Surveillance | Futurismic

Japanese teen smokers hack age verification with bank-notes

Paul Raven @ 08-07-2008

Tokyo vending machines Everything can and will be hacked; once you have the motivation sussed, the exploits will be close behind.

Point in case: Japanese cigarette vending machines have age-verification cameras fitted to them to prevent teens from illegally purchasing tobacco. A great idea, and a typically Japanese high-tech fix for a social problem, right? [image by midorisyu]

Well, it might have been - if the kids hadn’t sussed out that the cameras can be fooled by not just pictures from magazines but the portraits of historical figures on bank-notes. Back to the drawing board - I wouldn’t want to be on the R&D team of the company that makes those vending machines right now.

I know where you drove last summer - the secrets your satnav could tell

Paul Raven @ 03-07-2008

Super-seekrit satnav Happy Independence Day, America! I expect you’ll be busy making loud noises with explosives and generally partying it up this weekend, and I don’t begrudge you that*. But here’s some advice - if at some point you should decide to take a little drive somewhere to do something you maybe shouldn’t do, turn off the TomTom. [LOLnav based on an image by pizzodisevo]

You see, it turns out that not only does your satnav tell you how to get from A to B, it remembers where A and B were, when you travelled between them, and where you drove through on the way. Plus, if you’ve linked your phone to it via Bluetooth, it’ll have a record of every call and text message you made during the journey.

This isn’t a standard feature, obviously; it takes a detective with some good tech sk1llz0rz to tease out the old files, and now this has been revealed (by the superbly-monikered Beverly Nutter of London’s Metropolitan Police, no less) we can expect the same hacker enthusiasts who found the vulnerabilities to find a way of closing them.

So, just another front-line skirmish in the of the war between technology and privacy … but then if you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear, right?

[ * Actually, I do kinda begrudge you it; the closest we Brits have to Independence Day is Guy Fawkes Night. I've always clung to the explanation for burning Fawkes in effigy that a slightly inebriated friend of my father's told me when I was about twelve: "We're not burning him for trying to blow up the government, Paul; we're burning him because he failed." Happy 4th July! ]

‘Ghost’ Photos through Quantum Physics

Tom Marcinko @ 01-07-2008

toysoldier Scientists funded by the Air Force have used quantum entanglement — in which pairs of particles continue to interact even after they are spatially separated — to snap this picture of a tin solider without aiming a camera directly at the object.Â The technique, called “ghost imaging,” has potential military or space applications, such as using aerial drones to survey of battlefields obscured by clouds, or the smoke that follows airstrikes.Â Yanhua Shih, who has been experimenting with entangled photons since 1995, says:

“…[T]he image is not formed from light that hits the object and bounces back. The camera collects photons from the light sources that did not hit the object, but are paired through a quantum effect with others that did. An image of the toy begins to appear after approximately a thousand pairs of photons are recorded.”

These are exciting times on the frontiers of physics. Researchers in Copenhagen took a step towards producing a quantum bit. And scientists at Arizona State are trying to figure out how electrons interact. Both are necessary steps towards building superfast quantum computers.

[Image: University of Maryland]

Question Surveillance, Go to Jail

Tom Marcinko @ 17-06-2008

london-camera Normally I’d leave surveillance-outrage stories to BoingBoing, but really:

Four young residents of a North Philadelphia house who circulated petitions questioning police-surveillance cameras were rousted from their home Friday and detained 12 hours without charges while police searched their house…. 9th District Police Capt. Dennis Wilson…was quoted …as saying of the residents: “They’re a hate group. We’re trying to drum up charges against them, but unfortunately we’ll probably have to let them go.”

If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be asking questions.

[Thanks, Eschaton; London '05 photo by nolifebeforecoffee]

Shopping center tracking telephone ’slug trails’

Paul Raven @ 17-06-2008

cell phone electronics A bit of local news from my neck of the woods - the Gunwharf shopping centre (read as: ‘retail outlet experience’, or just ‘mall’) in Portsmouth is keeping a close eye on its customers by tracking their movements via their mobile phone signals. [image by A Magill]

A spokesperson explains that we shouldn’t be concerned: there’s no personal data captured, they’re just looking at what he charmingly refers to as ’slug trails’:

“We can also see where people aren’t going or are not spending much time and can flag that up to businesses. We are trying to make the experience of shoppers better. If they are having a better experience they obviously spend more money and the shopping centre is happy.“

