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Harold Finch and John Reese track potential crime victims using secret databases and a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure in the new series Person of Interest. Their world is filled with street corner cameras and espionage — but in the real world, cameras and databases are tracking your every move just as carefully, to the point where you couldn't disappear if you wanted to. More »
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Sometimes, it already seems like the websites you visit know more about you than you know about yourself — but this is just the beginning. Every day you're helping to generate masses more data, which computers are getting better and better at crunching. How long will it be before the predictive power of these systems becomes so powerful, they're almost magical? More »
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Pigeons already spread disease and poop through their urban homes, but what if we had to worry about flocks of pigeons armed with miniature cameras, watching our every move from overhead? In the early 20th century, one hobbyist photographer equipped the rats of the sky with just such cameras. More »
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Casinos are keeping their digital eyes on the ball, while keeping an eye on the hands of the customers, in order to stop cheats. Find out how cameras coordinate to catch people. More »
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With hackers, DIYers and the military using them for years, domestic police forces the world over are apparently itching to get some surveillance drones of their own. Now Australian authorities have discussed using drones alongside a new license plate recognition system, autonomously tracking vehicles of interest. More »
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It used to be that you could just pick up and start over as a new person. You could get yourself a new identity, go off the grid, or just reinvent yourself completely. Even if you've never committed a crime, there's something seductive about going missing. More »
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Social media can be problematic for professionals who don't want their bosses to see unflattering college party photos. But it's even worse for people whose livelihood literally depends on anonymity, like undercover cops. What happens if the gang you've infiltrated finds your grinning mug in Facebook photos from the police union annual picnic? More »
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A federal judge's decision requiring the government to get a court warrant before obtaining mobile-phone location data is one of a string of conflicting opinions on the topic. It comes as lawmakers and the Supreme Court weigh in on the hot-button issue of locational privacy. More »
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Worried about privacy on the Internet? It may be even worse than you thought - with rapidly improving face recognition technology, your automatically tagged Facebook pictures could help a stranger, or the authorities, quickly identify you on the street. More »
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The intelligence community has seen the future, and the future is Google Trends. Actually, more like a highly sophisticated version of Google Trends, with Twitter and YouTube thrown in for good measure. More »
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Ever wanted to spend your day watching yourself in third-person shooter mode, seeing the world from behind your head or over your shoulder? Now you can, thanks to Korean artist Hwang Kim's CCTV chandelier, the ultimate surveillance accessory. More »
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The Miami-Dade PD has added a Honeywell RQ-16 T-hawk drone to their roster. This drone, which can hit altitudes of 10,000 feet for 40+ minutes, would be used in SWAT and search-and-rescue operations, not spying on jaywalkers. More »
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Some of today's biggest legal debates (genetic discrimination, patents for human genes) might have seemed far-fetched not so long ago. So the American Civil Liberties Union is looking to science fiction to figure out tomorrow's biggest challenges to personal liberty. More »
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The number of wiretaps authorized by state and federal judges in criminal investigations jumped 26 percent from 2008 to 2009, according to a report released Friday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. More »
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Face-recognition technology is already helping surveillance cameras pick out individual faces of suspects, and even smartphone apps may soon allow you to ID strangers on the street. Privacy lovers could soon paint on anti-face-recognition camo that protects against being identified. More »
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Government spy cameras are a common feature in science fiction, suggesting a future where citizens are under near-constant surveillance. But in the upcoming film Eyeborgs, cameras cease to be a mere symbol of government oppression and step into the limelight as full-fledged villains. In a pair of new trailers, the errant eyeborgs try to take down Adrian Paul and Danny Trejo while broadcasting transmitting a very different image to the US government. More »
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If you browse Cthulhu fetish sites in the comfort of your own home, who’s going to know? You can clear your browser history and secure your home network, but that doesn’t mean your late night Lovecraftian lust sessions are safe from prying eyes. A new nationalized database system could let the British government know exactly how you’re spending your online time, as well as your email and cell phone contacts. More »
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In the realm of privacy-ending products, spy cameras leave a lot to be desired. Stationary cameras and nanny cams offer a limited view or a room, and strapping a camera to your Roomba is bound to give you motion sickness. Enter the ROVIO, a mobile home surveillance and telepresence robot. Click through to see this spybot in action. More »
