These will be all the rage at future demonstrations

[andrewducker]

Twenty years ago, David Brin wrote about the death of privacy in "Earth" (later, he wrote a non-fiction book covering this in more detail, The Transparent Society. The lynchpin piece of tech behind this was the ability to record everything that people saw during the day, and then post it online. Which was pretty forward thinking for 1990.

Today, jwz posted a link to this:

It has a five hour memory. It records all of the time, but only starts saving when you hit record - at which point it starts at the beginning of its 30-second buffer. In other words, you see something suspicious, hit the button, and get the thing that you saw recorded for later perusal.

If I was going to be somewhere the police were going to be, well, policing, then considering the death of Ian Tomlinson, and the intermittent bad behaviour which occurs, I'd be wearing one of these things. Heck, faced with a group of people all wearing recording devices, would you want to cause trouble?

Next up - software to take the output from a few hundred of these, map them together, and produce a 3D playback that you can then pan a virtual camera through...

Comments

[andrewducker]

That would, in the UK, be hideously illegal.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Which part? Taking the devices off you would be illegal, but that would hardly stop them; they do that sort of thing all the time and are never called to order on it. If the jamming would be illegal, that's interesting, but I'd guess they'd act to change it - easy to see how you sell that one as an anti-terrorist measure.

[andrewducker]

Jam bluetooth devices at a distance? Jam all phone signals in the centre of London?

I'd put those down as causing so much disruption as to make them effectively impossible.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

No, you jam close to where the demo is.

[andrewducker]

Which, last time, would have meant taking out the phones and wireless internet of the headquarters of numerous banks.

They don't have the legal right to jam protestors, and nor are they likely to get it, as recording police activity is perfectly legal, and has been ruled so repeatedly. The occasional member of the police bashing someone is one thing, you're pretty much talking about widespread high-level conspiracy.

If we were operating a police state, then yes, I'd expect this. In our current society, it seems rather ridiculous.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

They wouldn't sell it as preventing themselves from being recorded; they'd sell it as preventing demonstraters from coordinating with each other. Last time it was on a Saturday; given that the various banks likely have perfectly good wired communications, how bothered would they be?

The police don't officially have the right to kill passers-by during protests, and it now seems that they unofficially do have that right. There seems to be very little political or judicial will for ensuring the police actually stay within the law.

Still, you may well be right about this and I hope you are - in which case I hope that future demos are covered in people using cellphones to upload video footage in real time.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Or you just don't admit to the jamming - everyone's cellphones and wifi networks stop working, but how do you prove it's the police? Sure, you gather absolutely rock-solid evidence that the RF signal your equipment just recorded could only be the result of deliberate jamming, and you put it on a web page. Would anything happen next?

[fj.livejournal.com]

They'd also kill all their own comms.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I thought jamming could be more specific than that.