'Privacy campaigners may enjoy the irony'

Paul Marks reports in New Scientist :

An Orwellian nightmare it may be to many of us, but CCTV is a boat full of holes to the organisations that pay for it. That's because the people watching CCTV images back in the control rooms often have too many screens to monitor at once, and so may miss the criminal or antisocial activities they are there to spot.

To the rescue of Big Brother's limited attention capabilities come Ulas Vural and Yusuf Akgul of the Gebze Institute of Technology in Turkey, who have developed a gaze-tracking camera system that watches the eyeballs of CCTV operators as they work. It then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift. "This increases the reliability of the surveillance system by giving a second chance to the operator," the researchers write in the journal Pattern Recognition Letters (DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2009.03.002).

The system uses webcam-style cameras trained on the irises of the CCTV operators. From this, software works out where the operators are looking as they stare at each monitor - and the areas they have not been paying attention to. From this it creates a video of what they missed, for them and their bosses to watch at the end of their shift.

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Latest on Pirate Bay trial

From the Pirate Bay Blog :

Regarding Friday [17 Apr, 2009]

On friday we will get the verdict in the ongoing trial. It will not be the final decision, only the first before the losing party will appeal. It will have no real effect on anything besides setting the tone for the debate, so we hope we win of course.

Since a lot of people and press are really interested in the outcome of this part of the spectrial, we've decided to hold a small press conference on friday at 13.00 swedish time (GMT+1 / CET). It will be held on Bambuser, no-one is invited physically to participate, only digitally.

The URL for the Bambuser-stream will be posted on the front page of the site on friday some minutes before 13. If you're from the press or just interested in hearing our thoughts about the outcome, you are welcome to join the stream and chat.

3 Daft Monkeys - 'Paranoid Big Brother'

The song in this video is "Paranoid Big Brother" by 3 Daft Monkeys.

(cc) No Rights Reserved

"The Big Brother State" is an educational film about what politicians claim to be protection of our freedom, but what we refer to as repressive legislation.

Since terrorism has become a global threat, especially after 9/11, governments all over the world have started enforcing laws which, so the governments say, should increase national security.

These laws obviously aim at another goal: the states gaining more and more control of their citizens at the cost of our privacy and freedom.

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Original animation by David Scharf:
http://www.huesforalice.com/bbs/index.php?page=start


Remixed under licence from Creative Commons Non-Commercial Sampling Plus 1.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/nc-sampling+/1.0/

Big Brother wants to be your close friend and constant companion

Photographers Rights And The Law In The UK - A brief guide for street photographers.

Know your rights when you're out with your camera.

Despite the law being clear on a citizen's rights to freely take pictures in public places (with a few restrictions) there is growing evidence of the police, police community support officers (PCSOs), security guards and general jobsworths failing to respect the rights of photographers going about their lawful business.

For more info on photographers rights, please visit:
http://www.urban75.org/photos/photographers-rights-and-the-law.html



The Cashless Society Cometh...



Is the NSA copying everything on the internet - your emails, web traffic, VOIP phone calls? Yep - check out this story:

"AT&T whistleblower: I was forced to connect 'big brother machine'"
Reported by David Edwards and Jason Rhyne
Published: Wednesday November 7, 2007

A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device.

"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."

Asked by Olbermann how he knew what was being sent along those particular lines, Klein said it was all part of his former job:

"As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room," Klein continued. "And so I know that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream was copied..."

According to Klein, that information included internet activity about Americans.

"We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic," Klein said. " And that's what got me upset to begin with."

Previous Bush administration claims that only international communications were being intercepted aren't accurate, Klein says.

"I know the physical equipment, and I know that statement is not true," he added. "It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic communications that they're copying wholesale, sweeping up into that secret room."

When Olbermann asked Klein if being involved in the process reminded him of a scene in the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the former technician said he had another movie in mind.

"Actually, I'm a little older so my thought was George Orwell's 1984 and here I am forced to connect the big brother machine," he said. "And I felt I was in a funny position, but I needed my job, so I didn't want to make a fuss a the time. But after I retired, I thought about it some more." According to ABC News, Klein believes AT&T has similar operations in place in as many as 20 other sites.

He is in Washington to lobby Congress not to pass a proposed telecom immunity bill, which would provide legal immunity to companies who secretly participated in NSA warrantless eavesdropping programs. Some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies are currently facing an array of class-action lawsuits related to the matter.



We are living through a surveillance revolution empowered by technology - who is watching you?



A documentary made for A2 level media studies



Talk by James Bamford author of "The Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets" & Chris Calabrese Program Counsel of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project



Over 4 million cameras, being retro-fitted w/speaker systems. Yelling out orders to people like a concentration camp. Doesn't sound like V for Vendetta at all.
If you want people to be nice or clean up more, have it a point for every citizen to do public service much like some country's requirement for military service.

Evelyn Glennie: How to listen to music with your whole body

From Ted Talks



About this talk

In this soaring demonstration, deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie illustrates how listening to music involves much more than simply letting sound waves hit your eardrums.

About Evelyn Glennie

Scottish percussionist and composer Evelyn Glennie lost nearly all of her hearing by age 12. Rather than isolating her, it has given her a unique connection to her music. Full bio and more links

[ hat tip to Naeem ]