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Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

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.

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