Technology
By Steven Anderson
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The Def Con Demo. Swearingen didn't just theorize. He went to Def Con and showed the thing working in the real…
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Privacy Angle and Legal Gray Areas. Swearingen co-founded the SecKC security meetup, and he's pretty open about what's driving him here.
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Flock's Broader Footprint. Flock isn't the only surveillance technology facing scrutiny right now.
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Bill Swearingen ran 31 million tests from his home in Kansas City. The result: a pattern that makes vehicles basically invisible to Flock surveillance cameras — without touching…
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The project, called noRecognition, targets the object-detection software layer sitting behind the camera. Flock cameras keep recording normally.
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Flock has been controversial for a while now. The company's surveillance cameras are expanding fast across the United States, and the pushback from privacy advocates has grown…
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And the consequences of getting it wrong aren't abstract. Incidents where automated license plate readers misidentified vehicles have led to innocent people being detained at…
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Swearingen co-founded the SecKC security meetup, and he's pretty open about what's driving him here. He sees noRecognition as a tool for people to "opt out of being tracked.
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The legal picture, though, is murky. Plate obstruction laws vary by state, and it's unclear how different jurisdictions would treat a vehicle wrapped in an adversarial pattern.
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noRecognition is also raising money. Swearingen launched a crowdfunding campaign to produce T-shirts, hoodies, and eventually vehicle skins featuring the patterns.
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Swearingen's work fits into a longer tradition of people finding creative ways to disrupt surveillance systems.
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Flock isn't the only surveillance technology facing scrutiny right now. Lawmakers have been pushing harder on facial recognition broadly, including Meta's use of it in smart…
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More context: BitMine Pushes Ethereum Stack Past 5.8 Million ETH with 7,391-ETH Buy
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He says he'll keep improving the model. Patterns get more effective over time as the reinforcement learning system keeps training.
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