Entries Tagged "cameras"

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Expensive Cameras in Checked Luggage

This is a blog post about the problems of being forced to check expensive camera equipment on airplanes:

Well, having lived in Kashmir for 12+ years I am well accustomed to this type of security. We haven’t been able to have hand carries since 1990. We also cannot have batteries in any of our equipment checked or otherwise. At least we have been able to carry our laptops on and recently been able to actually use them (with the batteries). But, if things keep moving in this direction, and I’m sure it will, we need to start thinking now about checking our cameras and computers and how to do it safely.
This is a very unpleasant idea. Two years ago I ordered a Canon 20D and had it “hand carried” over to meet me in England by a friend. My friend put it in their checked bag. The bag never showed up. She did not have insurance and all I got $100 from British Airways for the camera and $500 from American Express (buyers protection) that was it. So now it looks as if we are going to have to check our cameras and our computers involuntarily. OK here are a few thoughts.

Pretty basic stuff, and we all know about the risks of putting expensive stuff in your checked luggage.

The interesting part is one of the blog comments, about halfway down. Another photographer wonders if the TSA rules for firearms could be extended to camera equipment:

Why not just have the TSA adopt the same check in rules for photographic and video equipment as they do for firearms?

All firearms must be in checked baggage, no carry on.

All firearms must be transported in a locked, hard sided case using a non-TSA approved lock. This is to prevent anyone from opening the case after its been screened.

After bringing the equipment to the airline counter and declaring and showing the contents to the airline representative, you take it over to the TSA screening area where it it checked by a screener, relocked in front of you, your key or keys returned to you (if it’s not a combination lock) and put directly on the conveyor belt for loading onto the plane.

No markings, stickers or labels identifying what’s inside are put on the outside of the case or, if packed inside something else, the bag.

Might this solve the problem? I’ve never lost a firearm when flying.

Then someone has the brilliant suggestion of putting a firearm in your camera-equipment case:

A “weapons” is defined as a rifle, shotgun, pistol, airgun, and STARTER PISTOL. Yes, starter pistols – those little guns that fire blanks at track and swim meets – are considered weapons…and do NOT have to be registered in any state in the United States.

I have a starter pistol for all my cases. All I have to do upon check-in is tell the airline ticket agent that I have a weapon to declare…I’m given a little card to sign, the card is put in the case, the case is given to a TSA official who takes my key and locks the case, and gives my key back to me.

That’s the procedure. The case is extra-tracked…TSA does not want to lose a weapons case. This reduces the chance of the case being lost to virtually zero.

It’s a great way to travel with camera gear…I’ve been doing this since Dec 2001 and have had no problems whatsoever.

I have to admit that I am impressed with this solution.

Posted on September 22, 2006 at 12:17 PM • View Comments

Spy Gadgets You Can Buy

Cheap:

This is a collection of “spy equipment” we have found for sale around the internet. Everything here is completely real, is sold at online stores, and almost any item listed here costs less than $500, and often times can be bought for less than $200.

What’s interesting to me is less what is available commercially today, but what we can extrapolate is available to real spies.

Posted on July 13, 2006 at 1:50 PM • View Comments

Digital Cameras Have Unique Fingerprints

Interesting research:

Fridrich’s technique is rooted in the discovery by her research group of this simple fact: Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity.

Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or “fingerprint” of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera.

That means that as long as examiners have either the camera that took the image or multiple images they know were taken by the same camera, an algorithm developed by Fridrich and her co-inventors to extract and define the camera’s unique pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity can be used to provide important information about the origins and authenticity of a single image.

The limitation of the technique is that it requires either the camera or multiple images taken by the same camera, and isn’t informative if only a single image is available for analysis.

Like actual fingerprints, the digital “noise” in original images is stochastic in nature ­ that is, it contains random variables ­ which are inevitably created during the manufacturing process of the camera and its sensors. This virtually ensures that the noise imposed on the digital images from any particular camera will be consistent from one image to the next, even while it is distinctly different.

In preliminary tests, Fridrich’s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.

There’s one important aspect of this fingerprint that the article did not talk about: how easy is it to forge? Can someone analyze 100 images from a given camera, and then doctor a pre-existing picture so that it appeared to come from that camera?

My guess is that it can be done relatively easily.

