io9: surveillance

Mobile Spy Cams Frame You for Murders They Commit

Lauren Davis — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 08:00:00 PST

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.

B-movie director Richard Clabaugh co-wrote and directed the film, in which the War on Terror takes a bizarre and unexpected turn. To improve its domestic intelligence, the US government rolls out a line of roving surveillance bots called “Eyeborgs,” which are designed to monitor everyday American life. Initially, the wandering cams are viewed as an acceptable annoyance, but questions arise when it appears the Eyeborgs are capable of fabricating videos and sometimes take a more “hands on” approach with their subjects. Adrian Paul plays a Homeland Security agent who finds himself unraveling the Eyeborg mystery. And, judging from the trailers, Danny Trejo’s role in the film is to beat the Eyeborgs while shouting robot-themed insults at them.

[Eyeborgs via Twitch]

Big Brother is Watching You Surf the Web

Lauren Davis — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:00:00 PDT

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.

Telecom companies in the UK already store mobile and web information, including which numbers you call, which websites you visit, and which addresses you email, for 12 months. This information is already available to government investigators on demand, but the government wants to nationalize the database to make it readily searchable and hold the information for two years. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith defends the proposal as essential to criminal investigations:

"Communications data - that is, data about calls, such as the location and identity of the caller, not the content of the calls themselves - is used as important evidence in 95% of serious crime cases and in almost all security service operations since 2004.

"But the communications revolution has been rapid in this country and the way in which we intercept communications and collect communications data needs to change too.

"If it does not we will lose this vital capability that we currently have and that, to a certain extent, we all take for granted.

But some are suspicious of the Home Department’s motives:

Lib Dem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said: "The government's Orwellian plans for a vast database of our private communications are deeply worrying…

"Ministers claim the database will only be used in terrorist cases, but there is now a long list of cases, from the arrest of Walter Wolfgang for heckling at a Labour conference to the freezing of Icelandic assets, where anti-terrorism law has been used for purposes for which it was not intended."

Perhaps it's time to step up the development of ParanoidLinux.

Giant database plan 'Orwellian' [via Kurzweil]

Spy Robot Ready to Invade Your Home

Lauren Davis — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 09:00:00 PDT

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.

WowWee, who developed the ROVIO, sees the robot as having numerous telepresence applications, including use in home security, in meetings where the telecommuting party needs to observe multiple objects or people up close, and in lab work where a researcher needs to make observations in conditions that would be hazardous to a human being. The robot offers both autonomous and web-based remote navigation, with proximity sensors to keep it from crashing into objects. The True Track system enables the interface to track the ROVIO’s position by sensing reflected beacons beamed at the ceiling, and the built-in camera can be adjusted to view objects at various heights and angles.

Sister blog Gizmodo saw the ROVIO in action back in January, but this week the folks at Robot Dreams took it for a extended test spin and were pleased with the robot’s mobility and interface, declaring that it “is positioned to be the hottest robot for the upcoming holiday season.” Their test video below demonstrates the ROVIO’s simple click and drag interface:

The ROVIO is currently available and retails for $299.

ROVIO Rolls Out: First Impressions of WowWee's Surprising Robot [Robot Dreams]

Your Remote-Controlled Robot Voyeur Army Has Arrived

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:00:00 PDT

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.

The Spykee site says, enticingly, that you can:

Watch video of your own home from anywhere in the world while the the Rovio mobile spy robot patrols your home automatically for you while you're away.

Or you could even watch your home while you're not away, just to make sure nobody is doing "bad things" down the hall. The Spykee lets you talk to the people you see in your house via Skype, which should provide hours of fun when people assume the robot itself is talking to them. Plus, you can set up a system where the robot will look for motion, snap a photo, and send it to you via e-mail. That's a great feature for bedrooms, if you know what I mean. Because bedrooms have a lot of valuables in them that you might want your robot to guard for you! Right?

Oh, and did I mention you can add on to the robot with legos? I'm so glad the future has brought us a lego-based voyeuristic robot. Can HAL9000 really be far behind?

