October 7, 2002
Protesting the Big Brother Lens, Little Brother Turns an Eye Blind
By JOHN MARKOFF

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/technology/07ZZAP.html?todaysheadlines


SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 6 - Confronted with the unblinking eyes of surveillance
cameras, Michael Naimark believes he can hide in plain sight with the aid of
a $1 laser pointer.

Mr. Naimark, a Silicon Valley artist and technologist, decided to try
turning the tables on what he saw as the potential for Big Brother
surveillance after the Sept. 11 attacks.

His is a Little Brother response: using inexpensive laser pointers to
temporarily blind those omnipresent electronic eyes. He plans to post his
13-page, single-spaced treatise on the subject this week on his Web site,
www.naimark.net.

"The question `if a camera's aimed at me can I not be in the image?' became
a haunting obsession," he said. "The answer is yes."

But in these security-conscious times, one person's civil liberties can be
another's shortsighted anarchy.

"It's possible that Harry Potter's invisibility cloak may not be viewed as a
good thing for the community," said Kevin Kelly, an editor at Wired
magazine. "We have laws prohibiting jamming police radar. It will be
interesting to see if camera-jamming becomes illegal."

Nonetheless, Mr. Naimark's obsession is emblematic of a national debate that
is growing as video cameras proliferate - a proliferation that results both
from falling monitoring costs, made possible by the Internet, and increasing
safety concerns in the face of crime and terrorism.

In his research, Mr. Naimark discovered that there was already military
literature widely available about using lasers to blind sensors, and that it
was relatively simple to become invisible in front the cameras that now
watch over many public spaces in this country.

"I began by aiming an inexpensive laser pointer directly into the lens of a
video camera," he writes. "The results were striking. The tiny beam
neutralized regions of the camera sensor far larger than the actual size of
the beam. Properly aimed, it could block a far-away camera from seeing
anything inside of a large window."

While Mr. Naimark acknowledged that he had some ethical discomfort about his
project because his information could be useful to terrorists, he decided to
go ahead.

"My interest and motivation is to provide the creative community with some
stimulating and provoking stuff," he writes. "These are stimulating and
provoking times."

In recent weeks there have been a growing number of incidents involving
video-surveillance cameras, ranging from the mother who recently surrendered
after she was recorded hitting her 4-year-old daughter in an Indiana parking
lot to a man who filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the Marriott hotel
chain last month after discovering a video camera hidden in a bathroom light
fixture.

The growing reliance on surveillance is giving some of the pioneers of the
video camera industry second thoughts.

"I have lots of worries about how this technology is being used," said John
Graham, who is the founder of BroadWare Technologies, a Cupertino, Calif.,
maker of software for video-camera networks, and who was one of the first
researchers to send audio and video over the Internet.

"I've become Big Brother, but I didn't mean to be," Mr. Graham said. "It's
just that there's no money in education or scientific collaboration."

The rush to surveillance in the wake of Sept. 11 is revitalizing a growing
group of civil liberties activists who, like Mr. Naimark, are determined to
limit the spread of networks of inexpensive video cameras that are appearing
in virtually all public spaces.

In New York City, the Surveillance Camera Players, a guerrilla theatre
troupe, is placing hand-drawn maps of video camera locations on the Internet
and staging brief politically inspired performances in front of the cameras.


The group was co-founded by Bill Brown, an American literature scholar, who
said the troupe was sympathetic to Mr. Naimark's opposition to the
ubiquitous video eyes but took a different tack, highlighting the emerging
surveillance world through a series of street parodies.

"His methods are quite different from ours," Mr. Brown said. "We're
philosophical anarchists. We never engage in illegal activity, but we
believe the greatest weakness of those who operate the surveillance systems
is that they require secrecy."

One person who said he occasionally sees Mr. Brown's group perform is Brian
Curry, the chief executive and founder of EarthCam, based in New York City,
which makes surveillance camera systems and operates a network of seven
cameras aimed at Times Square that constantly beam video images over the
Internet.

His Web site, www.earthcam.com, attracts 50,000 to 75,000 visitors each day,
Mr. Curry said, and he frequently sees people standing in Times Square
waving at his cameras while they talk on their cellphones.

"We're offering a window on the world that is very much like sitting in a
restaurant and looking out on the street," he said. "To try to inhibit this
by saying it represents a brave new society where people are losing their
privacy is far-fetched."

EarthCam's business changed after Sept. 11, he said, because there was an
increased reluctance to travel and more interest in using video cameras
rather than personal visits.

He also argued that the Internet video camera fills a social role in a
changing society where people no longer know their neighbors, taking the
place of the neighbor who would keep an vigilant eye on a neighborhood.

"People move a lot, and they're not home a lot," he said. "Internet cameras
have helped fill the gap."

Indeed for some, the Internet camera is a step toward a global village.
Gregory P. Galanos of Mobius Venture Capital in Silicon Valley now keeps a
remote eye on his second home on a Greek island, where he has installed four
cameras that send pictures over the Internet each hour. He can see ships
passing and watch workers remodeling his home. "It gives me peace of mind,"
he said.

That is not the view of a group of privacy advocates in Washington, who are
suing the Metropolitan Police Department under the Freedom of Information
Act to force disclosure of technical information about a network of video
cameras that has been established in the city.

The value of video cameras to improve safety and detect terrorists has been
greatly overrated, according to Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of
the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit advocacy group based
in Washington.

Like the Surveillance Camera Players, Mr. Rotenberg said he worries that
while Internet-viewable cameras might offer entertainment, there are other
networks of private and law enforcement cameras that collect information
secretly on behalf of the government.

"There has been a reduction in privacy and there has been an expansion in
government secrecy," he said. "We give up our privacy, but we don't gain
openness in exchange."

That view contrasts sharply with that of David Brin, a physicist and author
who has argued that universally accessible cameras will increase
transparency in modern society without encroaching on traditional civil
liberties.

"My metaphor is that databases are expansions of human memory and the
cameras are the extension of human vision," he said, adding that the
challenge is to make certain that new laws have provisions for "watching the
watchers."

Such a viewpoint upsets other civil libertarians, who see the growing
encroachment of video cameras as simply deepening the power of law
enforcement and society's elites.

"I sometimes wonder if I'm living on the same planet as David Brin," said
Philip E. Agre, an associate professor of information studies at the
University of California at Los Angeles. "Everyone can watch the common
people, but that has nothing to do with the political question of who can
watch the powerful."

Mr. Naimark, the artist who believes he can disable security monitors, said
he would be satisfied if he stirred debate on surveillance.

"One role of the artist in the contemporary world is to hold a mirror up to
society," he said. "The artist is a social critic, and the artistic angle is
in exposing and revealing and provoking things."

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