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Spykee is your own personal robot spy. It takes pictures and movies that you can watch on the Internet in real time or save for later. You can even talk with whoever you’re spying on via Skype. More here, and you can buy one here: only $300.
They’re trying to detect anomalies:
If you have ever wondered how security guards can possibly keep an unfailingly vigilant watch on every single one of dozens of television monitors, each depicting a different scene, the answer seems to be (as you suspected): they can’t.
Instead, they can now rely on computers to constantly analyze the patterns, sizes, speeds, angles and motion picked up by the camera and determine—based on how they have been programmed—whether this constitutes a possible threat. In which case, the computer alerts the security guard whose own eyes may have been momentarily diverted. Or shut.
An alarm can be raised, for instance, if the computer discerns a vehicle that has been standing still for too long (say, a van in the drop-off lane of an airport terminal) or a person who is loitering while everyone else is in motion. By the same token, it will spot the individual who is moving rapidly while everyone else is shuffling along. It can spot a package that has been left behind and identify which figure in the crowd abandoned it. Or pinpoint the individual who is moving the wrong way down a one-way corridor.
Because one person’s “abnormal situation” is another person’s “hot dog vendor attracting a small crowd,” the computers can be programmed to discern between times of the day and days of the week.
Certainly interesting.
From CNet:
A recent article in the London Review of Books revealed that a number of private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time location information. These companies include ThorpeGlen, VASTech, Kommlabs, and Aqsacom—all of which sell “passive probing” data-mining services to governments around the world.
ThorpeGlen, a U.K.-based firm, offers intelligence analysts a graphical interface to the company’s mobile-phone location and call-record data-mining software. Want to determine a suspect’s “community of interest“? Easy. Want to learn if a single person is swapping SIM cards or throwing away phones (yet still hanging out in the same physical location)? No problem.
In a Web demo (PDF) (mirrored here) to potential customers back in May, ThorpeGlen’s vice president of global sales showed off the company’s tools by mining a dataset of a single week’s worth of call data from 50 million users in Indonesia, which it has crunched in order to try and discover small anti-social groups that only call each other.
On 60 Minutes, in an interview with Scott Pelley, reporter Bob Woodward claimed that the U.S. military has a new secret technique that’s so revolutionary, it’s on par with the tank and the airplane:
Woodward: This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders, that is one of the true breakthroughs.
Pelley: What are we talking about here? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of taking out just the people that you’re looking for, the leadership of the enemy?
[…]
Woodward: It is the stuff of which military novels are written.
Pelley: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?
Woodward: Yeah.
It’s here, 7 minutes and 55 seconds in.
Anyone have any ideas?
EDITED TO ADD (9/11): One idea:
I’m going to make a wager about what I think Woodward is talking about, and I’ll be curious to see what Danger Room readers have to say. I believe he is talking about the much ballyhooed (in defense geek circles) "Tagging, Tracking and Locating" program; here’s a briefing on it from Special Operations Command. These are newfangled technologies designed to track people from long distances, without the targeted people realizing they are being tracked. That can theoretically include thermal signatures, or some sort of "taggant" placed on a person. Think Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Well, not so many cameras, maybe.
Ignoring the sensationalist headline, this is interesting:
By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk—a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise.
Video taken from above shows only people’s heads and shoulders, which makes measuring the characteristic length and rhythm of a person’s stride impossible. That’s not true of shadows, though, Stoica told a security conference in Edinburgh, UK, last month. Shadows, he says, provide enough gait data to deduce a positive ID. To prove it, he has written software that recognises human movement in aerial and satellite video footage. It isolates moving shadows and uses data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows if they are elongated or foreshortened. Regular gait analysis is then applied to identify people. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data.
The article goes on to say that using satellite images would be harder, but that the basic idea is the same.
Of course, this is less useful for finding individuals and more useful for tracking a population as it moves about its day. But some individuals will have more distinctive gaits than others, and will be easier to track. Soon we may all need to walk with rocks in our shoes.
Over the past year I have gotten many requests, both public and private, to comment on the BT and Phorm incident.
I was not involved with BT and Phorm, then or now. Everything I know about Phorm and BT’s relationship with Phorm came from the same news articles you read. I have not gotten involved as an employee of BT. But anything I say is—by definition—said by a BT executive. That’s not good.
So I’m sorry that I can’t write about Phorm. But—honestly—lots of others have been giving their views on the issue.
This is serious stuff. (Kim Zetter’s posts on the topic are excellent; read them.)
It’s a man-in-the-middle attack. “The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole” (the title of that first link) has been that interior relays have always been trusted even though they are not trustworthy.
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): This is worth reading.
Interesting paper: “Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks or Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice“:
Abstract—We reverse engineer copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing network and find that a common approach for identifying infringing users is not conclusive. We describe simple techniques for implicating arbitrary network endpoints in illegal content sharing and demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques experimentally, attracting real DMCA complaints for nonsense devices, e.g., IP printers and a wireless access point. We then step back and evaluate the challenges and possible future directions for pervasive monitoring in P2P file sharing networks.
Webpage on the research.
Nice article on personal surveillance from the London Review of Books.
In this article about British speed cameras, and a trick to avoid them that does not work, is this sentence:
As vehicles pass between the entry and exit camera points their number plates are digitally recorded, whether speeding or not.
Without knowing more, I can guarantee that those records are kept forever.
EDITED TO ADD (7/25): As pointed out by Pete Darby in comments: Passenger moons speeding camera and gets his picture published even though the car was not speeding.
Police may take action against the man for public order offences and not wearing a seat belt.
Officers have the registration of the car, which was not breaking the speed limit, and intend to contact its owner.
It is understood the driver will not face prosecution as no driving offence was being committed.
How did they even know to look at the picture in the first place?
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.