Fashion And Face Recognition.

      Surveillance is becoming an ever more important and intrusive state tool Today we are surrounded by CCTV, roaming vehicles with cameras continually snapping away at everybody and everything. On top of this we have the various arms of the state and large commercial corporations gleaning personal details form or social habits. Your are profiled for state and commercial purposes, whether you like it or not. The latest venture is face recognition. The following article may be of some use when you think of posting that photo on you favourite social network, or when you next venture in to town. 

 This is from Rotenotes:

      Adam Harvey is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work addresses the impact of surveillance technologies.

      Next year the Janus program, an initiative run by the director of national intelligence, will begin to collect photographs of people’s faces from social media websites and public video feeds. Machines will then use powerful algorithms to pair those photos with existing biometric profiles.

     The Janus program isn’t alone: Facial-recognition technology is quickly becoming a mainstay of commercial and government surveillance systems. While it can provide benefits in automation and security, it is also a threat to privacy. Sophisticated algorithms can already extract information about your gender, age and even mood from a single image, and then link those physical attributes to commercial or government databases.

This powerful surveillance technology is cheap, ubiquitous and unregulated.

      My project, CV Dazzle, explores how fashion can be used as camouflage from face-detection technology, the first step in automated face recognition. The name is derived from a type of World War I naval camouflage called Dazzle, which used cubist-inspired designs to break apart the visual continuity of a battleship and conceal its orientation and size. Likewise, CV Dazzle uses avant-garde hairstyling and makeup designs to break apart the continuity of a face. Since facial-recognition algorithms rely on the identification and spatial relationship of key facial features, like symmetry and tonal contours, one can block detection by creating an “anti-face.”

See helpful diagrams to help fool face recognition technology: 

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Who Is Big Brother Protecting??

      Here in the UK we have more cameras per head of the population than any other country in Europe, if not the world. A recent visitor to Glasgow from Italy, that I spoke to, was shattered at the volume of cameras watching her every move. She said she felt intimidated and found it difficult to relax when out and about in town. She wanted to know was this array of cameras because Glasgow was a more criminal city than anywhere else. Of course the answer to that is most definitely, NO. Glasgow as well as being plastered with CCTV cameras on every street corner, lamp post, and lots at bus stops, (six at the bus stop at my home) we also have them on buses, in pubs, cafés, restaurants, underground stations, bus and train stations. On top of this, until the recent tragic crash at the Clutha pub, we had a police surveillance helicopter, fitted with an array of sophisticated surveillance equipment, flying low over the city. All of this, we are told, is for our own protection. Are we really that untrustworthy, violent, vicious a bunch of people, that we have to be watched at every move, our every trip to the shops, pub, church, train station, monitored? Would the city descend into mayhem and self destruction, if our lords and masters did not watch our every movement? 

     Forget “our protection” and think “control”. With this volume of detailed surveillance, we are living in a large prison, our minders are watching our every move, and ready to control you should you not be where the deem you should be, if they assess that you are not doing what they think you should be doing. Your patterns of behaviour are being analysed, you are being profiled. Who is big brother protecting? You are in prison.

     Though other cities in other countries, don't suffer the same intrusion of privacy that we do, there is still an anger and indignation at the volume of surveillance they do suffer, where is our anger and indignation?

       The following is a translation from Catalan and appeared in Anarchist News: 

"We refuse to live in a prison" (translated from Catalan)

Today, the society in which we are obliged to live appears ever more like a prison. Our movements are registered and our conversations listened to and controlled systematically via our cellphones. Our emails are analysed and maps of our social networks are created using, for example, Facebook and Twitter.

The national press gets indignant about the tracking of [European] politicians by the NSA but what's certain is that for a long time they have been not only complicit, but directly promoting the sharing of data on a large part of the population between European agencies and the NSA. And on the other hand, we have not seen the same indignation for the dozens of cases of spying on activists carried out by CESICAT [an extralegal or private security apparatus formed by the government of Catalunya, as part of its bid for independence].

An element of devastating quotidianity in this web of social control are the surveillance cameras. They seek to train us to accept "for our own safety" being filmed from the moment we leave our houses in the morning until the moment when we come home at night. Some cities are already installing systems of integrated surveillance with all the cameras in a region linked up to facial and other recognition software.

