
Art Project: Armor That Lets You Sense Surveillance Cameras - Musicmadness
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-new-armor-that-lets-you-sense-surveillance-cameras/282335/
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sargun
It looks for infrared light. This will only detect a small subset of
surveillance cameras that actively use infrared light for illumination. There
are tons of dome cameras, and such that don't use infrared light.

It's a cool art project.

There was a research paper I found on detecting hidden cameras that emitted
high power IR light, and looked for reflective sources. Potentially, you could
listen to EM noise, and then introduce visual noise to the environment. It
turns out, this is a hard problem to actually solve.

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mikro2nd
I have read - and I'd love to have this confirmed or refuted - that pretty
much all those cameras are tuned somewhat into the IR so that they can still
do useful surveillance in low light situations.

My ~solution~ hack is to fasten a couple of small IR LEDs into my hat and
flood the cameras with lots of lights ;)

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Palomides
cameras are sensitive to IR and usually have a filter to block it, since it it
usually unwanted. you'd need extremely and impractically powerful IR lights to
do anything useful.

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anonymouscowar1
Some of those auto-camera-targetting laser cannons from Pirate Cinema would be
awesome.

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judk
This post illustrates is the problem with HNs "original title" policy: it lets
inaccurate linkbaity titles from sketchy publications (including the modern
_Atlantic_ ) get repeated on a more(?) reputable site like HN.

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translocation
This is a creative art project. Obviously, it doesn't work, and cannot work as
designed. Most consumer night-vision cameras emit near-infrared light with
LEDs at around 750-900nm, which is the wavelength this spaulder is designed to
pick up. This is the same wavelength of EM radiation your TV remote uses. If
your phone camera does not have a filter for IR light, you can see this kind
of radiation as a white glow through your phone.

Cameras generally emit IR only while in darkness. Sunlight, or even
incandescent lightbulbs, will emit so much infrared light that any nearby
security cameras would be blotted out.

A functional 'security spaulder' device would need to be far more complex.
Maybe a combination of IR, network packets, and other indicators would work.

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patja
Isn't this a William Gibson invention from the Pattern Recognition / Blue Ant
series?

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MechSkep
Does this even work? It's just an IR detector, and you can be pretty sure that
the sun is a bigger emitter than security spotlights...