Posted on April 25, 2006 at 2:09 PM • View Comments

80 Cameras for 2,400 People

This story is about the remote town of Dillingham, Alaska, which is probably the most watched town in the country. There are 80 surveillance cameras for the 2,400 people, which translates to one camera for every 30 people.

The cameras were bought, I assume, because the town couldn’t think of anything else to do with the $202,000 Homeland Security grant they received. (One of the problems of giving this money out based on political agenda, rather than by where the actual threats are.)

But they got the money, and they spent it. And now they have to justify the expense. Here’s the movie-plot threat the Dillingham Police Chief uses to explain why the expense was worthwhile:

“Russia is about 800 miles that way,” he says, arm extending right.

“Seattle is about 1,200 miles back that way.” He points behind him.

“So if I have the math right, we’re closer to Russia than we are to Seattle.”

Now imagine, he says: What if the bad guys, whoever they are, manage to obtain a nuclear device in Russia, where some weapons are believed to be poorly guarded. They put the device in a container and then hire organized criminals, “maybe Mafiosi,” to arrange a tramp steamer to pick it up. The steamer drops off the container at the Dillingham harbor, complete with forged paperwork to ship it to Seattle. The container is picked up by a barge.

“Ten days later,” the chief says, “the barge pulls into the Port of Seattle.”

Thompson pauses for effect.

“Phoooom,” he says, his hands blooming like a flower.

The first problem with the movie plot is that it’s just plain silly. But the second problem, which you might have to look back to notice, is that those 80 cameras will do nothing to stop his imagined attack.

We are all security consumers. We spend money, and we expect security in return. This expenditure was a waste of money, and as a U.S. taxpayer, I am pissed that I’m getting such a lousy deal.

Posted on March 29, 2006 at 1:13 PM • View Comments

The Future of Privacy

Over the past 20 years, there’s been a sea change in the battle for personal privacy.

The pervasiveness of computers has resulted in the almost constant surveillance of everyone, with profound implications for our society and our freedoms. Corporations and the police are both using this new trove of surveillance data. We as a society need to understand the technological trends and discuss their implications. If we ignore the problem and leave it to the “market,” we’ll all find that we have almost no privacy left.

Most people think of surveillance in terms of police procedure: Follow that car, watch that person, listen in on his phone conversations. This kind of surveillance still occurs. But today’s surveillance is more like the NSA’s model, recently turned against Americans: Eavesdrop on every phone call, listening for certain keywords. It’s still surveillance, but it’s wholesale surveillance.

Wholesale surveillance is a whole new world. It’s not “follow that car,” it’s “follow every car.” The National Security Agency can eavesdrop on every phone call, looking for patterns of communication or keywords that might indicate a conversation between terrorists. Many airports collect the license plates of every car in their parking lots, and can use that database to locate suspicious or abandoned cars. Several cities have stationary or car-mounted license-plate scanners that keep records of every car that passes, and save that data for later analysis.

More and more, we leave a trail of electronic footprints as we go through our daily lives. We used to walk into a bookstore, browse, and buy a book with cash. Now we visit Amazon, and all of our browsing and purchases are recorded. We used to throw a quarter in a toll booth; now EZ Pass records the date and time our car passed through the booth. Data about us are collected when we make a phone call, send an e-mail message, make a purchase with our credit card, or visit a website.

Much has been written about RFID chips and how they can be used to track people. People can also be tracked by their cell phones, their Bluetooth devices, and their WiFi-enabled computers. In some cities, video cameras capture our image hundreds of times a day.

The common thread here is computers. Computers are involved more and more in our transactions, and data are byproducts of these transactions. As computer memory becomes cheaper, more and more of these electronic footprints are being saved. And as processing becomes cheaper, more and more of it is being cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes.

Information about us has value. It has value to the police, but it also has value to corporations. The Justice Department wants details of Google searches, so they can look for patterns that might help find child pornographers. Google uses that same data so it can deliver context-sensitive advertising messages. The city of Baltimore uses aerial photography to surveil every house, looking for building permit violations. A national lawn-care company uses the same data to better market its services. The phone company keeps detailed call records for billing purposes; the police use them to catch bad guys.

In the dot-com bust, the customer database was often the only salable asset a company had. Companies like Experian and Acxiom are in the business of buying and reselling this sort of data, and their customers are both corporate and government.

