New York to Dublin in Milliseconds

A new interactive art installation in New York City is allowing viewers to communicate with people 3,000 miles away in Dublin, Ireland.

The brainchild of Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys, “the Portal” was unveiled on Wednesday and allows people on either side of the Atlantic to interact with each other via a video link.

New Yorkers can head to Flatiron South Public Plaza at Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street, next to the Flatiron Building, to see people on Dublin’s O’Connell Street on the 24/7 visual livestream, according to a Wednesday press release. more
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From the Security Scrapbook... “Good artists copy, Great artists steal” files.
This isn't the first time an artist has connected New York City with Europe. You can read our May, 2008 post here. Links to the picture have evaporated, but the WSJ covered it as well...

UPDATE 3/15/24: The video portals connecting Dublin and NYC have been shut down to address inappropriate behavior, which apparently included flashing, showing porn, and mocking 9/11.

UPDATE 5/20/24: Dublin-New York portal reopens with set hours. A live video "portal" between Dublin and New York has reopened after it was temporarily closed due to "inappropriate behaviour".

1650 Kircher Musurgia Listening Devices

The book Musurgia Universalis is famous and has been since it appeared in 1650. 

Vol. 2 (Af-x.10): plate between pages 302 & 303

The illustration depicts a piazza-listening device.

The voices from the piazza are taken by the horn up through the mouth of the statue in the room on the piano nobile above, allowing both espionage and the appearance of a miraculous event. more

The modern eavesdropping equivalent is the ventilation plenum. Acoustical ducting is something most people don't consider when concerned about eavesdropping. We do.

Porcelain — An Industrial Espionage Story

1712 A.D. ...a French Jesuit priest named François Xavier d’Entrecolles pioneered industrial espionage by recording the secrets of porcelain making while on a trip to China and sending them back to Europe...

Another remarkable use for porcelain is the lithophane, a sheet of porcelain so thin as to be translucent, with artwork etched into it. The lithophane is thin enough that the art can only be seen when backlit, but just thick enough that the image can have depth. Lithophanes began to appear in several parts of Europe in the 1820s, but they’re believed to have originated in China a millennia earlier during the Tang Dynasty. Later Ming Dynasty scholars wrote of Tang bowls “as thin as paper” that included secret images.

Eavesdropping — at the Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne

WHAT: Eavesdropping — Tue, 24. July–Sun, 28. October 2018
WHERE: Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
ADMISSION: Free

Eaves­drop­ping is a unique col­lab­o­ra­tion between Liquid Archi­tec­ture, Mel­bourne Law School and the Ian Potter Museum of Art, com­pris­ing an exhi­bi­tion, a public pro­gram, series of work­ing groups and tour­ing event which explores the pol­i­tics of lis­ten­ing through work by lead­ing artists, researchers, writ­ers and activists from Aus­tralia and around the world.

EAVES­DROP­PING used to be a crime. Accord­ing to William Black­stone, in his Com­men­taries on the Laws of Eng­land (1769): ​‘eaves­drop­pers, or such as listen under walls or win­dows, or the eaves of a house, to hear­ken after dis­course, and there­upon to frame slan­der­ous and mis­chie­vous tales, are a common nui­sance and pre­sentable at the court-leet.’

Click to enlarge

Two hun­dred and fifty years later, eaves­drop­ping isn’t just legal, it’s ubiq­ui­tous. What was once a minor public order offence has become one of the most impor­tant politico-legal prob­lems of our time, as the Snow­den rev­e­la­tions made abun­dantly clear. Eaves­drop­ping: the ever-increas­ing access to, cap­ture and con­trol of our sonic worlds by state and cor­po­rate inter­ests. But eaves­drop­ping isn’t just about big data, sur­veil­lance and secu­rity... more

Auction - Original artwork from Carry On Spying (1964)

Original artwork from Carry On Spying (1964) and Carry On Cowboy (1965) will go under the hammer with an estimate of £2,000 - 3,000 and £3,000 - 5,000 respectively

Both artwork pieces were illustrated by legendary British cinema poster designer, Tom Chantrell of Star Wars fame.

The auction will be live-streamed online for fans to track the bidding on auction day. Registration and bidding is now open. Bids can be placed online at www.propstore.com/liveauction, over the phone or in person.

Prop Store's Cinema Poster Live Auction is on Thursday 28th June.  more

136 Old NSA Security Posters

In the 1950s and 1960s, the NSA made a bunch of posters to remind its employees that security is the most important thing, and that they must work hard to protect the country’s most important secrets.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency site Government Attic, we can now see these quaint, sometimes hilarious, but also menacing, posters.

Here are all the 136 posters the NSA released. We’ve chosen a few that we thought were the best ones. Some of them are cutesy, some are kind of lame, others are dark and dystopian, and others are straight up incredible. more

Don't it just give you, "The locking pneumonia and floppy-copy flue."

Weiwei - All Leave Hansel & Gretel Digital Breadcrumbs

The Chinese artist-activist Ai Weiwei is nothing if not connected. All through the introductory remarks at the press preview for Hansel & Gretel, the giant art installation about electronic surveillance at the Park Avenue Armory in New York (open through August 6), Ai was busy on his phone...

