Snooping on the snoops and spooks

Extending the autonomy of human activists... nice-sounding slogan, isn't it? In a time when individuals are increasingly regulated, inspected, scanned, photographed, catalogued, tracked, and intruded on, anything that can add to our autonomy is worthwhile.

One of the most interesting websites I've encountered is from the Institute for Applied Autonomy.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.

The IAA has a number of fascinating projects, such as remote-control street and sidewalk message-painting robots. The ones I found most interesting are Terminal Air and i-See:

Terminal Air is a visualization system developed for mapping the movements of planes over time. The flights represented here are ones known or suspected to have been involved in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. The extraordinary rendition program involves the kidnapping and transport of suspect terrorists to undocumented prisons where they can be held, interrogated and tortured outside the research of international scrutiny.

You can watch years of CIA rendition flights happen on a global map, from hundreds of locations you can identify by pausing the mouse over a point. You may be surprised to find an airport near you being used for CIA flights. If you pause over a flight in progress, you'll get info on that.

i-See is a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments. With i-See, users can find routes that avoid these cameras ("paths of least surveillance") allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors.

Here's a reduced-size screen-shot from i-See, of Manhattan, NY. Each surveillance camera is marked with a small red square (yeah, an incredible number of them). You can move around the island, zoom in and out, and plan your path. Just click at your starting location and a little person-symbol will appear. Then click on your destination. i-See will find the best route for avoiding cameras. In a jungle of cameras like this, the best route is often not even close to the shortest route.



I can hardly wait to see what the folks at IAA do next.