DIY street anonymizer

EDIT: Ahh, this was a video post, but the video no longer works. It was either too edgy to remain public or all the additional traffic from this blog crashed their servers. I don't know which, but I'll try to explain what it showed so this isn't an utterly wasted post.

Tiny Infra-red LEDs can be used to hide your face from security cameras. These LEDs are small lights that require only tiny batteries to power and can be easily mounted anywhere.

CCTV cameras don't like Infra-red light when they're stalking you after sunset. In low light they enhance the image, and the Infra-red LED shows too bright for the picture. Mount one on your head, and you become unrecognisable on camera, protected by a halo of anoyminity.

The now deleted video below showed you how to fit the LED into some cheap sun-glasses and what this does to your image on CCTV cameras.
What a brilliant idea. Tastes like the cyberpunk anarcho-future to me.

Magic mirror shades that render you invisible to the MAN.


Unlikely to be the first or best method developed for tricking CCTV, but brilliant in its simplicity. The thick black frames and DIY aestetic will even appeal to the fashion sense of your local graffiti artists and urban explorers.

What does this mean? Will every Hoodie in the UK who never skipped electronics lessons dash out to buy themselves the reasonably priced kit and wire up their baseball cap before their next mugging or shady deal?

Unlikely: The feral youth don't read gadget blogs, and they couldn't give a damn about CCTV in the first place.

The first time my car got broken into the little buggers were careful to batter the nearby CCTV camera too. The next time me motor got the hoodies' handshake the police told me that all the local CCTV cameras were fake or not recording.

I'm sure it's true that CCTV does help clear up some cases of casual violence and crime. I just doubt it really protects society against any kind of premeditated misbehavior; it's already too easy to avoid with a simple hat or hood.

Writing about CCTV in todays Guardian, Marine Hyde suggests, "(You) could always don a hood. Yet there does seem a vaguely depressing irony in governments insisting that constant surveillance is essential to prevent our being overrun by repressive regimes who'd make us all cover our heads and the like."

We can only hope criminals do try this hi-tech soloution instead of their hoods, because while these lights might hide you from night-time CCTV, they mark you with a beacon to any loitering Police helicopter or UAV.

At any rate, just look what else you can do with IR LED glasses.

The police state's not that dumb...

An analysis of the Metropolitan Police’s new Counter-Terrorism advertising campaign.

The posters are brilliantly designed; the mass of cameras with the single one ringed indicates both that there is a terrorist photographer out there, but also that the Police can identify them from the masses. It re-affirms the threat, and reassures us of the police’s protective power.

The red white and black imagery and McCarthy-esq language is powerful, but seems to be deliberately drawn from fascist and dystopian cultural myths. Compare the posters to V for Vendetta, 1984 or Children of Men. Even the ranks of identical cameras seem to indicate a forced hegemony. Already anti-fascist re-workings are popping up online, as if taking the bait. Protest about the posters is growing.

I don’t believe that fascism is innately drawn to this artistic style, and I don’t think the choice of imagery is revealing about the authorities. Poster design is not an accident. I’d be more worried if the posters were a friendly green and white. While we may have a problem with social observation and the targeting of minorities in this country, with CCTV and spot-checks, I suspect the Met isn’t dumb enough to needlessly boast in this manner.

I believe that the Met is deliberately playing on these myths, targeting the adverts not just at the greater public, but at the bad-guys directly.

The Met’s greatest fear seems to be the low-level radicalisation of home-grown terrorists rather than trained outsiders, and projecting allusions of power may serve to frighten these individuals out of terror plots.

This would be the rough equivalent of the American ‘Surge’ strategy; to impose a high level of control for a short unsustainable period, hoping that the ensuing calm becomes accepted as normal. If government propaganda can force a brief reduction in plotter activity, the reduction may stick.

It’s long been known that the sensation of being watched makes people more honest, so it seems likely that the Met are overplaying their power here, drawing on authoritarian imagery to project the illusion of power against the enemies among us. The posters are there to frighten the dishonest.

So I don’t think these posters are an indication of our slide into a fascist dystopia, but rather a well designed projection of the power of nightmares against the enemies of the state.

I’m not sure I agree with this all, but I just can’t accept the initial reaction that the posters betray fascist tendencies in the police. There’s more to it.

But, if you really don’t like the posters, just consider it an open invitation of waste police time.