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Imagine you are working for a three letter agency scanning a crowd. 999/1000 people look similar. One is just a glowing sun of light. Which one do you go take
by brianwawok 4y ago
Imagine you are working for a three letter agency scanning a crowd.
999/1000 people look similar. One is just a glowing sun of light.
Which one do you go take to the backroom?
- Brian_K_White 4y agoThe shiny decoy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amelius 4y agoThe point of this webpage is that more people should be wearing it.
- TechBro8615 4y agoProtest organizers should hand out these hoodies, or someone should sell them to protestors through some kind of pop-up shop ambassador program where an affiliate at each protest sells the apparel on consignment.
- ilyt 4y agoOnly really work at night tho.
- justinator 4y agoIR Cameras are used in daytime, too.
- tablespoon 4y ago> IR Cameras are used in daytime, too. The documentation lists its limitations, which include daylight: > The Camera Shy Hoodie is not an end-all-be-all for hiding your identity. It’s good for one thing, blowing out the view of night vision (IR) cameras in low light environments. It’s not effective in sunlight, most indoor lighting, or against conventional cameras. In fact, you will draw attention to yourself if you wear this in a context in which the security cameras are actively monitored. In the view of an IR camera, it’ll look as if you’re flashing a light directly at the lens. In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m). The idea is designed to exploit limitations with the camera's auto-exposure, and I presume a requirement to do that is to strobe a light that outshines the ambient light by n times. That works at night because there's so little ambient light, during the day you'd have to outshine the sun (and the sun is really bright).
- tablespoon 4y ago> Protest organizers should hand out these hoodies, or someone should sell them to protestors... In that particular case, it wold make far more sense to hand out a cost-reduced version that people could wear over their own clothes. I'm thinking of something with the LEDs mounted in a plastic ring like these (https://www.glowuniverse.com/20-inch-glow-stick-necklaces-8-color-mix https://www.glowuniverse.com/20-inch-glow-stick-necklaces-8-...), with a battery box/controller, and maybe some kind of protest messaged taped to it.
- moremetadata 4y agoSome people bring their own masks [1] which work 24/7 in all conditions! For protests, the best form of flattery is to be imitated, so this website [2] and others, lets you pay your respects and flatter the police. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask [2] https://havengear.com/ https://havengear.com/
- EntrePrescott 4y agoDepending on where you live, wearing a mask (as in: face covering, not the COVID masks) at a public protest or demonstration can be a punishable offense forbidden by law… and I'm not talking about autocratic states but many civilized and relatively liberal Western countries, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law
- bb88 4y ago> For example, The Georgia Supreme Court found the law constitutional on the grounds that the wearing of the mask was an act of intimidation and a threat of violence So this is not that.
- moremetadata 4y agoWomen wear masks ever day with their make up, and also documented with filters on social media. Bet the courts didnt think of masks in that context did they?
- formerly_proven 4y agoFYI check your local laws, this is almost certainly criminal in at least some places (e.g. in Germany it's illegal to "wear things which may prevent or interfere with identification of protestors" and to "carry items meant to interfere with identification", this clearly meets those criteria).
- mattigames 4y agoQuite dystopian of germany to target protesters this way, reminds me of the time they made some people wear a star for easy identification.
- hezralig 4y agoWith that being said, it is not illegal to attempt / to succeed at escaping a imprisonment as the will to be free is an unalienable human right under German law.
- eru 4y agoSources?
- formerly_proven 4y agoGerman police usually has a bunch of people (and cars with pole-mounted cameras) running around with cameras filming everyone at regular protests; you'd think nothing can happen without being taped. Except of course it often goes <FOOTAGE MISSING> when it gets interesting, seems to be a technical issue. Just like bodycams suddenly failing to work. Oh well
- concordDance 4y agoQuantify "often" please?
