police only, with gun kills 5:1; guns are certainly capable of increasing the impact of your change. He didn't have near the dirt of Snowden or Manning, but he certainly got the info he had out with the help of the gun, that he wasn't able to do after first trying without the gun.
The voting machines don't need to be rigged.
The candidates are rigged. The political parties are rigged. Congress is rigged. The judiciary is rigged.
No matter who you vote for, you're voting for servants of the corporate oligarchy.
Because the ballot box, particularly for offices that have any real sway in the debate, is being effectively neutered by the system that controls it.
The corporate plutarchs and their mass-media entertainment industry shills are doing a masterful job of manipulating public behavior, to the extent that no dissident element has any possibility of making an electoral impact. Money always wins. Always.
Conclusion?
Short of a complete societal and economic collapse with a subsequent rethinking of governing structures, we're hopelessly fucked.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.