GeoCamming and Surveillance

I think I am over the GeoCamming addiction -- finally. I haven't had the opportunity to travel outside of Canada much for the past few years, so cruising round the world, playing with security cameras has been a whole lotta fun. Please feel free to check out my slideshow tour of images from Australia, Japan and Portland, Oregon. I may have also made a stop in Hong Kong or Singapore. Part of the fun of GeoCamming is trying to find out exactly where you are! I watched a small Japanese town wake up, saw the sun light up the snow on Mt Fuji. I saw women hanging out laundry on the roof of a high rise in a far eastern city and workers smoking while waiting for a truck to arive at some anonymous loading dock. I saw couples holding hands next to a Razorback submarine in Portland and a people lounging on yachts in Queensland. I watched egrets wading in Japan and dogs playing on a beach in Hawaii. If you don't get out much, Geocamming can be a fun way to travel.

It all started when I stumbled upon one of the first articles on GeoCamming at Hack a Day. There you can learn how to search for insecure web cameras using Google and other search engines. The cameras feature web-based interfaces that should be password protected -- but many are not. And many of these are high-quality cameras that allow you to pan, tilt and zoom around the neighborhood. Webcamplaza.net provides sample searches for some of the more common cameras on the web. The best cameras I have found were Sony SNC-RZ230N's models. Try searching Google for "inurl:home/homeJ.html" and you'll find quite a few of these. This view of Hawaii was spectacular!

GeoCamming raises many questions of privacy, safety and security. My slideshow includes a number of pictures of people -- and the quality is good enough that you could probably identify them if you knew any of them. There is nothing to stop anyone with a high-speed connection and a $500 camera from spying on his/her neighbors. In fact, some of these open cameras are probably just as useful to criminals as they are to the police. The ubiquity of surveillance is causing some to "fight back" using "Sousveillance" techniques. By wearing their own camera gear these groups actively watch the watchers in an attempt to even the playing field. For now, one could argue that the legions of open, insecure, controllable cameras available on the web give you and me a chance to get out from under the gaze of the big eye in the sky by taking control of the lens our selves. And yet we are still under the constant panoptic stare of countless routers, web and email servers, proxies, caches and cookie trackers. Almost every click is logged, data-warehoused and ultimately data-mined. So happy GeoCamming, watch and be watched, but don't let them catch your "I".