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You're on vacation, but you still want to spy on what your roommates are doing in your house. Or maybe you just want to be sure your boyfriend remembers to feed your cats. Either way, you're in luck with the new Spykee robot (pictured), a robot that's remote-controlled via internet phone service Skype. That means you can call your robot from anywhere in the world, guide it around your house, and see what it sees. More »
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One of the unintended consequences of having constant satellite surveillance over every centimeter of the globe is that it's easy to see how governments screw up. Here is a UNOSAT image from a report on the damage done to villages in Georgia after the bombings. All the destruction tracked here is in residential areas. Click through to see full-size map, or read whole report, with detailed map analysis, here (it's a PDF). Buildings with less than 50 percent their roofs still intact are labeled red; those with visible structural damage to a wall or roof are labeled with orange. This time, at least, somebody was watching the watchers. [via Foreign Policy] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5048016&view=rss&microfeed=true A new piece of software available in England for CCTVs can identify the race of people passing its lens, and change the camera's behavior accordingly. Based on the race of the person being watched, the camera can choose to track the person or continue to randomly survey the area. The race-identifying software was developed by Benjamin Males, an art student in London whose work aims to show why ubiquitous CCTVs are troubling. [PC World] More »
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At least two things happened in the world of science fiction and science in the past week. One of them was cool, and the other was crap. More »
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It's time to monetize your datastream. You're generating all this data while you surf the web: what you buy, what you read, where you work, where you vacation, your current favorite music/video, where you bank, and of course what you're talking about in email. Shouldn't there be some way to commoditize all that? I mean, shouldn't you be putting all your personal web data together into a handy UDP, or unified data profile, and selling it to the highest bidder? Absolutely. And in the year 2024, a nice company called Datapoints wants to help you to do just that. The Datapoints site, written in hilarious biz-speak, is one of the only deliberately science fictional corporate websites I've ever seen. More »
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Video surveillance is the hot new thing. Tech market think tank ABI Research has just come out with a new study predicting that the global video surveillance market will "expand from revenue of about $13.5 billion in 2006 to a remarkable $46 billion in 2013." In a press release only Philip K. Dick could love, ABI gushes excitedly about all the fun new uses of the vidcams and databases you could be manufacturing, buying, and selling to the surveillance-craving masses. More »
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This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below. More »
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You can gage how busy New York City is by looking at all the people swarming in the streets, or by smelling the giant piles of trash they've left at the curbs. But there are ways to take stock of the city's populace that are far more revealing. For a new MoMa exhibit this month, MIT's Senseable City Lab chose to expose how talkative New York is by tracking lines of electronic communication into and out of the city. Their project is aptly named the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE). It's also inadvertently a portrait of digital surveillance, showing exactly how easy it is for people to use phone records to monitor which countries New Yorkers are ringing up. More »
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Security checkpoints could do a full-body scan and check your skeleton against the bone structures of known terrorists in a few years. A new patent, issued on Friday, covers a system that would scan some, or all, of your skeleton and compare it with a database of skeletons. The database would also pull up data such as your name, address, social security number, and passport number. Worst of all, you might not even know your skeleton is being scanned from a distance. More »
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What happens when Google street view is no longer content with showing incredibly detailed pictures of the outside of your house? This hilarious science fiction video by the Vacationeers follows Google's omni-cam to its most invasive extreme... and of course they posted it on YouTube. More »
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Satellites will soon capture ultrasound images of unborn children in rural Nunavut and beam them all the way to Ontario. It's just part of a new pilot program which uses technology developed for diagnosing astronauts from Earth. Already, doctors in Calgary can look at real-time ultrasounds of patients in Banff and figure out what ails them. How long will it be before the satellite itself can scan your body from space? More »
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In our surveillance-obsessed era, it's no surprise that science fiction is packed with stories about people going to extreme measures to escape being tracked. Just think about Tom Cruise's character in Minority Report, swapping out his eyeballs and taking a pill that transforms his facial features in an incredibly painful process. It seems like every dystopian tale these days has to have at least one biological implant that functions as a location device, and our hero must dig around in her body to get rid of it. Here are a few of the best "kill the spybot" scenes in recent years: More »
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