Wired's Kevin Poulsen has pried loose details about the FBI's homebrew spyware, used in criminal investigations. The document is redacted almost to the point of uselessness, but there are some interesting nuggets. Paul Ohm, who used to work in the FBI department responsible for the spyware, notes,Page one may be the most interesting page. Someone at CCIPS, my old unit, cautions that "While the technique is of indisputable value in certain kinds of cases, we are seeing indications that it is being used needlessly by some agencies, unnecessarily raising difficult legal questions (and a risk of suppression) without any countervailing benefit,"Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years...
On page 152, the FBI's Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU) "advised Pittsburgh that they could assist with a wireless hack to obtain a file tree, but not the hard drive content." This is fascinating on several levels. First, what wireless hack? The spyware techniques described in Poulsen's reporting are deployed when a target is unlocatable, and the FBI tricks him or her into clicking a link. How does wireless enter the picture? Don't you need to be physically proximate to your target to hack them wirelessly? Second, why could CEAU "assist . . . to obtain a file tree, but not the hard drive content." That smells like a legal constraint, not a technical one. Maybe some lawyer was making distinctions based on probable cause?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Wired publishes documents detailing the FBI's spyware
Thursday, March 12, 2009
One-eyed filmmaker conceals camera in prosthetic (AP)
BRUSSELS - A one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras. Canadian Rob Spence's eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage.
A fan of the 1970s televsion series "The Six Million Dollar Man," Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cell phone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.
With the camera tucked inside a prosthetic eye, he hopes to be able to record the same things he sees with his working eye, his muscles moving the camera eye just like his real one.
Spence said he plans to become a "human surveillance machine" to explore privacy issues and whether people are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."
He said his subjects won't know he's filming until afterward but he will have to receive permission from them before including them in his film.
His special equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. It's a challenge to get everything to fit inside the prosthetic eye, but Spence has had help from top engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The camera was provided by Santa Clara, California-based OmniVision Inc., a company that specializes in the miniature cameras found in cell phones, laptops and endoscopes.
Zafer Zamboglu, staff technical product manager at OmniVision, said he thinks that success with the eye camera will accelerate research into using the technology to restore vision to blind people.
"We believe there's a good future in the prosthetic eye," he said.
The team expects to get the camera to work in the next month. Spence, who jokingly calls himself "Eyeborg," told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye — the same pale hazel color as his real one — would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera.
"As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person," he says, "and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact."
But Spence also acknowledged privacy concerns.
"The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me," he said, adding people aren't sure they want to hang around someone who might be filming them at any time."
