Below are some readings that dig into the increasing surveillance of today’s society. In many instances, these new surveillance methods are first being tested in Las Vegas & prisons, and then brought into every day life, most notably through companies searching for the next best way to track consumers.
Required Reading:
- Signs of the Times: Smart Ads that Watch You Watching Them by Laura Farrar
- How Vegas Security Drives Surveillance Tech Everywhere &/or brief synopsis: 6 Ways Las Vegas Security Tech Has Entered Daily Life by Michael Kaplan
- Surveillance Society: New High-Tech Cameras are Watching You by James Vlahos
Recommended Reading:
- High-Tech Lockup: Inside 4 Next-Gen Prison Security Systems by Erik Sofge
- RFID-Enabled Phones Could Let Credit Card Companies to Track Users by Kim Zetter
- RFID Backers, Privacy Advocates Seek Common Ground by Rick Whiting
Optional:
- East Coast Diversified Corporation Completes Deal with EarthSearch & Enters GPS & RFID Technologies Industry Press Release, April 13, 2010
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After Saturday’s bomb attempt in Times Square, the NYT is hosting an interesting debate on the efficiency of surveillance cameras as preventive strategies… Check this out:
Google, Facebook and other Internet services could be asked to carry out Web-based facial recognition technologies that will make it possible for anyone to snap a cellphone picture of a stranger on the street, plug the picture into Google, and produce tagged and untagged pictures of the person across the Web, challenging our expectations of anonymity in public as camera footage proliferates.
That challenge will become even more acute over the next decades, as Google and Facebook confront pressure to post live feeds from all public and private surveillance cameras online. As the surveillance network in world capitals becomes ubiquitous, it will be possible to click on a picture of me in Midtown, back click on me to see where I came from, forward click to see where I’m going, making possible 24/7 surveillance of everyone in the system. When confronted with this not-so-hypothetical scenario, most people balk. And to accept 24/7 ubiquitous surveillance in exchange for virtually non-existent security benefits seems like a bad bargain, by any sane cost-benefit analysis.
These are the debaters:
* Richard A. Clarke, author, “Cyber War”
* Steven Simon, co-author, “The Next Attack”
* Paul Ekman, expert on facial expressions
* Michael J. Black, computer scientist, Brown University
* Noah Shachtman, Wired magazine
* Michael J. Tarr, professor of cognitive neuroscience
* Bruce Schneier, security technologist
* Jeffrey Rosen, law professor, author of “The Naked Crowd”
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/times-square-bombs-and-big-crowds/
guys!! I keep coming back to comment here. I can’t help it. I miss you!
Check out The Simpson’s great episode on surveilance
http://www.hulu.com/watch/143446/the-simpsons-to-surveil-with-love
Good finds, Jimena… thanks! Being able to follow people by pictures sounds pretty scary.