On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 5:17 PM jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
On Thursday, February 28, 2019, 12:16:48 PM PST, Punk <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote: On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 09:15:51 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
If you are in the city, everything is on CCTV. But you are not going to drop something valuable in the middle of the city.
Yet the majority of customers live in the city. Also, surveillance in the city means surveillance when you enter and leave the city.
Depends very much on the city. In the big (relatively) city closest to me, Portland Oregon, there are many hundreds of streets that 'leave the city'. Sure, they could all be camera'd, but what good would that do? The pictures could be stored, and would be, but how could it be known if any specific frame represents a "useful" image?
Eventually, some kind of AI could be developed, but I doubt whether this would find most activities which would be useful to identify. Placing or retrieving a dead-drop would be one of the most undetectable events that could occur: Drive to a block, get out, walk around in a large grassy area, bend over, pick up something, walk away, drive away. How much video of this would surveillance have to catch to determine that the person surveilled was doing something suspicious...particularly if they didn't already know something was going on.
This reminds me that 23 years ago, I first learned about "3M Louvered Film", https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/industrial-manufacturing-us/display-enhancement-... a plastic sheet product that prevents viewing at angles greater than a pre-defined amount. It's now generically available. https://www.shinetsu.info/vc_film
This stuff could be placed over a car's license plate, so that a camera well above (or to the side, or both) couldn't read the plate. To be sure, that's not necessarily an unmixed blessing. While it effectively makes a car look like it doesn't have a (readable) license plate, that in itself might be considered suspicious.
A few weeks ago, I realized that cemeteries would be excellent locations for placing dead-drops. (no pun intended, but I'll take what I can get !). There are few people who visit cemeteries, but the idea of a person visiting a grave is very plausible. And, some amount of 'searching' is to be expected, so it doesn't look suspicious. Further, there are plenty of gravestones which can be used as markers for the placement and retrieval of those dead-drops, even more precisely than WAAS GPS or L1+L5 GPS.
The war continues.
Jim Bell
Riffing a bit on the cemeteries: Pick a famous grave near you - some recently deceased celebrity, say Jim Morrison (as opposed to an ancient celebrity, such as US Grant) that attracts a lot of people. And, FWIW, there's a fair amount of tradecraft shown in The Americans, a pretty good TV series set in the '80s. Kurt