Tag: sousveillance

Citizen Virtual Patrol

Surveillance cameras monitored by the police have become a ubiquitous presence in many cities. In Newark, anyone with internet access is allowed to watch. The Citizen Virtual Patrol has been hailed by officials as a move toward transparency in a city where a mistrust of the police runs deep, rooted in long-running claims of aggressive enforcement and racial animosity. The cameras provide a way to recruit residents as Newark tries to shake a dogged reputation for violence and crime. Since the program started about 1 month ago, 1600 users have signed into the website, and residents have been lobbying the department to add more cameras in their neighborhoods.

Phone video clears man

nice how automatic video upload cleared this man from police thugs.

The 10-second video doesn’t show much, just a quick shot of 1 Toronto police officer, then a second, who then reaches up to slap away the phone camera. But the brief video recording captured the crucial part of Abdi Sheik-Qasim’s exchange with Toronto police Consts. Piara Dhaliwal and Akin Gul — enough for an Ontario judge to rule Sheik-Qasim had been assaulted by Toronto police, not the other way around.

OWS potential

If OWS weren’t so stupid, they’d be able to achieve things. ows might find strategic success by using sousveillance at scale.

It appears that Occupy’s extreme non-violence/passivity has finally generated a social system disruption. Videos and pictures showing policemen using violence against passive protesters have gone viral (UC Berkeley students, Grandma, and open mouth were the leading examples). Stories about this violence are now sweeping the media (7910 news stories over the last 24 hours)

Drone Paparazzi

Paparazzi UAV is an open-source drone hardware and software project encompassing autopilot systems and ground station software for multicopters/multirotors, fixed-wing, helicopters and hybrid aircraft that was founded in 2003. Paparazzi UAV was designed with autonomous flight as the primary focus and manual flying as the secondary. From the beginning it was designed with portability in mind and the ability to control multiple aircraft within the same system. Paparazzi features a dynamic flight plan system that is defined by mission states and using way points as “variables”. This makes it easy to create very complex fully automated missions without the operators intervention.

wow

Is credibility doomed?

ivan amato reports about video insertion technologies:

The ability to manipulate video data in real time has just as much potential as some of these forerunners. “Now that you can alter video in real time, you have changed the world, Deleting people or objects from live video, or inserting prerecorded people or objects into live scenes, is only the beginning of the deceptions becoming possible. Pretty much any piece of video that has ever been recorded is becoming clip art that producers can digitally sculpt into the story they want to tell.

clearly, these technologies erode the trust that average persons have in visual imagery. the parts of society that rely on television for their news are doomed.

Imagine you are the government of a hypothetical country that wants more international financial assistance, You might send video of a remote area with people starving to death and it may never have happened

amato then goes on to blame the internet because “so much internet content is unfiltered”. the opposite is true, actually. the only hope we have to counter these massive manipulations is decentralized publishing combined with a web of trust. already, mobile devices with integrated cameras are available, personal publishing is here (albeit not on a joe 6pack level yet), and the first crude experiments with trust metrics are being undertaken. big media relies on trust, and if this trust is gone, big media is dead.