Spykee [official site]

Satellite Images Reveal Exact Nature of Destruction in Georgia

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:08:39 PDT

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]

Surveillance Camera Software that Identifies and Catalogues Everybody's Race

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:00:00 PDT

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]

Cool and Crap Awards of the Week

Annalee Newitz — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 12:00:00 PDT

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.

Coolest way to get funding for time travel that takes you beyond the singularity: Paul Saffo, a renowned culture forecaster among technobiz types, has left his job at the Institute for the Future after twenty years because it wasn't futuristic enough. He told the San Jose Mercury News that the trouble with the IFTF was that he could only get funding for predictions about the next decade, whereas he's more interested in the next half-century. So he's setting up shop in Stanford University's engineering department, where (implicitly) there is funding for ideas about what might happen in 2050. So what are the issues that IFTF won't fund futurists to think about, but Stanford will? Number one is apparently that global warming isn't a good thing, and another is that sophisticated new prediction software might make "forecaster" a job that anyone could do. Click through to find out the crap on how your car is spying on you.

Crappiest new way the police or your mom can follow your every move without ever leaving the sofa: The groovy satellite navigation system in your car that tells you how to get to any address you type into it is also ratting you out. Most satnav systems keep records of every address you type into it, and the route you took to get there. If you sync it with your bluetooth phone, it also has records of phone calls and messages you've received. That's why police officers in the U.K. have started sucking data off the satnav systems of suspects to find out where they've been. Now the authorities can tail you without ever leaving their stations — and probably without getting a court's permission to follow you either. Plus, according to New Scientist, the hacks required to get this data off the satnav systems are widely known and can be used by anyone smart enough to look them up on various wikis or discussion boards. So your mom or your boyfriend could be snarfing up your location data too, checking to see whose house you're going to after work and where you go for lunch. That is seriously crap.

Creepy Corporate Data-Sucking Machines of the Future

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:40:49 PDT

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.

Here's what you'll get from this fictional company:

The DATAPOINTS Active Privacy® System allows members to control who sees and analyzes their unified data profile (UDP). In return DATAPOINTS® members receive an ongoing income stream based on the detail, purity and 'interestingness' of their UDP.

Of course there's a kiddie version, so you can start selling your kid's UDP. And then there are a lot of peripherals you can buy to spice up your UDP. For example, there's the home retinal verification scanner.

A kind of dystopian mashup of Choicepoint and Google, Datapoints comes from a future where Big Brother has been privatized and made "fun." If you're irritated by corporate-speak and web industry jibber-jabber, you've got to check this out.

Datapoints [corporate website]

The Video Surveillance Market Is About to Explode!

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:40:56 PDT

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.

The release reads, in part:

"Security" is the word on everyone's lips these days, but there is more to this dramatic market growth than that. Video surveillance finds uses in a variety of vertical markets such as retail, education, banking, transportation and corporate business. And it's not always about security: new facial recognition software can analyze shoppers' behavior within stores, for example, tracking eyeball movements as shoppers view product displays.
European video surveillance markets are more mature than those in North America (some say the UK, with its 4.1 million surveillance cameras, is the most monitored society on earth), but massive deployments are also now taking place in North America and, in connection with the upcoming Olympics, in China . . .

But while digital technology offers advantages - higher resolution, easier searching and retrieval, and more efficient storage - many of the traditional security resellers of analog equipment are not yet comfortable with digital, and a massive retraining effort is going to be required.

"This is a modern version of the California gold rush," [ABI vice president Scott] Schatt concludes, "except that people are bringing cameras instead of pickaxes and shovels."

I just love the idea of a surveillance gold rush. Plus, the blithe way ABI points out that surveillance goes beyond mere security into "new facial recognition software [that] can analyze shoppers' behavior within stores" is pure gold. If you think this is rank speculation on ABI's part, though, you'd be wrong. Companies like VideoMining are already providing this very type of surveillance for stores, tracking shopper behavior and trying to figure out patterns.