Hansel & Gretel—the latest in the Armory’s series of huge Drill Hall extravaganzas, whose title indicates that we all leave breadcrumb trails, whether we want to or not—is another collaboration among Mr. Ai and Mssrs. Herzog and de Meuron...

Part 1 of this technology-rich dystopian spectacle occupies the whole of the darkened 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall, which the audience enters not from the Armory’s grand, staircased main entrance, but through an inconspicuous rear door on Lexington Avenue.

Once inside, visitors make their way through almost pitchblack corridors to a ramp that takes them up a few feet to the main attraction: a floor on which are projected their surveilled overhead images, which follow them around like digital puppy dogs.

The images come from dozens of overhead cameras, not the tethered drones buzzing around overhead. The phenomenon undoubtedly inspires awe in a few... The Drill Hall gizmopalooza gives everyone a visceral experience of what it’s like to be watched by unseen forces... more

Nixon Watergate Era Poster

Vintage (1973) Waterbug Workshop, Boston.

Poster by David Campion.

Czech Mate, or Here's Looking at You Id

Forty-foot statue of David Black Trifot is part of a new multi-genre space outside the city Photo Czech Centre, which is now open to the public. more

Spy vs Spy Sweepstakes - Win Original Artwork

Spy vs. Prize Department
MAD’s year-end issue chronicling “The 20 Dumbest People, Events and Things” of 2016 is coming soon. But you don’t have to wait to experience the dumbness of MAD!

Enter now for a chance to win an original piece of Spy Vs Spy artwork by renowned artist Peter Kuper.

This rare piece has never been published, and no, not because one of the editors spilled coffee on it. (Note: The stain has since been removed. Coffee not included in this sweepstakes.)

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR TO WIN. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. ODDS OF WINNING WILL DEPEND ON THE TOTAL NUMBER OF ELIGIBLE ENTRIES RECEIVED.The “MAD® Spy vs. Spy Original Art Sweepstakes!” begins on 11/9/16 at 10:00a.m. PT and ends on 11/30/16 at 9:59 a.m. PT. Only open to legal residents in the 50 U.S. and D.C. who are 13 years of age or older. Void in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, U.S., Military installations in foreign countries, all other U.S. territories and possessions and wherever prohibited or restricted by law. Total Prize ARV is: $100.00. Sponsor: DC Entertainment. This Sweepstakes is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook, Twitter or any other social media sites.

Banksy Spy Art Destroyed

This famous Banksy artwork showing "snooping" in Cheltenham has been removed. 

Spy Booth depicts three 1950s-style agents, wearing brown trench coats and trilby hats, using devices to tap into conversations at a telephone box.

On April 13, 2014 the mural first appeared on the house in Fairview Road, Cheltenham.

The graffiti street art - which highlights the issue of Government surveillance - is located on the Grade II listed building near GCHQ, where the UK's surveillance network is based.

Spy Booth was granted listed status by Cheltenham Borough Council but the house itself has been put up for sale in January this year.

A social media post yesterday appeared to show the mural being cut down behind a tarpaulin. more

The Man with the Butterfly Net was a Spy... and then founded the Boy Scouts

Just a few years into his military service, Robert Baden-Powell had served in South Africa and was transferred to Malta, where he began his spy career as an intelligence officer for the director of military intelligence. One of his favorite disguises was that of an entomologist who studied butterflies, a cover that allowed him to move around freely without looking suspicious. He revealed his scientific subterfuge in his book "My Adventures as a Spy."

Click to enlarge.

"Carrying this book and a colour-box and a butterfly net in my hand, I was above all suspicion to anyone who met me on the lonely mountain side, even in the neighbourhood of the forts," Baden-Powell wrote. And not only did he disguise himself as a butterfly collector; he hid secret information about those forts, as well as other military secrets in drawings of insects and other natural ephemera, which you can see scattered throughout this post.

In Baden-Powell's illustrations, natural patterns are used to transmit messages and information within a drawing; a leaf's pattern could reveal the contours of an area to be invaded, as above. Once a recipient knew how to read the illustrations, it was possible to convey the information easily, without much translation or complex code-breaking needed. more

Eavesdropping on the Public in 1919

In 1919 a Chicago Theater bugged the seats...

Click to enlarge.

to find out what the audience was saying about the production they were watching. The hope was that the honest criticism (or praise) they heard would help them make future performances better. more

More Banksy Art, from Artsy

I received this email today and thought you might like to know...

Hi - my name is Oliver, and I work at Artsy. While researching Banksy, I found your page: http://spybusters.blogspot.com/2014_06_01_archive.html. I wanted to briefly tell you about Artsy's Banksy page, and about our mission.

Click to enlarge.

We strive to make all of the world’s art accessible to anyone online. Our Banksy page, for example, provides visitors with Banksy's bio, over 150 of his works, exclusive articles, as well as up-to-date Banksy exhibition listings. The page even includes related artist & category tags, plus suggested contemporary artists, allowing viewers to continue exploring art beyond our Banksy page.

