 Franklin Delano Roosevelt likened the motley coalition supporting his opponent in the 1940 election to a chameleon. The president joked: “We all know the story of the unfortunate chameleon, which turned brown when placed on a brown rug, and turned red when placed on a red rug, but who died a tragic death when they put him on a Scotch plaid.” Plaid, in actuality, is never fatal, though it has been known to kill the vibes for a few first dates. There is, however, a new use for plaid in the 21st century. With millions of cameras embedded in doorbells and suspended over streets and highways, plaid may just be the fashion accessory for the privacy-conscious. The power of plaid has been discovered by a security researcher, who seems to have found a way to make people and vehicles less visible to the algorithms behind surveillance cameras. As Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch reports, Bill Swearingen’s “noRecognition” project uses computer-generated patterns to confuse automated detection systems. After some 31 million tests, his model produced patterns that defeated 11 open-source algorithms, including software used by Flock license-plate readers, Axon body cameras, and Clearview AI. At the recent DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, a car wrapped in one of Swearingen’s patterns evaded detection from a Flock camera. These patterns, however, do not stop cameras from recording. They merely prevent algorithms from recognizing and flagging people, faces, or vehicles. Swearingen calls these patterns a way to “opt out of being tracked.” It is an ingenious response to a troubling reality: Although we never agreed to it, we are increasingly subjected to automated surveillance that tracks us wherever we go, with the potential to record our associations and activities. Who knows? If people start wearing these patterns, maybe surveillance algorithms will crawl across our images and die. Comments are closed.
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