[Brinworld] UK firms tout camera phone blinding tech
Safe Haven works by transmitting a signal in a localised environment such as a school, swimming pool, office facility or factory, which "disables the camera functionality of devices in the nearby environment", the companies claim. The snag is that Safe Haven technology needs to be integrated at the time of manufacture into new devices or installed as a Java download update to suitable equipment already in the market. "You need to have an approved camera," Blagden admitted, adding that the incorporation of Sade Haven technology is unlikely to affect handset prices. http://www.theregister.com/content/68/32783.html ---- "Can you hear me now?" --UBL
Safe Haven works by transmitting a signal in a localised environment such as a school, swimming pool, office facility or factory, which "disables the camera functionality of devices in the nearby environment", the companies claim.
If there will be a dedicated receiver circuit in the phone, operating on other than cellular frequencies, it will be fairly trivial to shield or jam or damage it. (Some countries, I think something Far-Eastern, want legislation to force the manufacturers to make the handset emit loud tone when taking the picture. A tiny switch enabling/disabling the transducer takes care of it rather easily. A non-tech approach could be to make the same tone popular as a ringtone, psychologically immunizing people against paying special attention to it.) If it will be a firmware update, it is matter of couple days or at most weeks until rogue firmware versions with blocking disabled pop up all around - especially if one of the blocked functions will be SMS messages in schools.
Thomas Shaddack wrote:
Safe Haven works by transmitting a signal in a localised environment such as a school, swimming pool, office facility or factory, which "disables the camera functionality of devices in the nearby environment", the companies claim.
If there will be a dedicated receiver circuit in the phone, operating on other than cellular frequencies, it will be fairly trivial to shield or jam or damage it.
That's overkill. If this thing is ever actually deployed, it'll be a feature that _asks_ a Safe-Haven-equipped camera phone not to take pictures here, and if you happen to have that kind of phone, it won't take pictures there. The solution to this is not to carry a special jammer device if you want to take pictures where people don't want it - it's to carry a digital camera (and besides, those get much better pictures - the one gsm cameraphone I've tried had only a 352x288 CCD in it, in spite of not being a cheap phone.) Alternatively, if you want to transmit pictures there as well as taking them, buy a phone now that doesn't have that feature, or buy a PDA with a camera and some kind of wireless card. Aside from places that want to protect privacy or prudishness, one obvious market for Safe Haven is police agencies that want to be able to bash people without being on live video. On the other hand, they'd probably be just as happy with a cell phone jammer, which also prevents live voice transmission, and therefore not only blocks strategic remote recordkeepers, but also blocks tactical coordination by a crowd's instigators.
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart -
Major Variola (ret.) -
Thomas Shaddack