Glad to help!
Here is another Banksy anti-surveillance piece of art.

Radar Rat, 2004
Spray paint and silkscreen on paper
14 × 14 in
35.6 × 35.6 cm
Gallery Nosco
Sold
£20,000 - 30,000 ($28,500 - $42,800)

Buy Banksy Spy Art - Get a free House

Consider yourself a bargain hunter with a penchant for modern art? Well why not buy a Banksy mural for just £210,000 ($304,900 UDS) and to sweeten the deal the owner will throw in a three-bedroom house.

A property in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, featuring the artist's Spy Booth piece is on the market after its stressed owner said he was sick of the circus caused by the mural.

Spy Booth shows three 1950s-style agents, wearing brown trench coats and trilby hats, using devices to tap into conversations at a telephone box. more - with video

click to enlarge

Spy for Art's Sake

Spy vs. Spy: Tech-Savvy Swiss Duo Bitnik Refines the Art of Espionage

‘I’ve hijacked your surveillance camera. How about a game of chess?” The words filled a closed-circuit television screen that only seconds before had shown commuters in London’s Charing Cross station.

Whichever security guard read the message soon saw it replaced by a chessboard and the words: “You are white. I am black. Call me or text me to make your move. This is my phone number: 075 8246 0851.”

In the heart of the world’s most surveilled city, two artists were registering their polite protest with the help of a laptop and an interfering transmitter. Carmen Weisskopf and Domagoj Smoljo, a Swiss team known as !Mediengruppe Bitnik, have been co-opting the spy’s arsenal to practice their own, artistic style of counter-espionage...

 

Artists and spies are loners, operating on the margins. They observe, gather intelligence, surgically intervene, and detect and disseminate artifice. They try to stay ahead of everyone else. more

Log Jam - Forces You to Shut Up and Experience Where You Are

Artist and coder Allison Burtch has created a new device to save us from our cellphones and ourselves. 

It comes in the form of a 10-inch birch log that jams cellular radio signals, and it’s called the Log Jammer. Packed with about $200 of hardware including a power source, a circuit board of her own design, voltage control components, an amplifier, and an antenna, it can produce radio noise at the 1950 megahertz frequency commonly used by cellphones. It’s powerful enough to block all cellphone voice communications in a 20-foot bubble, and its log-like exterior is designed to unobtrusively create that radio-jamming zone in the great outdoors...

Burtch sees her creation as the inverse of the increasingly common sight of cellular towers disguised as trees. Instead of hiding technology in nature to let people remain connected everywhere, the Log Jammer blends into a natural setting to cut off that constant remote communication—to force people to experience the place they’re in. Burtch paraphrases French philosopher Gilles Deleuz: “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves,” she says. “It’s creating a needed gap of solitude in which they might find something to say.” (more)

Get ready for a 'Mystery Science Theater' streaming marathon

Football schmootball. Instead of watching NFL teams throw the pigskin around this Thanksgiving, why not watch a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" marathon with new intros by the series creator? (more)

The Official Spybuster sticker is back!

Our beautiful, 4 inch, heavy vinyl Official Spybuster sticker is back! This was a limited edition give-a-way to our clients in 2011. Use it to let everyone know you support privacy.

4 inch, heavy vinyl

The printing experts at Stickermule now have it for sale in their Marketplace.

If spying by the NSA, FBI, CIA, TSA, GCHQ, MI5, MI6, other government spies, your significant other, or your parents concerns you, sticker it to them. 

If you are in Homeland Security, the NSA, FBI, CIA, GCHQ, MI5, MI6 – protecting us against spies (thank you) – sticker it to them. 

Either way, proudly declare, "I'm mad as Hell, and I am not going to take it anymore!"

Looks great on a white coffee cup.

Proof the Surveillance Society is Making us Crazy - CV Dazzle

This is how bad things are getting...

"The NSA made me slather my face in make-up... I had slathered the paint on my face in order to hide from computers. The patterns in which I applied the paint were important: To the pixel-calculating machinations of facial recognition algorithms, they transformed my face into a mess of unremarkable pixels. In the computer’s vision, my face caused a momentary burst of confusion. That’s why the patterns are called computer vision dazzle (or CV dazzle). When it works, CV dazzle keeps facial-recognition algorithms from seeing a face...

...more unexpected was what CV dazzle taught me about the physical world. It reminded me of another tech experiment I’d undertaken: 

My phone’s Reminders app can tie a message to a specific place, it triggers an alert tone every time a user comes within 500 feet. I’d tried tying these reminders to a different kind of location—the 176 embassies and diplomatic missions in Washington, D.C. Whenever I got within a couple hundred feet of one, my phone sent me a little ping: “Iceland.” “Thailand.” “Equitorial New Guinea.”...

...here is the essence of CV dazzle’s strangeness: The very thing that makes you invisible to computers makes you glaringly obvious to other humans."  (more) (official site cvdazzle.com)


Blank Reg would have loved this.