The shopping centre may be happy, but the local population - now alerted to the matter - aren’t. Whether any of them will transcend their apathy enough to stop shopping there remains to be seen, however. In the meantime, I think I’ll set up a stall outside selling tin-foil phone sleeves …

Innocence-Sensitive Spy Cams

James Boone Dryden @ 11-06-2008

Since 9/11, the government’s use of video surveillance on the public has increased dramatically (this opens a new window with a .pdf). While the vast majority of this surveillance has been implemented to “protect the country from another 9/11-style attack”, it has been used in other arenas as well, namely in attempts to catch wanted criminals. It’s effectiveness in such a capacity is questionable at times, and the effects of such surveillance on society is noteworthy [photo courtesy of kafka4prez].

However, companies like 3VR - one of the largest surveillance software and video-analysis producers in the world - have begun development of increased-privacy software that would seek to protect innocent people from being falsely targeted by authorities. Their software is hoping to visible blur every face in video surveillance unless an investigation requires that the people in the video be identified. It seems like a small step in the right direction to counter the immense violations by the NSA not too long ago, but at least it’s something.

Robotic Dragonflies

TJ @ 11-06-2008

Fans of one of Terry Pratchett’s early comic science-fiction novels The Dark Side of the Sun, will be familiar with the idea of robotic versions of insects being used as “bugs” to spy on people.

This is an idea that is being enthusiastically embraced by the US military, with many small UAVs in development for surveillance purposes.

And there is even more insect-themed biomimicry on it’s way from the labs: the dragonfly is of particular interest, according to researchers:

Dragonflies are one of few creatures that utilize four independently controlled wings to fly, allowing them to hover, dart, glide, move backward, and change directions rapidly. Looking to understand such abilities, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College, in England, and the University of Ulm, in Germany, have developed a robotic dragonfly to measure the current flows over and under the wings at different flap cycles. While most of the dragonfly hovering scenarios were not efficient, the team found that if the lower wings are beating slightly ahead of the top wings, the double set of wings proves more efficient at generating lift, employing 22 percent less power to lift the same weight as a single pair.

Well good luck to them. Fortunately for privacy-lovers/paranoids it seems that practical fabrication of these insect spies is still some way in the future.

[story from Technology Review][image by Lori Greig]

Frikkin’ LASERs

TJ @ 04-06-2008

Another wonderful development in the world of LIDAR - LIght Detection And Ranging - has lead to the possibility of mapping the surface and geophysical properties of other planets with with “differences [in height] down to one centimeter“. Pixel resolution has also greatly increased, “from kilometers square to a few feet by a few feet.”

LIDAR works on a similar principle to radar, but through the use of lasers rather than radio waves. The laser is shot at an object, and the time delay between the pulse and the reflection is measured in order to accurately gauge the distance. The advantages of LIDAR over radar are twofold: LIDAR can be used to measure smaller objects, and it works on a greater variety of materials.

Of course project leader Professor Donald Figer is keen to promote his system’s anti-terrorism credentials:

“Imagine,” he says, “that you have this 3-D, 180-degree fish-eye system . . . in every city scanning continuously for biohazards.”

I know it’s meant to be scanning for biohazards, but presumably the system could also be used to create real-time, centimetre-resolution maps of cities, including the relative positions of every individual. Combine this with currently existing surveillance systems and we could have ourselves a nice panopticon by the middle of the century.

[original story from Technology Review][image by Mike Licht]

RFID and the future of social networking

Paul Raven @ 06-04-2008

RFID tag Researchers at the University of Washington are curious to see what effects RFID technology could have on social networking. To see what happens when the tags become ubiquitous, they installed two hundred antennae in and around a campus building and gave tags to twelve researchers. The results? Their every move is recorded by computer. [image by akaalias]

If that sounds sinister, that’s the entire point. The experiment is designed to see if the negative implications for privacy can be balanced by the more positive functions. [via Roland Piquepaille]

It’s good to see these sort of implications being considered in public … maybe we’ve started to learn from our mistakes and keep an eye on the road ahead?

Charles Stross on transport surveillance

Tomas Martin @ 18-03-2008

The ever-illuminating Charles Stross talks about plans for MI5 to have access to the databases for Oyster, the wireless card that regular users of the London Underground swipe instead of paper tickets. He discusses the possible ramifications of intelligence agencies being able to track your movements across the capital.

