Is it time to break out the tinfoil hat?
Gibbs follows on from last week’s column on surveillance with a tale of cops caught on video in a house search, the state of video surveillance in the UK, and wonders if our operating systems might be rigged …
In last week’s Backspin about surveillance I mentioned video surveillance and, as a great example of how you can never be too careful about how you behave anywhere, consider the following tale: A drug dealer in Polk County, Fla., was arrested and, as a result, a group of Polk County’s finest were dispatched to search the dealer’s house.
Futuristic security surveillance system brings Big Brother to life
Now, this drug dealer was apparently nervous that someone might get into his house and steal his product (I’m guessing that’s an occupational hazard of that business) so he installed a surveillance camera.
Polk County’s finest, showing a dazzling lack of forensic skills, failed to notice the camera so, as a consequence, their search was recorded. Now, had the police done what they were supposed to do, to wit, just search the place, things would have been fine.
The problem was that in the course of their investigations they discovered the bad guy’s big screen TV (it was pretty hard to miss) and his Nintendo Wii game console.
Now, perhaps they thought there might be evidence on the Wii because they fired it up. And when they found Wii Bowling was loaded, well, that obviously had to be investigated too.
The trouble was the police investigated Wii Bowling for something like nine hours!
The video is great. Most of the in-depth Wii Bowling investigation is done by one cop and, when he finally gets a strike, he demonstrates his professional detachment by leaping about with the kind of gusto only a Microsoft CEO could muster.
Let me digress for a moment and note that, curiously, I cannot find out how the video actually got out.
Anyway, something else from last week I didn’t have space to mention, in the land of my birth, England, a BBC article in 2006 estimated there were some 4.2 million video cameras in Britain, which worked out to roughly one for every 14 people. It is said that each person in London is imaged several dozen times per day.
Of course that is in the United Kingdom where there is no Bill of Rights (although the European Union’s privacy laws do apply and improve things somewhat). Here, your privacy is, in theory, better protected, but that’s the reality of the future: Surveillance cameras everywhere.
Another creepy surveillance issue is that your PC could be watching you. A 2004 computer virus called Rbot-GR was designed to not only trap keystrokes and gather other data, it could also switch on a Web cam to spy on the computer user!
Now the good thing (if anything good can be said about such malware), was that it wasn’t a particularly effective virus; its spread was minimal and, as far as is known, it vanished sometime in 2005. As far as is known.
And therein lays the problem: What if Rbot’s successor is far more cleverly written and you are being spied on even as you read this?
Really, that’s just a step up from the risks associated with malware anyway. You run antivirus software, you make sure it gets updated, you have a firewall … in short you do all the right things but you also know that you can’t be certain.
In fact, how would you know if spyware was built-in to the core of your operating system by the vendor?
Let’s, for the sake of discussion, posit that the feds had gone to, say, Microsoft and suggested they add some “special” code? We know that such things have happened in the past and the tacit assumption is that Microsoft had turned them down but what if that isn’t the case?
It is conceivable that code could be engineered well enough to avoid detection and the gods know that smuggling monitoring code inside the hundreds of operating system updates and patches would be equally plausible. So, am I just being paranoid? Should I put on my tin-foil hat?
Gibbs looks over his shoulder a lot in Ventura, Calif. Send black helicopters to backspin@gibbs.com.
