Veery interesting...
From
Business Insider:
WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country Are Being Used In A Huge Spy Network
The U.S. cable networks won't be covering this one tonight (not accurately, anyway), but Trapwire is making the rounds on social media today�it reportedly became a Trending hashtag on Twitter earlier in the day.
Trapwire is the name of a program revealed in the latest Wikileaks bonanza�it is the mother of all leaks, by the way. Trapwire would make something like disclosure of UFO contact or imminent failure of a major U.S. bank fairly boring news by comparison.
And the ambitious techno-fascists behind Trapwire seem to be quite disappointed that word is getting out so swiftly; the Wikileaks web site is reportedly sustaining 10GB worth of DDoS attacks each second, which is massive.
Anyway, here's what Trapwire is, according to Russian-state owned media network RT (apologies for citing "foreign media"... if we had a free press, I'd be citing something published here by an American media conglomerate): "Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology�and have installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.
Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It�s part of a program called TrapWire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America�s intelligence community.
The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who�s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented. The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent TrapWire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program�s public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year�s hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing."
So: those spooky new "circular" dark globe cameras installed in your neighborhood park, town, or city�they aren't just passively monitoring. They're plugged into Trapwire and they are potentially monitoring every single person via facial recognition.
In related news, the Obama administration is fighting in federal court this week for the ability to imprison American citizens under NDAA's indefinite detention provisions�and anyone else�without charge or trial, on suspicion alone.
So we have a widespread network of surveillance cameras across America monitoring us and reporting suspicious activity back to a centralized analysis center, mixed in with the ability to imprison people via military force on the basis of suspicious activity alone. I don't see how that could possibly go wrong. Nope, not at all. We all know the government, and algorithmic computer programs, never make mistakes.
Oh right. Nothing can ever go wrong... ~go wrong... ~o wrong... ~wrong... ~rong... ...
We are not at the
AFDB stage yet but these days, it is hard to tell.
More
here.
From what I understand of the algorithms used, they look for specific metrics -- geometry of the face, colors, etc. It would be interesting to see if eyeglasses could be fashioned to distort the facial geometry -- a tinted patch that the camera would pick up as an eye pupil spaced close together or far apart. A covering for the bridge of the nose that would hide the profile. Nothing blatant but enough to scramble their ability to recognize a specific face. This is also
an excellent option.
Also, something to realize is that 90% of the installed base of security cams and webcams are piss-poor resolution -- a couple-hundred lines at best under optimal lighting. Great for seeing crowd dynamics and individual movement but not that good for absolute recognition. If you have a couple hours to play with,
here is a good set of instructions for finding unsecured security cameras on the web -- there are a ton of them!
Posted by DaveH at August 10, 2012 8:00 PM