The news stories about Oyster pose good questions about the future of RFID: with cracks in the encryption beginning to be found, what are the risks of having everything wirelessly connected? Is the added convenience going to expose us to a new breed of hackers? Expect this to appear in the next series of Spooks, for sure.

[via Charles Stross, image by Mirka23]

Transparency bites - Brin blasts back

Paul Raven @ 12-03-2008

Wired has given David Brin some rebuttal space to defend his Transparent Society concept in response to Bruce Schneier’s recent criticisms (as covered earlier here on Futurismic):

“How did we get the freedom we already have, becoming the first civilization in history to (somewhat) defy ancient patterns? Yes, it’s imperfect, always under threat. We swim against hard currents of human nature. But reciprocal accountability is the innovation that lets us even try.
Schneier claims that The Transparent Society doesn’t address “the inherent value of privacy.” But several chapters do, and I conclude that privacy is an inherent human need, too important to leave in the hands of state elites, who are themselves following ornate information-control rules written by other elites — rules, by the way, that never work. (Robert Heinlein said “‘privacy laws’ only make the bugs smaller.”)”

Going back and reading Schneier’s piece again, it does seem like he’s arguing a similar point from a different direction - they’re both opposed to top-heavy hierarchies of control. It would be great if Wired could arrange some sort of formal public debate between Schneier and Brin - the topic has never been more relevant, after all, and as Cory Doctorow points out, talking about these issues is the best way to ensure things don’t get any worse. [image by David de Groot]

Transparent society redux: Camera ’sees’ through clothing

Tomas Martin @ 10-03-2008

In fortuitous timing to fit in with Paul’s story earlier today on David Brin’s ‘Transparent Society’, it emerges there may be a new technology that may take that definition a little too literally. BBC News reports that ‘ThruVision’, a camera utilising terahertz rays to ’see’ concealed objects. Normal security cameras use X-rays to probe a person but as everything emits different levels of terahertz rays normally, the system is passive, simply observing the body’s glow.

“If I were to look at you in terahertz you would appear to glow like a light bulb and different objects glow less brightly or more brightly,” said the firm’s spokesperson. “You see a silhouette of the form but you don’t see surface anatomical effects. In addition, the system does not involve any of the “harmful radiation associated with traditional X-ray security screening.”

[story and image via BBC News]

Schneier shreds the Transparent Society

Paul Raven @ 10-03-2008

Regular readers will know I’m fond of citing David Brin’s Transparent Society concept as a potential solution to the escalating level of surveillance in our cultures. [image by takomabibelot]

However, it looks like I may have to reconsider the idea in light of an essay from security maven Bruce Schneier. The problem is that mutual disclosure doesn’t take into account the amount of power you have before a transaction begins:

“An example will make this clearer. You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.”

That said, Schneier is still definitely on-side with an increase in “watching of the watchers” - our ability to keep tabs on those who keep tabs on us is the difference between control and liberty. I just hope that, in light of the UK police’s increasingly Orwellian PR efforts, we haven’t already gone too far in trading freedom for supposed security.

Facet - open source swarming smart-phone software

Paul Raven @ 17-01-2008

This one must have passed me by at the time, but Warren Ellis’s team of future-culture hounds at grinding.be have brought it to my attention. A New Scientist article from October 2007 talks about Facet, an open source software project that networks mobile phone cameras over Bluetooth:

“To test the software, the researchers attached four phones running Facet to the ceiling of a corridor in their department. The phones were angled so that the camera of each could see a different part of the corridor and so that they could all see peopling walking past.
Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.
One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.
Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone’s view to another’s.”

That would put fairly top-range surveillance capabilities into the hands of street-level operations. Maybe the only logical response to nation-states with endemic surveillance of citizens is for the citizens to start watching the watchers? [Image by Asim Bijarani]

Watching the watchers

Stephen Years @ 04-01-2008

Mike Elgan has an opinion piece in ComputerWorld about the “endemic surveillance” that now permeates society in the US and the UK.Â Elgan takes a position that seems to be growing in popularity: forget privacy as we knew it in the 20th century - it is dead, cold and buried in the ground.Â Instead, “privacy” advocates should take up a new fight - a fight for our right to watch the watchers:

Surveillance technology is on the rise. Powerful organizations — law enforcement, corporations, governments and others — have demanded and won their right to videotape the public, often secretly. They do this in order to hold individuals accountable for their actions.

Yet the rights of individuals to use similar technology to do the same are often restricted. Why should shoppers, pedestrians, bank customers and citizens be held accountable, but politicians, police, judges and others are not? What kind of democracy is that?