- formerly_proven 4y agoThe primary qualifier here is this isn't American police. Use of force, excessive use of force, and lethal use of force are much, much rarer here. Police kills about a dozen people per year. Not over a thousand. Though worryingly this number has risen a lot in the last couple years, it used to be more like half a dozen ten years ago. Regardless, when it happens, it's still a police force, so you still have esprit de corps, "blue wall of silence" and "DA doesn't feel like prosecuting people they work with day to day" effects, and evidence is quite frequently not gathered or "gets lost". So for example if there is excessive use of force at a protest it wouldn't be unusual for those recordings to be misplaced. Bodycams aren't universal yet, but they're always somehow turned off during excessive use of force. The latest example would be a 16yo refugee who was shot dead with an MP5 (i.e. not standard-issue-24/7-belt-carry for police, something you have to get from the car), all officers had bodycams, no recordings. Five officers were charged with various things (up to 2nd degree homicide) because a citizen made an audio recording of the police action (which is a felony btw.), revealing contradictory and false statements.
- concordDance 4y agoLooters will love these
- landemva 4y agoFrench yellow-vest protestors have been doing this for years. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yellow-vest-became-symbol-of-protest-beyond-france-gilets-jaunes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/21/how-hi-vis-yel...
- dymk 4y agoThey won't, and so it's not very useful
- anigbrowl 4y agoBe realistic, 'everyone should wear this to provide cover to people in stealth mode' is not a sensible security plan outside of an extremely limited number of contexts. I hate security camera theater and panopticons most than most people, and I have exactly zero expectation of this becoming A Thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hammock 4y agoThe three letter agencies (and Walmart, and anyone who can pay for it) have gait analysis that IDs you by how you walk, no face needed
- MengerSponge 4y agoThat's why you put a pebble in your shoe. Then after enough years you take it out like Piccolo dropping his weighted clothes and, like Harrison Bergeron in the story, defy the authoritarian state with dance.
- yborg 4y agoThis wouldn't work on Keyzer Soze.
- buggythebug 4y agohated that movie
- PufPufPuf 4y agoWhy do we get all the bad stuff from Little Brother, but not the free Xboxes???
- e28eta 4y agoBecause Cory Doctorow is paying attention!
- macrolocal 4y agoCounter-surveillance techniques for gait analysis are already well understood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeeovY4qNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNeeovY4qNU
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoIf you walk without rhythm you won't attract the worm?
- KMnO4 4y agoIf this is the USA, then I’m guessing you would take the minority?
- knodi123 4y agoso it hurts if the opposition is live-scanning a crowd, and it helps in all other cases, including targeted advertising / facial recognition stuff.
- colinsane 4y agoyou don’t have to commit a crime to wear this. you can wear it as a statement, in which case attracting that kind of attention so that you can say — ideally to someone with authority — “i don’t think it’s right to surveil the public like this” is arguably some measure of success.
- zht 4y agountil you get put on a list and you get SSSSed every time you fly
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoGiven that the cops have never needed much of a reason to illegally beat people up, I admire anyone who cares about making that statement so much that they're willing to risk it.
- concordDance 4y agoOvergeneralizing here. There's a very broad range of behaviour depending on location.
- cultureswitch 4y agoIndeed, this is only really useful if the cameras aren't actively being monitored. If you're the odd one out wearing this at a protest, you might be specifically targeted.
- danjoredd 4y agoThats assuming they can figure out which one is wearing the hoodie. With enough evidence I can see them going for a guy with that, but they would have to not only make the decision to specifically target you, but to figure out which one of the hoodies moving around is causing the issue
- bb88 4y agoWell... a lot of people wear hoodies. Many of them black and with blue jeans and black shoes.
- cryptonector 4y agoThe decoy.
- dfxm12 4y agoI think in the scenario this is trying to defeat, they already know who most of the other people are because their facial recognition software worked & they're already looking at their socials, purchase history, etc. All the 3 letter agencies are using this info, plus whatever else they have to construct some kind of case against them. So, they become the low hanging fruit. The more resources we give our TLA's, the less this matters, of course :)