Protest organizers should hand out these hoodies, or someone should sell them to protestors through some kind of pop-up shop ambassador program where an affiliate at each protest sells the apparel on consignment.
FYI check your local laws, this is almost certainly criminal in at least some places (e.g. in Germany it's illegal to "wear things which may prevent or interfere with identification of protestors" and to "carry items meant to interfere with identification", this clearly meets those criteria).
German police usually has a bunch of people (and cars with pole-mounted cameras) running around with cameras filming everyone at regular protests; you'd think nothing can happen without being taped. Except of course it often goes <FOOTAGE MISSING> when it gets interesting, seems to be a technical issue. Just like bodycams suddenly failing to work. Oh well
The primary qualifier here is this isn't American police. Use of force, excessive use of force, and lethal use of force are much, much rarer here. Police kills about a dozen people per year. Not over a thousand. Though worryingly this number has risen a lot in the last couple years, it used to be more like half a dozen ten years ago.
Regardless, when it happens, it's still a police force, so you still have esprit de corps, "blue wall of silence" and "DA doesn't feel like prosecuting people they work with day to day" effects, and evidence is quite frequently not gathered or "gets lost". So for example if there is excessive use of force at a protest it wouldn't be unusual for those recordings to be misplaced. Bodycams aren't universal yet, but they're always somehow turned off during excessive use of force. The latest example would be a 16yo refugee who was shot dead with an MP5 (i.e. not standard-issue-24/7-belt-carry for police, something you have to get from the car), all officers had bodycams, no recordings. Five officers were charged with various things (up to 2nd degree homicide) because a citizen made an audio recording of the police action (which is a felony btw.), revealing contradictory and false statements.
My googling has been failing to find info about the bodycams etc in this case. Do you have a link?
Additionally, do you have any figures, even very approximate, for what proportion of the time police bodycams are worn and on and what proportion of incidents have said camera turned off? This helps see if there's a real mismatch/incidence of corruption here.
With that being said, it is not illegal to attempt / to succeed at escaping a imprisonment as the will to be free is an unalienable human right under German law.
In Germany? “Some people in the crowd started to mask their faces“ is THE excuse for authorities to stop protests. You cannot seriously argue this doesn’t happen at e.g. 1st of May protests.
[0] I mean that in a legal sense, that's how the police works. Whether stopping the protest is morally the right thing to do or not is a different issue that I don't want to address here.
If you think German police(*) of all police forces goes easy on lefties you are completely delusional.
(*) The generalization is okay in this context, because behavior is pretty uniform and larger protests will have riot police pulled from other states anyway.
It is honestly just a terrible idea - you are essentially placing a target on yourself, no matter how you use it. Simply scanning a crowd of people with a camera, you are identifying people protesting from other civilians, in real-time and no cost. If you watched a crowd from above, over time you could find all sorts of patterns. In some countries, that could mean your whole family disappears.
The only groups I see benefitting from this are the agents of oppressive regimes, and the meth heads breaking into your storage shed at night and stealing your bike.
Depending on where you live, wearing a mask (as in: face covering, not the COVID masks) at a public protest or demonstration can be a punishable offense forbidden by law… and I'm not talking about autocratic states but many civilized and relatively liberal Western countries, cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_law
> For example, The Georgia Supreme Court found the law constitutional on the grounds that the wearing of the mask was an act of intimidation and a threat of violence
Women wear masks ever day with their make up, and also documented with filters on social media. Bet the courts didnt think of masks in that context did they?
I didnt get taught law, its not something that is a compulsory subject to teach and the adult population certainly doesnt get taught about the upgrades or changes to law, so I cant have a democratic debate over the laws that exist.
Ergo we are living in a legal dictatorship that put Mussolini to shame, but as most people dont know who he is, thats a point thats wasted on people.
Why is the state hell bent on removing everyone's privacy as well?
These anti-mask laws are designed to harm the public, especially when considering the riot police will be balaclava'ed up and in full riot gear.
If the scientific community especially at Uni, werent such pussy's there would be psychological paper's that exist demonstrating the provocative nature of the riot gear uniform, using military techniques, because the police and military share many training elements.
Representative democracy is a trick to cede autonomy over one's actions, so if you needed a way to control a population en-masse, this would be a disarmingly charming way to achieve this objective, the sort of thing a self attracted sociopath would come up with, and something that continues to attract sociopaths with narcissistic attributes around the world to this day!
I don't see where you would get that from my comment, which didn't name any country. The point was that the wiki article I pointed to does list quite a number of countries, of which several do fall into the group of “liberal Western countries”. Nobody said that _all_ countries listed there do.
The documentation lists its limitations, which include daylight:
> The Camera Shy Hoodie is not an end-all-be-all for hiding your identity. It’s good for one thing, blowing out the view of night vision (IR) cameras in low light environments. It’s not effective in sunlight, most indoor lighting, or against conventional cameras. In fact, you will draw attention to yourself if you wear this in a context in which the security
cameras are actively monitored. In the view of an IR camera, it’ll look as if you’re flashing a light directly at the lens. In addition, the LEDs need to be a minimum distance from the camera to be effective, as the cone of light from them needs to be wide enough to overlap with the cameras view of the wearers head. In practice, this is about 12ft (~3m).
The idea is designed to exploit limitations with the camera's auto-exposure, and I presume a requirement to do that is to strobe a light that outshines the ambient light by n times. That works at night because there's so little ambient light, during the day you'd have to outshine the sun (and the sun is really bright).
Be realistic, 'everyone should wear this to provide cover to people in stealth mode' is not a sensible security plan outside of an extremely limited number of contexts. I hate security camera theater and panopticons most than most people, and I have exactly zero expectation of this becoming A Thing.
Indeed, this is only really useful if the cameras aren't actively being monitored. If you're the odd one out wearing this at a protest, you might be specifically targeted.
Thats assuming they can figure out which one is wearing the hoodie. With enough evidence I can see them going for a guy with that, but they would have to not only make the decision to specifically target you, but to figure out which one of the hoodies moving around is causing the issue
you don’t have to commit a crime to wear this. you can wear it as a statement, in which case attracting that kind of attention so that you can say — ideally to someone with authority — “i don’t think it’s right to surveil the public like this” is arguably some measure of success.
Given that the cops have never needed much of a reason to illegally beat people up, I admire anyone who cares about making that statement so much that they're willing to risk it.
I think in the scenario this is trying to defeat, they already know who most of the other people are because their facial recognition software worked & they're already looking at their socials, purchase history, etc. All the 3 letter agencies are using this info, plus whatever else they have to construct some kind of case against them.
So, they become the low hanging fruit. The more resources we give our TLA's, the less this matters, of course :)
That's why you put a pebble in your shoe. Then after enough years you take it out like Piccolo dropping his weighted clothes and, like Harrison Bergeron in the story, defy the authoritarian state with dance.
Granted vr telemetry is based off of multiple cameras tracking a single individual - still, one wonders how hard it would be to cover a crowd with specific aim of identification and tracking?
For all practical purposes, it is impossible in the current state of security/surveillance video footage.
The example described in the paper in your link is using cameras that are setup to provide very high resolution images of people. It would be like using full-frame portrait images for face recognition, and then expecting that to translate to real-world scenarios where you might only have 20 pixels on a face, and the person is off-axis to the camera.
Gait detection has been discussed for a while, and may definitely be a thing one day, but right now we are barely at the point where pose estimation is a thing in security video. Very far from being able to do high precision pose recognition and sampling over successive frames to model something that would qualify as "gait".
999/1000 people look similar. One is just a glowing sun of light.
Which one do you go take to the backroom?