The Hungry Hacker has a great list of text you can search for, using Google, to find accessible security cameras. They title of their blog post, “How to Hack into a Security Camera?”, is slightly misleading as you can’t do much more than move the camera around. You don’t have any administrative controls over it.
This is fun none the less. Enjoy.
Here is a browsable list of notes and articles that I have used in the creation of this blog. Usually this is far more up to date than this blog is.
Wired recently ran an article on location embedded photos with geodata. This is the part that gets scary:
To test whether I was being paranoid, I ran a little experiment. On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.
Bruce Schneier had a good piece on the expectation of privacy.
The problem is, in today’s information society, that definition test will rapidly leave us with no privacy at all.
This is an interesting story of a town that is actually thinking about privacy and security instead of privacy vs. security.
The council voted 9-0 against building the network of eight video cameras throughout the city on Feb. 2 after hearing different opinions during two sessions about the video cameras.
and
“What agencies would have access to the camera’s digital images?” said Nancy Murray, the director of education at the ACLUM. “What guarantees would residents have that (the images) would not be used for purposes other than traffic control?”
But Cambridge’s neighbor Brookline went in a different direction about putting up security cameras.
Before Cambridge made its decision, Brookline, another community that has access to the Homeland Security grant, decided differently. In January, its Board of Selectman voted 3-2 in favor of a one-year trial for the video camera network.
via the Boston Globe
other stories: via the Cambridge Local and the Boston Globe
The New York Times Magazine profiles Virgil Griffith, hacker extraordinaire.
Here are some links to various Virgil pages:
Arizona’s Department of Public Saftey has 25 new license plate scanners and are using them quite aggressively. The Arizona Republic reports that the technology makes finding stolen vehicles and amber alert suspects easier, but there are many concerned about the handling of the data collected.
Currently they have have kept all of the data collected including vehicles that have nothing to do with crimes. Arizona legislation to control how quickly data is purged has been not been successful as of yet.
In a state that routinely ranks among the top five in the U.S. in auto theft, DPS scanned more than 1.6 million plates since introducing its first cameras in 2006 - leading directly to 122 felony arrests.
Callister, a DPS Border Crimes Unit officer, uses a set of the agency’s 25 plate-reader cameras to track stolen vehicles south of Phoenix. He said the system supplements everyday police work, freeing him from the routine checks that used to consume his time.
“Three years ago, all I had in my car was a radio to talk to a dispatcher, and I had to wait my turn,” Callister said. “If I was lucky, I could run 10 vehicles a day,” he said. “Now, with the plate reader and my computer, I’ve had days when I’ve read over 8,000.”
later in the article:
Plate-readers might be a boon for investigators, but agencies such as DPS already have grappled with the possibility of public resistance from those who fear the technology threatens the civil rights of law-abiding citizens. Of the thousands of license plates scanned each day, only a small fraction of the vehicles are tied to some possible criminal activity.
DPS, working with statewide task forces, could emerge as the central agency to store the data from the scans - but the agency has yet to establish guidelines on how to use the data and how long that information would be saved.
“That’s where some people might consider it an invasion of privacy,” Callister said, but he downplayed the idea, saying the plates are public information seen on public streets.
“This database is just a big pile of plates and GPS locations,” he said, adding that the potential to solve crimes outweighs privacy concerns. “If somebody is involved in a bank robbery, or kidnaps a kid, and they do have a plate, they can go back to see the vehicle was at a (specific) location.”
Cmdr. Larry Scarber, who oversees the DPS plate-reader program, said information from the cameras is used strictly to prevent crime.
“We have to be very cautious,” Scarber said of the records of vehicle locations. “Right now, we haven’t gotten rid of anything.”
via: Arizona Republic.
The article also lists which Arizona communities also have license scanning systems.
Good Magazine is starting a new series of videos about current and future military robot use.
Bruce Schneier’s name has come up for the new TSA Administrator under President Obama. He is going to pass on it.
Boston Dynamics has a new robot that will act as your own personal Sherpa. Of course it is funded by DARPA.
