The Watched vs. the Watchers

If the watchers will watch, then the watchers must be watched...

When the Austrian government passed a law this year allowing police to install closed-circuit surveillance cameras in public spaces without a court order, the Austrian civil liberties group Quintessenz vowed to watch the watchers.

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it's transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

The Quintessenz activists then began figuring out how to blind the cameras with balloons, lasers and infrared devices.

So, at least in Austria, something like the Participatory Panopticon seems to be taking shape.

But here in the U.S., the watchers are getting bolder...

The National Security Agency got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, literally, on Wednesday.

The NSA, which functions as the United States' information systems watchdog, admitted it has been posting cookies on the computers of visitors to its web site, despite federal rules banning such activity.

Cookies are small files placed on computers by web programs residing on sites visited by those computers. They were originally designed to hold identifying information to make web surfing easier and faster. . .

Posting long-term cookies on web surfers' hard drives is a direct violation of a June 2000 policy recommendation issued by the Office of Management and Budget that bans such activities. . .

The NSA ended its cookie distribution when a privacy activist and the Associated Press started asking questions about the cookie placements.

If the watchers will watch, then the watchers must be watched.

But nobody said it would be easy.

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

[Phillip Huggan]

Do you know what it is they're actually searching for? Are they looking for evidence of terrorist networking, or are they attempting to reduce violent crime rates?
I'm going to side with civil liberties groups and libertarians in my belief here that the ends don't justify the means unless policing and legal systems are completely reworked. Jaywalking and littering offences should be enough to bankrupt everyone on video the police choose to persecute.