None of this surprises us, since the very nature of the State is to want to exercise absolute power over life. Freedom is not possible under a power that aims to control and surveille our lives in their entirety. Any attempt to transform this world in accordance with our needs or to recover control over our own lives will be surveilled and punished by the State as an act of criminality. For this reason the struggle for freedom must take the path of illegality.

We refuse to live in a prison. We refuse to be listened to and followed. We refuse to have our movements recorded. We refuse to allow anyone to be obliged to grow up in a world in which they will be recorded, filmed, Twittered, and localised 24 hours a day.

Read the full article HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

Beware, Big Brother Has Arrived.

     You walk, you pause, you look, you take a photograph, your are being watched, you are now a suspect. Your behaviour is slightly out of the normal, the cameras have picked up on this, you may be questioned, your house could be searched. This is not Orwell's 1984, this is the UK today. To stay out of "their" radar, walk at a steady pace, just look straight ahead, don't linger, stay in the centre of the pavement, be a clone of the others. Individuality, eccentricity, must be shunned if you want to retain what is left of your privacy.

     Every city in the country is littered with hi-tec cameras, backed up by extremely sophisticate software, you are possible suspects, possible criminals, you all must be watched at all times and in all circumstances. Knowing your every move makes you so much easier to be controlled.

       It can't be a free society when my every move is monitored by people I don't know, for purposes I have no knowledge of, and I have no say in that monitoring. We are indeed in the Orwellian society and most of the public are completely unaware. The cameras just sit there, morning and night, day in day out, watching analysing, trying to fit you into a pattern, marking you out if you don't fit. This Western "democracy" today.

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COMING TO A BUS NEAR YOU.

      The surveillance society is well and truly established here and else where. You can't walk about your city without being observed, photoed, tracked and the information stored. The local bus stop at the bottom of our street has SIX cameras mounted on it, you enter the bus and you are recorded. I have counted as many as six cameras on some buses. Dotted around town are cameras with speakers mounted, you will be instructed what to do if you are seen to be doing something THEY deem to be wrong. Now it seems that this is not enough, in some cities in America they are fitting voice recording equipment on public transport buses, to record your conversations and store them. Where America goes today, we go tomorrow. How long before all new build houses will have a camera and sound recording fitted at the construction stage? Far fetched? How long ago was it that you would have been laughed at if you said that the bus stop will have six cameras fitted? Of course you know it is all for your own good and safety. Oh George, we should have listened.

This from The Stranger:

      When people worry about drones, they worry that the information gathered by the little fliers will be stored forever as a blanket violation of Fourth Amendment protections—a warrantless search with wings. (That's what people in the US worry about, anyway. People in other countries worry that drones will kill them.)
Looks like drones are the least of the Fourth Amendment's worries. From Wired.com:
      Transit authorities in cities across the country are quietly installing microphone-enabled surveillance systems on public buses that would give them the ability to record and store private conversations, according to documents obtained by a news outlet.
The systems are being installed in San Francisco, Baltimore, and other cities with funding from the Department of Homeland Security in some cases, according to the Daily, which obtained copies of contracts, procurement requests, specs and other documents.

Read the full article HERE:

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THE LONDON OLYMPICS WAR GAMES??

           The Olympics, the most expensive TV program ever in the UK, a corporate greed feast paid for by public funds. Or as our Millionaire cabal in The Westminster Houses of Greed and Corruption would say, "a chance to show case Britain". However the London that visitors will see will not be the London that most Londoners know. It will be a surreal London, a science fiction London, a military zone London, a London where military law will rule. Apart from the billions of pounds of public money thrown at this even, to encourage corporate leeches to come in and make a killing, there will be another container ship full of money spent on "security". Welcome to the Olympic spirit, UK style.

 This from The Edge of Sport by Dave Zirin:

         As many as 48,000 security forces. 13,500 troops. Surface to air missiles stationed on top of residential apartment buildings. A sonic weapon that disperses crowds by creating "head splitting pain."Unmanned drones peering down from the skies. A safe-zone, cordoned off by an 11 mile, electrified fence, ringed with trained agents and 55 teams of attack dogs.

