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This Dutch prison is the future of surveillance.
At a high-tech prison opening this week inmates wear electronic wristbands that track their every movement and guards monitor cells using emotion-recognition software.
Remember, new surveillance technologies are first used on populations with limited rights: inmates, children, the mentally ill, military personnel.
There’s a good write-up from The Register.
Two points stand out. One, the RFID chip in the passport can be read from ten meters. Two, lots of predictability in the encryption key—sloppy, sloppy—makes the brute-force attack much easier.
But the references are from last summer. Why is this being reported now?
Back in October, the Dutch police arrested three people who created a large botnet and used it to extort money from U.S. companies. When the trio was arrested, authorities said that the botnet consisted of about 100,000 computers. The actual number was 1.5 million computers.
And I’ve heard reports from reputable sources that the actual actual number was “significantly higher.”
And it may still be growing. The bots continually scan the network and try to infect other machines. They do this autonomously, even after the command and control node was shut down. Since most of those 1.5 million machines—or however many there are—still have the botnet software running on them, it’s reasonable to believe that the botnet is still growing.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.