Shouldn’t recording your own police interrogation be a constitutionally protected right, like the right to an attorney? If not, why not?

Glenn Reynolds,of Instapundit fame has also recently written about this concept in Popular Mechanics and on his blog.Â And of course, anyone interested in the topic should read David Brin’s masterful treatise, The Transparent Society (Brin also wrote a fantastic novel titled Kiln People based on many of the concepts presented in The Transparent Society).

Reality mining: what your phone knows about you

Paul Raven @ 21-12-2007

The next big frontier for the software and web corporations is in your pocket - your mobile phone. But have you ever wondered why exactly the search giants like Yahoo and Google are so keen to get access to your handset? Sandy Pentland, an MIT researcher, explains in an interview at Technology Review:

“It knows where you are, and this is obviously sort of useful. But the generalization is that maybe it can know lots of things about you. Take your Facebook friends as an example. The phone could know which ones you socialize with in person, which ones are your work friends, and which friends you’ve never seen in your life. That’s an interesting distinction, and reality mining can make it automatic. It’s about making the “dumb” information-technology infrastructure know something about your social life. All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in.”

Quite. But as Nicholas Carr points out, that’s not quite as utopian as it might initially seem:

“… it’s easy to see the vast commercial value of automatically harvesting a continuous stream of data on a person’s location, activities, relationships, and social roles and using it to personalize services and advertisements or, in the extreme, manipulate behavior for profit-making ends.”

Well, it’s not like we’re unused to having our behaviour analysed and manipulated for commercial purposes … or to the idea that external agencies can spy on us by subverting our gadgets. But the point is that technologies in their default states are making it much easier - rather than rejecting Big Brother, have we instead slipped him into our back pocket? [Image by Milica Sekulic]

Man defeats constant government surveillance with his own constant surveillance

Tomas Martin @ 29-11-2007

Artist Hasan Elahi was wrongly arrested by the FBI in 2002. He found if he called and told them before each of his many flights, he wasn’t troubled again. So he decided to beat Big Brother in the most brilliantly counter-intuitive way - by photographing everything about his life.

Elahi uploads hundreds of photos a day and a tracking bracelet on his ankle gives a constant update of his wherabouts. So it seems the way to stop overzealous intelligence agencies falsely accusing you is to give them all the information about everything you do, all of the time.

[via collision detection, image by open content]

The surveillance society marches on

Stephen Years @ 02-10-2007

In Vernor Vinge’s novel A Deepness Upon the Sky, a sure sign that a civilization is going to end is the emergence of ubiquitous surveillance and law enforcement.Â If that postulationÂ is correct, then the recent surveillance technology deployments in Chicago are not a good sign:

A car circles a high-rise three times. Someone leaves a backpack in a park. Such things go unnoticed in big cities every day. But that could change in Chicago with a new video surveillance system that would recognize such anomalies and alert authorities to take a closer look. On Thursday, the city and IBM Corp. are announcing the initial phase of what officials say could be the most advanced video security network in any U.S. city. The City of Broad Shoulders is getting eyes in the back of its head.

Future Surveillance Technology Can Tell How You Feel

Stephen Years @ 17-09-2007

Â

While the governments of the United States and Britain continue to deploy surveillance cameras at a startling pace, researchers in top universities and private laboratories are developing the next generation of surveillance technology.

The BBC recently published an article title “Big Brother is Watching Us All,” in which they highlight some of these new technologies:

Gait DNA, for example, is creating an individual code for the way I walk. [The] goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are.

And if being able to instantly identify an individual in a public crowd wasn’t enough, the same article reports on a tool under development that can look through walls and determine your emotional state:

Using radio waves, you point it a wall and it tells you if anyone is on the other side … and it turns out that the human body gives off such sensitive radio signals, that it can even pick up breathing and heart rates … “it will also show whether someone inside a house is looking to harm you, because if they are, their heart rate will be raised. And 10 years from now, the technology will be much smarter. We’ll scan a person with one of these things and tell what they’re actually thinking.”Â

With this level of surveillance available within a decade, I can imagine whole industries springing up that will protect an individual’s privacy while in public and private spaces.Â This begs two questions.Â One, will governments allow such privacy protection products and services? And two, if you try to protect your privacy, will this just engender more surveillance of you because the government will assume you have something to hide?

[Via KurzweilAI.net]

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