Ah, the future looks so bright. I'd better make sure I'm filming everything that happens in it with hidden cameras. Image via NYC Indymedia.

Video Surveillance: Explosive Market [ABI Research]

Satellite-Eye-View of People Evacuating in Chad

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 07:00:55 PST

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.

This is a story that requires few words to tell. Here's a larger map of the region. UN Satellites Photograph Human Exodus [War and Health]

The Art of Monitoring New York City's Telephone Conversations

Lisa Katayama — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 08:20:27 PST

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.

AT&T is a sponsor of the project, and handed over reams of phone records to the group so they could link NYC with cities around the world based on phone calls and IP traffic. No, it's not a surveillance spree, though it's hard not to wonder about that given AT&T's recent eagerness to hand over its phone data to the government without warrants. But this project merely aims to show how busy NYC can be. And just how pretty busy can be. This will be part of the MoMa's "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition starting February 24th.Images by senseable city lab

New York Talk Exchange main page

The Authorities Have Your Skeleton On File

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:00:23 PST

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.

The patented device uses "imaging radar," which bounces microwaves off your skeleton and obtains an image. The objective of the new system is to provide a fool-proof means of identifying people by their skeletons, which may be harder to spoof than fingerprints or other biometrics. The imaging system will be "compact and safe" for use on humans, the patent (#7317416) claims. Most of all, the system would provide "a means to identify individuals at a distance and/or without requiring direct contact."

Versatility is a big selling point of Leonard Flom and Ophir Almog's system:

The imaging radar may be at a security checkpoint (e.g., airport, secure facility, etc.). In other embodiments, the imaging radar is an active radar mounted on an aerial platform such as a satellite or an aircraft. The radar may also be mounted on a track and/or rail system (e.g., on the ground, a floor, and/or a roof) along which it can be moved rapidly.

The authorities could use the system to grant, or withhold, access to secure facilities. But they could also use it to scan for individuals who are on a "watch list" for terrorists or criminals, the patent says. It's not much of a leap to imagine how this system could be abused. Skeleton-scanners could soon be as ubiquitous as CCTV cameras already are in some urban areas... and you'd just better hope your skeleton doesn't throw up the wrong red flag by mistake. Skeleton scan image from AP photos. Other images from patent filing. [FreePatentsOnline]

Beware Google's Surveillance Death-Ray

charliejane — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:20:23 PST

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.

Our evil video tool cut off the credits from this video, alas. So here they are. Starring: Jeff Grace and Blaise Miller. Directed by: Todd Berger. Written by: Jeff Grace. Produced by: Kevin Brennan and Jeff Grace. Cinematography: Helena Wei. Edited by: Todd Berger. Music: Kevin MacLeod. Production Assistant: Derrick Guyton. [The Vacationeers]

Spy Satellite Diagnoses Cancer

charliejane — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:00:00 PST

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?

Space Age Health Care [630 CHED]

Three Ways To Escape High-Tech Surveillance

Annalee Newitz — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:42:17 PDT

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:

1. In The Matrix, Trinity de-bugs Neo after he's been implanted with a creepy-ass cyber-insect that burrows into his belly button and allows the Agents to track him everywhere. Trinity holds a steampunk-looking gun funnel over Neo's bully and sucks the bug out, along with a nice big splat of red goo. It squirms around in electric yuckiness before going inert.

2. In this week's episode of Bionic Woman, beta-version bionic lady Sarah teaches hero Jaime how to kill the tracking chip in her brain. The special effects in the scene are pretty cheesy, but it's cool to see Jaime hacking her own brain so that the creepy secret agent boys can't follow her every move.

3. In a scene oddly reminiscent of Bionic Woman, the latest Resident Evil flick has a great scene where hero Veronica (Milla Jovovich) uses the power of her brain to burn out a satellite that is tracking her and controlling her behavior. She's been frozen by a signal from the satellite, which means the bad guys are about to win. But then we see her exploiting a back door she's made in the satellite software, and stopping the mind-control beam. Go, Veronica, go!