        One would be forgiven for thinking that these were the counter-insurgency tactics used by U.S. army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps the military methods taught to third world despots at the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning Georgia. But instead of being used in a war zone or the theatre of occupation, they in fact make up the very visible security apparatus in London for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

        London, which has the most street cameras per capita of any city on earth, has for the last seven years since the terror attacks of 7/7/05, been a city whose political leaders would spare no expense to monitor its own citizens. But the Olympic operation goes above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen when a Western democracy hosts the games. Not even China in 2008 used drone planes or ringed the proceedings with a massive, high-voltage fence. But here is London, preparing a counter insurgency, and parking an aircraft carrier right in the Thames. Here is London adding “scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centres and checkpoints.”

Continue READING: 

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A HIGH SCORE AT THE OFFICE TODAY??

     The march of the robotic war continues at a rapid pace, mostly unobserved in the West but we are the harbingers of the peopleless army. Most people tend to see CCTV cameras as a benign watch on criminals, but they are all part and parcel of the surveillance and control by a central authority and that authority spreads across the globe. the latest stage is the surveillance drones and their big brother, the killer drones.

      America has used drones to strike at and kill citizens in other countries, and since Obama came to power the use of drones as robotic assassins has grown enormously.  In Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Obama administration is using drones to invade other nations sovereign territory and kill people by remote control in those countries, while no state of war exist with the U.S.. Some of those killed have been American citizens. No charges, no jury, no judge. Just a CIA hit list.

            Once one state finds an efficient killing method others soon follow, now 50 countries have drones. Of course drones are not just being used to invade others soveriegn territory but are used as means of surveillance in their own home land. They have been used in the UK for this purpose and in the US, no doubt other countries are fllowing suit. The implications are horrendous, as country after country builds up its peopleless army of spies and assassins. Soon war will become a 9 to 5 office job, you'll have kids sitting in front of what looks like a game consul in some government office, getting excited as they see there hits score go higher and higher. No doubt there will be bonuses for the highest scorers. They will probably boast to their friends and family about their high score, oblivious that each score is the death of a family or a village, or even worse as the drones get larger and carry a heavier payload of destruction and death.

       I wrote on this some time back and make no apologies for doing so again, it is a horror world we should not allow ourselves to sleepwalk into, it is a world that only suits the corporate state.

ann arky's home.   

ESCALATION!!!

    

    Since posting the previous article "A DAY'S KILLING AT THE OFFICE" I have learnt that the US has made Predator armed drones available in support of NATO for use in Libya. The precedent has now been set, armed drones will now become the preferred weapon of choice. We all know that the UK police, and other police forces no doubt, have been using smaller drones  for surveillance purposes, which no doubt could be armed with smaller weapons. The state now has the perfect Orwellian tools, CCTV cameras everywhere, small drones patrolling the skies above our cities, perhaps armed, and the armed Predator drone to sort out any trouble. All this from one central control room in an inconspicuous building sitting somewhere in a leafy suburb. Welcome to 1984.

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WHY DESTROY CCTV CAMERAS ?

I came across this and thought it was worth discussing. Taken from SCHNEWS.

1.1) Why destroy cctv cameras ?

    Trust your instincts, but if you need intellectual justification then:

"The gaze of the cameras does not fall equally on all users of the street but on those who are stereotypical predefined as potentially deviant, or through appearance and demeanour, are singled out by operators as unrespectable. In this way youth, particularly those already socially and economically marginal, may be subject to even greater levels of authoritative intervention and official stigmatisation, and rather than contributing to social justice through the reduction of victimisation, CCTV will merely become a tool of injustice through the amplification of differential and discriminatory policing."

   "an instrument of social control and the production of discipline; the production of 'anticipatory conformity'; the certainty of rapid deployment to observed deviance and; the compilation of individualised dossiers of the monitored population."

"The unforgiving Eye: CCTV surveillance in public space" Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong of the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at Hull University, UK.

"What we have been able to show is that Creduce crime - if anything it has increased - and it didn't reduce fear of crime. If anything there was a slight increase in anxiety."CTV didn't 

Prof Jason Ditton of Sheffield University.

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