OccupyDenHaag Anonymous

URME Surveillance

Anti Face-Rec art project by Leo Selvaggio where he offers his facial likeness as surveillant data disinformation - video embedded below:

URME represents artist-driven, anti-surveillance devices made for the public. Working as an artist in Chicago, the most widely surveilled city in the nation, and seeing how it has affect the way I behave and think about public space,  I have an overwhelming urge to protect the public from such surveillance …

… I have researched several of the strategies out there and there are two major themes. You can either wear a ski mask and hide your face, which looks very suspicious or you can destroy private or public property vis-a-vis security cameras. URME offers a different way. With facial recognition technology being widely used now a days, rather try to hide or obscure one’s face from the camera, these devices allow you to present a different, alternative identity to the camera, my own. When you wear these devices the cameras will track me instead of you and your actions in public space will be attributed as mine because it will be me the cameras see. All URME devices have been tested for facial recognition and each properly identifies the wearer of me on facebook, which has some of the most sophisticated facial recognition software around. 

That’s one of the reasons why a growing number of schools are replacing traditional identification cards with iris scanners. By the fall, several schools — ranging from elementary schools to colleges — will be rolling out various iris scanning security methods.

Winthrop University in South Carolina is testing out iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer. Students had their eyes scanned as they received their ID cards in June.

"Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don’t have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University’s Information Technology department. “It can be hands free security."

Some passwords for critical systems are gradually being replaced with biometric identifiers like fingerprints and iris scans, which supposedly offer a safer way to log in. Biometric information can’t be stolen in a phishing attack, for instance, because the markers are unique (and physically attached) to each user. It’s a foolproof system, right?

Ha.

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