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How Hong Kong's Protestors Are Hindering (and Hijacking) the Tools of Surveillance
Simply moving through the physical world in regions with massive, powerful surveillance systems threatens to strip one of their anonymity, and in places with anti-government demonstrations, that threat is disturbingly amplified. But protestors in Hong Kong are countering these gross invasions of privacy.
In Hong Kong, hundreds of thousands of civilians are estimated to have filled the streets in June to protest a bill that would allow the government to extradite suspected criminals to mainland China, a violation of their democratic freedom. Anti-extradition demonstrations have been ongoing for weeks in Hong Kong, and police are turning to increasingly aggressive and violent means to quash the efforts. In response, protestors created their own channel to identify plainclothes cops.
The channel, called Dadfindboy, was created on cloud-based messaging app Telegram and has over 50,000 subscribers, according to a report published on Friday by the New York Times. The channel was largely created in response to cops no longer wearing their identification badges, and reportedly doxxed officers with posts including their personal information, social media posts, and both intimate photos and photos of their family.
[...] The New York Times report also illustrated how protestors fought back against surveillance devices. During a demonstration on Sunday, some of them reportedly aimed laser pointers at cameras and spray painted surveillance cameras outside of the government liaison office.
A protestor detailed in the report, Colin Cheung, also began to develop a tool to deal with corrupt plainclothes cops, but ultimately ceased efforts because he didn't have the time. The concept for the tool, though, is an ironic display of how surveillance tools can be used to counter each other. Cheung had started creating a facial recognition tool that used an algorithm to match photos that had been posted on the internet with photos of police officers in an attempt to identify those who no longer identified themselves.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @06:13PM (4 children)
It would be great to use some of the free (as in freedom) tools available for license plate recognition, face recognition, etc. and crowd source a huge surveillance network to keep track of cops, politicians, rich oligarchs, etc. -- anybody who promotes surveillance of normal plebs.
With the rate these clowns engage in crime, and with video evidence of widespread daily crimes, we might get one or two off the street every few years. But, perhaps after being exposed to a daily barrage of evidence of criminal activity *for just that day* by cops, etc., the public might stop believing the lie of, "a few bad apples." And, then we might get mass incarceration for the real criminals in our society-- I'd guess at least 90% of cops* and approaching 100% for the oligarchy.
There would have to be multiple checks to ensure that the only folks being monitored were in fact cops, politicians, etc. And, it would be best if each node in the mesh did its own recognition processing, so video that might capture innocent people would never need to be transmitted within the network.
* if there were good cops, then you would have heard about the time that cop saw his fellow cops engaged in beating a man to death, or shooting a man in the back, etc., and turned them in. Never happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 28 2019, @11:17PM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_(Doctorow_novel) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 29 2019, @12:57AM (2 children)
Don't count on that happening with distributed tools. There would be good and bad points to this approach. One of the bad points would be misuse of the tools.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @08:38AM (1 child)
Are you one of these tools?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 29 2019, @02:20PM