I haven’t looked at BoingBoing in a while, but it so happened that the first post today when I finally did check in was about something wonderful and surveillance-related… this is Andrea Anastasio’s new multilayered artwork / book, Fingerprint, an exploration and extrapolation that resulted from the experience of being fingerprinted on entering the USA a few years ago.
Category: art
Brazilian modernism (2)
Not surveillance-related, but here’s some of the many, many pictures that I took whilst getting very sunburnt walking around the big open spaces under the huge skies of Brasilia last week. There are a couple more pictures of the Parliament complex in my report from my meeting there last week. My first set of photos of Niemeyer’s work from Sao Paulo can be found here.
Ever fancied global domination?
The always interesting Very Short List draws my attention to a neat bit of web design cum surveillance art installation: the Henchman’s Helper. Designed by Joel Friesen, it is a window onto some deranged mind bent on global domination, showing a retro atompunkish console on which are displayed over 40 feeds from satellite mapping applications, webcams and weather channels. What’s more, the code is Creative Commons-licensed so anyone can adapt it to their own evil purposes!
This is all good fun but it also brings to mind something I reported on last year, so-called ‘surveillance in a box’ products (see the article in New Scientist), integrated data-fusion systems, combining automated searching and cross-matching of data from multiple sources, such as Siemens and Nokia’s joint venture into so-called ‘Lawful Interception’ Intelligence Platforms. This could lead to powerful multifunctional surveillance, including things like telephone monitoring being available to nations with dubious human rights records, private corporations and even wealthy individuals as the cost of such packages comes down. This will make what Greg Elmer calls ‘personal information economies’ into private intelligence services for some…
ubisurv 