[Ssc-dev] Respectful Cameras

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 06/08/2011 11:16 PM, Shawn Van Every wrote:
> We all probably know about this one already:
> http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18617/?a=f

Yes, it is Gibson's "really ugly t-shirt" feature!

http://www.viceland.com/blogs/en/2010/09/03/william-gibson/2/

>From the interview:

What’s interesting with regards to the book while thinking of this stuff
is that the garment that sort of helps to save the day is a t-shirt. You
call it the ugliest t-shirt in the world. It’s specially designed to
scramble the wearer’s identity so that they can’t be picked up by CCTV
cameras. You have the character of Garreth, who’s like the ultimate
quasi-military badass, sort of being afraid of this t-shirt because it’s
“bad to know” about and it’s “too deep.”

If it were real, it would be just too bad to know about. It offers
virtual invisibility—video invisibility. Your acts cannot be recorded.
The idea works particularly well in the context of London, which is such
a famously surveilled landscape.

Is there any basis in reality for that shirt?

Only insofar as that the description of it emerged instantly and
effortlessly from my colleague Bruce Sterling. [laughs] I forget exactly
what my version of it was, but I asked him for some help. He said, “You
just need a really ugly t-shirt.” He came out with this thing off the
top of his head, his assumption being that the absolute holy grail of
the video surveillance industry was facial recognition. He said,
“They’ll tell you that they’re working on it, but they already have
some—and they don’t tell you what they’re doing anyway.” He reeled off
how the whole thing would work. And I said, “Thank you, I’ll take that.”
My experience with Bruce has been that if he can imagine it that easily,
it’s likely to be close to what somebody is doing. Have you seen, on the
internet, this guy who can use his fists to make different shapes that
video surveillance systems will recognize as faces?