Tag Archives: surveillance

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Smart surveillance doesn’t bother you with trivia

surreal surveillance warning signsWhat could be better than complete panopticon-level surveillance over everything you own? Well, surveillance that only bothers you with issues you really want to know about, and which doesn’t send you an SMS every time the neighbour’s cat rubs itself against the garage door, of course!

The main difference with the Archerfish system is that alerts you by text or video footage only when certain “events” occur, which you define. Alerts can be sent to your cell or similar mobile device, as an email or to a customised web portal.

Unlike more conventional systems, you don’t need to monitor video around-the-clock or trawl through footage or rely on motion alarms.

Using a combination of video cameras, intelligent software (Smartbox) and a custom web portal (SmartPortal), Archerfish watches your premises for “events”. They can be defined as person, vehicle, intelligent object motion or external sensor trigger. This means the system can tell the difference between a human being and inanimate object like a car passing the camera.

At the same time, if the camera is triggered by human movement, you can check to see whether it’s a family member, an intruder or a delivery. You can also check live video through the SmartPortal, as long as you have access to a PC or web-enabled device.

Well, that’s a doozy… provided that you’re willing to trust the software not to goof. And that you’re willing to upgrade the software regularly. And that you’re willing to believe that no one will ever find a way to futz the cameras, or hack the backline hardware via that web portal… but other than that, complete peace of mind! Ain’t technology wonderful? [image by Cory Doctorow]

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Stross and Doctorow on privacy in the modern age

A few weeks back the Open Rights Group held a benefit talk just up the tracks from me in London that I was meant to go to, though sadly the realities of self-employment intruded and kept me at home. The speakers were Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow – two very smart guys who, even if you’re not a fan of their fiction, have a lot of very interesting stuff to say on the matter of privacy and surveillance in the modern world.

Luckily for me (and everyone else) there’s video footage of the whole thing – and I heartily suggest you watch it. While somewhat focussed on the UK situation, the stuff about data security and information harvesting and ubiquitous surveillance is applicable to anyone who uses the web, has a government that uses computers or lives in a city or town with a CCTV presence… which (I imagine) covers pretty much everyone reading Futurismic right now.

There’s ninety minutes of video; the discussion between Stross and Doctorow fills a little less than the first half, but make the time to listen to the Q&A section afterwards as well. I’ve found myself with about four pages of notes and story ideas just from my first pass through, and I imagine there’ll be more when I go back to it. So get watching:

You know what would have made this even more interesting, though? If David Brin had been on the panel… now that would have been hands-down the debate of the year, at least for me.

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Hair you go: tracking by hair

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hair_with_pensResearchers at the LGC Chemical Metrology Laboratory and the University of Oviedo in Spain have developed a technique to track a person’s movements between different countries using a sample of their hair:

The two most abundant sulphur isotopes in hair keratin are sulphur-32 (32S), which accounts for about 95 per cent, and sulfur-34 (34S), which makes up around 4 per cent. These proportions, however, vary according to people’s diets, and, unless they take their food with them, will therefore change when people travel.

Although this is described in terms of counter-terrorism, there is no reason why it couldn’t be used for anyone and everyone.

Police organizations, including the Metropolitan Police in London, have already shown interest in the technology.

So here is yet another way by which we can be tracked and our movements monitored.

[from Wired UK][image from Evil Erin on flickr]

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Good with faces? The Recognition Corps needs you!

little metal facesOK, so it’s not quite X-ray vision, but science has unearthed a slightly more prosaic super-power – super-recognisers are those rare folk with an excellent memory for faces. [image by Valeyoshino]

Super-recognizers report that they recognize other people far more often than they are recognized. For this reason, says Russell, they often compensate by pretending not to recognize someone they met in passing, so as to avoid appearing to attribute undue importance to a fleeting encounter.

“Super-recognizers have these extreme stories of recognizing people,” says Russell. “They recognize a person who was shopping in the same store with them two months ago, for example, even if they didn’t speak to the person. It doesn’t have to be a significant interaction; they really stand out in terms of their ability to remember the people who were actually less significant.”

One woman in the study said she had identified another woman on the street who served as her as a waitress five years earlier in a different city. Critically, she was able to confirm that the other woman had in fact been a waitress in the different city. Often, super-recognizers are able to recognize another person despite significant changes in appearance, such as aging or a different hair color.

I’m better with faces than I am with names, though not to that extent! Worse luck for me, as Randall Parker of FuturePundit suggests an employment fast-track for super-recognisers:

Imagine employing super-recognizers to watch for criminals in train stations, airports, and other places where large numbers of people pass. These are the people we should want to look at most wanted lists of criminals.

Yeah – let’s replace those horrible cameras with fallible meat-based undercover snooper agents! After all, we can always be sure the people on the most-wanted lists deserve to be there, right?

Right?

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Cellphone epidemiology- Japan’s swine flu panopticon

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mother, child and cellphoneIn response to the swine flu almost-epidemic, my government thoughtfully sent me a leaflet, advising me to steer clear of people sneezing and so on. The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, however, appears to be approaching the problem from a more technological angle; this autumn, they’ll test a system that uses mobile phones to track the locations of citizens and inform them whether they’ve been in contact with a flu carrier:

The proposed system relies on mobile phone providers to constantly track the subjects’ geographical locations and keep chronological records of their movements in a database. When a person is labeled as “infected,” all the past location data in the database is analyzed to determine whether or not anyone came within close proximity to the infected individual.

The system will know, for example, whether or not you once boarded the same train or sat in the same movie theater as the infected individual, and it will send you a text message containing the details of the close encounter. The text messages will also provide instructions on specific measures to take in response.

The primary purpose of the test, which will involve about 2,000 volunteers in both urban and rural areas, is to verify the precision of GPS tracking technology, estimate the potential costs of operating such a system, and determine whether or not such a system can be put into practical use.

The first problem that leaps to mind here is that just one or two undiagnosed flu carriers loose in your city is going to throw a spanner in the works; those few errors will multiply exponentially over time.

Secondly – and channelling my tin-foil hat-wearing younger self for a moment – what a fantastically comprehensive way to monitor and control your population, should you decide you need (or want) to, and what a great excuse to coat the pill with. There’s a polical-dystopian technothriller just waiting to be written right there; just replace the word ‘infected’ with ‘subversive’ in the above quotes, and off you go. [via Technovelgy; image by kalandrakas]