Myth No. 1: This bill is a compromise.
Myth No. 2: We need the bill to intercept our enemies abroad.
Myth No. 3: The courts will still review the telecom cases.
Myth No. 4: The Democrats must fold because of the November election.
Myth No. 5: The law will be the “exclusive means” for surveillance.
(via Cryptogon)
“Many people are uncomfortable with the march of the surveillance state – but a Manchester band has used it to their advantage.
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets. With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras. Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.”
(via The Telegraph)
Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.
With an estimated 13 million CCTV cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.
They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras.
Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.
(via Grinding)
The New Normal is an art show in Germany on the subject of privacy in the post 9/11 world. Above:
Submitting oneself to security measures can be turned upside down by adopting what Hassan Elahi calls an “aggressive compliance.” Elahi daily points a mocking finger to absurd security measures with the real-time self-tracking website he set up in a bid to demonstrate to the FBI investigator that he’s not spending his time traveling to the Middle East and plotting some attack in the U.S. The models features in Sharif Waked’s Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints video seem to have adopted a similar strategy.
As a promotion for the new Cory Doctorow book Little Brother, Instructables is running a series of related “how to” articles, including:
How to blend in with crowds
How to lie to authority figures
Encrypt your Gmail Email!
How to locate pinhole cameras
Spice Mister
Avoiding Camera Noise Signatures
How to Start A Flash Mob
How to block/kill RFID chips
Photo-emulsion Screen Printing
What to do if the police stop you
It’s shaping up to be an “anarchist cookbook” for the 21st century.
This story’s been in high circulation on the blogosphere lately:
Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.
Now how about this:
Thousands of foreigners are being allowed to work in high security parts of Britain’s airports without passing proper criminal record checks, it was disclosed last night.
Despite warnings that terrorists would try to recruit people working “airside” in terminals – with direct access to aircraft and baggage – no attempt has been made to check whether foreign workers have committed any offences abroad.
The vetting process checks only for crimes committed in Britain. Foreign workers – arriving from inside or outside the European Union – are not checked in their country of origin.
This means that someone with a conviction for firearms or explosives offences committed abroad could, for example, take a job loading bags on to aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick or any other airport, provided they had committed no crimes here.
(via Cryptogon)
“Miranda is a black box-like arrest documentation device that records video, audio, motion, impact, location, and other data and streams it over cell phone data networks to third party observers such as the ACLU.”
Is this a real, available device or just a design concept?
(Thanks Michael)
The secretive graffiti artist managed to erect three storeys of scaffolding behind a security fence despite being watched by a CCTV camera.
Then, during darkness and hidden behind a sheet of polythene, he painted this comment on ‘Big Brother’ society.
Yesterday the scaffolding gang returned to remove all evidence – again without the camera operator stopping them.
(via Grinding)
The site was created by Witness, a Brooklyn-based group founded by the globe-trotting pop star Peter Gabriel in 1992. Conceived in the wake of the Rodney King beating, the group initially focused on getting camcorders into the hands of human rights activists around the world. The goal, in Gabriel’s phrase, was to create a network of “Little Brothers and Little Sisters” to keep an eye on Big Brother’s thugs. He rapidly discovered that distributing tools wasn’t enough. To be really effective, you need a network.
“What we learned over the first four or five years was that the promise that Rodney King represented couldn’t be realized just by providing cameras to human rights groups,” says Sam Gregory, Witness’s 33-year-old program director. “In the absence of technical training, they couldn’t produce video that would be used by news organizations and they couldn’t craft the stories that would engage audiences.” The group did manage to place some footage in the news media, but even then it had trouble leveraging those appearances into actual change.
Update: Here’s supplementary interview with Witness program manager Sam Gregory.
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