The fashion line designed to trick surveillance cameras by Alex Hern

The fashion line designed to trick surveillance cameras by Alex Hern

Adversarial Fashion garments are covered in license plates, aimed at bamboozling a device’s databases

Alex Hern in Las Vegas      @alexhern            Wed 14 Aug 2019 06.00 BST

Garment: Ropa, vestido

Aim: Destinada

Bamboozling: Engañar.

Automatic license plate readers, which use networked surveillance cameras and simple image recognition to track the movements of cars around a city, may have met their match, in the form of a T-shirt. Or a dress. Or a hoodie.

Hoodie: Capucha / Robin Hood /

The anti-surveillance garments were revealed at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas on Saturday by the hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose, who presented the inaugural collection of her Adversarial Fashion line.

Rose credits a conversation with a friend, the Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Dave Maass, for inspiring the project: “He mentioned that the readers themselves are not very good,” she said. “They already read in things like picket fences and other junk. I thought that if they’re fooled by a fence, then maybe I could take a crack at it.”

Picket fenced: Valla, cerca

They already read →adverbio antes del verbo

Crack at it →Preposición at

To human eyes, Rose’s fourth amendment T-shirt contains the words of the fourth amendment to the US constitution in bold yellow letters. The amendment, which protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures”, has been an important defense against many forms of government surveillance: in 2012, for instance, the US supreme court ruled that it prevented police departments from hiding GPS trackers on cars without a warrant.

                        On cars → El GPS se instala oculto dentro del coche

But to an automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system, the shirt is a collection of license plates, and they will get added to the license plate reader’s database just like any others it sees. The intention is to make deploying that sort of surveillance less effective, more expensive, and harder to use without human oversight, in order to slow down the transition to what Rose calls “visual personally identifying data collection”.

To make deploying that sort of surveillance: Hacer que el desarrollo de este tipo de vigilancia.

                        To slow down → Ralentizar

“It’s a highly invasive mass surveillance system that invades every part of our lives, collecting thousands of plates a minute. But if it’s able to be fooled by fabric, then maybe we shouldn’t have a system that hangs things of great importance on it,” she said.

Rose likens her work to that of other security researchers at DefCon. “If a phone is discovered to have a vulnerability, we don’t throw our phones away. This is like that, disclosing a vulnerability. I was shocked it was so easy, and I would call on people who think these systems are critical to find better ways to do that verification.”

Liken: Conecta

(…)

The anti-ALPR fabric is just the latest example of “adversarial fashion”, albeit the first to be targeted against car trackers. In 2016, the Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey worked with international interaction studio Hyphen-Labs to produce the Hyperface textile, fabric printed with a seemingly abstract pattern designed to trigger facial recognition systems.

Albeit: Aunque

On Monday, the owners of the King’s Cross development in central London were revealed to be applying facial recognition without consent on any visitor to the 67-acre estate. The UK’s Information Commissioner warned the landowners that such use may not be legal under existing law.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/the-fashion-line-designed-to-trick-surveillance-cameras

“Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd”.