Computers are getting smaller and cheaper every year, and these trends will continue. Here’s just one example of the digital footprints we leave:

It would take about 100 megabytes of storage to record everything the fastest typist input to his computer in a year. That’s a single flash memory chip today, and one could imagine computer manufacturers offering this as a reliability feature. Recording everything the average user does on the Internet requires more memory: 4 to 8 gigabytes a year. That’s a lot, but “record everything” is Gmail’s model, and it’s probably only a few years before ISPs offer this service.

The typical person uses 500 cell phone minutes a month; that translates to 5 gigabytes a year to save it all. My iPod can store 12 times that data. A “life recorder” you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes/year for video. It’ll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell phone at home as evidence that he didn’t want to be tracked?

In a sense, we’re living in a unique time in history. Identification checks are common, but they still require us to whip out our ID. Soon it’ll happen automatically, either through an RFID chip in our wallet or face-recognition from cameras. And those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where we won’t even see them.

We’re never going to stop the march of technology, but we can enact legislation to protect our privacy: comprehensive laws regulating what can be done with personal information about us, and more privacy protection from the police. Today, personal information about you is not yours; it’s owned by the collector. There are laws protecting specific pieces of personal data—videotape rental records, health care information—but nothing like the broad privacy protection laws you find in European countries. That’s really the only solution; leaving the market to sort this out will result in even more invasive wholesale surveillance.

Most of us are happy to give out personal information in exchange for specific services. What we object to is the surreptitious collection of personal information, and the secondary use of information once it’s collected: the buying and selling of our information behind our back.

In some ways, this tidal wave of data is the pollution problem of the information age. All information processes produce it. If we ignore the problem, it will stay around forever. And the only way to successfully deal with it is to pass laws regulating its generation, use and eventual disposal.

This essay was originally published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Posted on March 6, 2006 at 5:41 AM • View Comments

Police Cameras in Your Home

This is so nutty that I wasn’t even going to blog it. But too many of you are e-mailing the article to me.

Houston’s police chief on Wednesday proposed placing surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes to fight crime during a shortage of police officers.

“I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?” Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.

One of the problems we have in the privacy community is that we don’t have a crisp answer to that question. Any suggestions?

Posted on February 23, 2006 at 1:12 PM • View Comments

Photographing Airports

Patrick Smith, a former pilot, writes about his experiences—involving the police—taking pictures in airports:

He makes sure to remind me, just as his colleague in New Hampshire
had done, that next time I’d benefit from advance permission, and that “we live in a different world now.” Not to put undue weight on the cheap prose of patriotic convenience, but few things are more repellant than that oft- repeated catchphrase. There’s something so pathetically submissive about it—a sound bite of such defeat and capitulation. It’s also untrue; indeed we find ourselves in an altered way of life, though not for the reasons our protectors would have us think. We weren’t forced into this by terrorists, we’ve chosen it. When it comes to flying, we tend to hold the events of Sept. 11 as the be-all and end-all of air crimes, conveniently purging our memories of several decades’ worth of bombings and hijackings. The threats and challenges faced by airports aren’t terribly different from what they’ve always been. What’s different, or “too bad,” to quote the New Hampshire deputy, is our paranoid, overzealous reaction to those threats, and our amped-up obeisance to authority.

Posted on February 22, 2006 at 2:09 PM • View Comments

Who Watches the Watchers?

One problem with cameras is that you can’t trust the watchers not to misuse them:

Two council CCTV camera operators have been jailed for spying on a naked woman in her own home.

Mark Summerton and Kevin Judge, from Sefton Council, Merseyside, trained a street camera into the woman’s flat.

[…]

The images from the camera, including the woman without her clothes on, were shown on a large plasma screen in the council’s CCTV control room in November 2004, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

Over several hours, she was filmed cuddling her boyfriend before undressing, using the toilet, having a bath and watching television dressed only in a towel.

Judge Gerald Clifton told the three men: “To dismiss what was happening as laddish behaviour, something that the 21st Century apparently condones, is absurd.

“You only have to read the impact statements of the lady to realise the harrowing effect that this had on her.

“Her life has almost been ruined, her self-confidence entirely destroyed by the thought that prying male eyes have entered her flat.”

Also, The Register reported on this.

Posted on January 16, 2006 at 12:00 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.