Doing surveillance was once how I made my living. I’ve always enjoyed watching people as they go about their everyday lives. Of course you must learn to carefully look for the unusual details, to look at faces, walking gate, and peculiar habits. The sense of accomplishment from observing things most people would miss is something hard to describe. Unfortunately, as city traffic turned homicidal, doing a surveillance became a survival ordeal. The old habit of constantly looking around and watching for unusual behaviour has remained and sometimes adds amusement to my dull life. Continue reading ‘The Shopping Mall Chameleon’
Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
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Just watch me: Life of a private dick
The closest I came to executive protection during my tenure as a private detective was keeping a takeout coffee from spilling onto the floor of my boss’s minivan during a particularly dull stakeout.
For most of Canada’s private investigators, keeping CEOs safe takes a distant back seat to tracking insurance claims. No femme fatales in dimly lit alleyways, no Maltese Falcons, no Ferraris — just hours squatting in the back of an anonymous van fitted with tinted windows, sipping coffee from a flask, videocam at the ready.
In other words, surveillance, surveillance, surveillance…
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue’s radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering…
Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said.
The mobile telephone has become a modern-day slave bracelet for so many people, now it might also become a national security appliance.
Nigel Stanley, at Bloor Research article entitled Ounce Labs weighs into rogue code about the dangers of outsourcing software development. The most interesting part of the article follows:
Industrial espionage, or good old fashioned spying, is as alive and well today as it has ever been. In fact, a lot of time and effort from the security agencies is tied up in dealing with this issue, and contacts have assured me it is worse now than it has ever been as developing countries try to steal a march (maybe even literally) against the developed world. Spying between developed nations is also a problem, with some larger European countries having a dreadful reputation for trying to obtain industrial secrets from so called allies. Software development is an obvious target…
The downside of this approach is that decision makers get seduced by green lights whilst their developers look for even more creative ways of inserting malicious code. No sensible person will ever declare that a product such as Ounce 5 will guarantee that your code is 100% secure…
EASY TO PLANT CAMERAS IN HOTEL ROOMS
THE recent sex DVD scandal involving former Malaysian Health Minister Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek shows how easy it is to rig a spy camera and film someone without their knowledge.
Experts tell The New Paper on Sunday that it takes anyone just 30 minutes to rig a spy cam.
It takes the professionally trained even less time…
If you really need a quick, cheap surveillance helicopter check-out the Pimp Your Copter! at Metacafe.
Every Private Investigator should have one!
The January 2008 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine has an excellent article titled Surveillance Society: New High-Tech Cameras Are Watching You. This article outlines some of the new video surveillance technologies and how they are used.
I wrote about the dangers of mobile telephones a while back. Now we have a new term for the abuse of GPS tracking associated with mobile telephones — Geoslavery.
This story links geoslavery to the probable murder of Stacy Peterson.
An article entitled Stalked by a cell phone: Who’s spying on you? warns of the danger of downloading software to your cell phone, connecting to the Internet from a mobile phone, and the dangers of letting it get out of your sight.
Update: See this at:
http://www.wthr.com/Global/story.asp?S=9346833 and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCyKcoDaofg
Taiwanese electronics corporation Misumi has what it claims is the smallest camera ever, a tiny cylinder measuring only 4.4mm in diameter and 15mm in length, capable of 320×240 pixel QVGA capture. Featuring a 1/18” colour CMOS camera chip (which might be the smallest currently available), Misumi’s MO-R803 is a “snake camera” on a bendable wire. It’s available with two different lenses – one with a 55 degree field of vision, the other a wide-angle boasting 105 degrees.
Its tiny eye being less than half a centimetre in diameter, the MO-R803 will get into a lot of hard-to-reach places, making it a useful medical tool, a very handy pipeline inspection device, and an interesting surveillance device.
Blogger and analyst for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Hans M. Kristensen, recently discovered a photo of a second and possibly a third Jin-class nuclear-powered submarine at Bohai Shipyard in northeast China. He discovered the image using Google Earth, an online mapping service provided by Internet search engine giant Google, and posted his discovery on his blog on October 4.
The use of Google Earth for this creates some interesting challenges for both governments and private industry. In the private sector, security officials now must consider the loss of proprietary and competitive data through satellite imagery. An example of this might be the construction of new production facilities. In the past, overflights of such facilities have given rise to law suits. Now that the data already exists and is searchable, how does one protect against a loss of critical information in this manner?
I predict the creative use of camouflage will become normal practice over the next couple of decades.
WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson loves flying home-made Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). But getting your UAV fix comes with risks. Especially when you start flying your drone over the cyclotron at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Chris Anderson, a 45-year-old Berkeley resident and aerial-reconnaissance enthusiast, sparked a minor security scare Sunday when his remote-controlled plane – equipped with a camera – crashed into a tree at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
Security personnel apparently didn’t notice the plane until Anderson asked for help retrieving it, but they’ve taken notice since.
DIY aerial surveillance is here now.
An Evening Standard article illustrates the ineffectiveness of CCTV surveillance camera use in London England.
“London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million, figures show today.
But an analysis of the publicly funded spy network, which is owned and controlled by local authorities and Transport for London, has cast doubt on its ability to help solve crime.
A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.”
I’m certain somebody’s nephew makes a lot of money off these CCTV surveillance systems, and I’m sure it provides a lot of deserving civil servants with well paid jobs, but I’ve never thought this stuff stops crime or even helps capture criminals. Now I know I’m right.
Google accounts present a serious risk to employees who use them in the workplace. Google accounts allow you access to Gmail and another interestng feature, your search history. Unfortunately, your Google account does not time-out.
Now imagine you’re at work. You sign-on to your Google account and check your mail and use Google Reader to check some RSS feeds. You are then called away from your desk. You don’t sign-off, afterall, its only Google. Well your collegue drops by and decides to do a search and check his mail. He searches for a prostitute for tomorrow evening and checks his Gmail and finds yours.
Your collegue has now added some interesting entries to your search history and read your mail. My Yahoo presents a similar risk.
This leads me to think of some interesting oportunities that this offers if I set-up virgin Google and My Yahoo accounts and place them on an unattended PC.
In the R v Waters [2007], the UK Court of Appeal upheld the sentence of four months imprisonment for a man who had conspired to install spyware software on his wife’s computer. The Court of Appeal ruling stated:
Computers are an established part of modern life. An increasing amount of personal and private information is kept on computers, not only by the State and large organisations but also by individuals. The privacy of that information must be protected and it is vulnerable to the kind of unauthorised interference and intrusion that occurred in this case. The judge correctly identified deterrence as an element of sentencing in this case. In our judgment, a sentence of imprisonment for offences such as this was not wrong in principle.