Surveillance | EPFL Graph Search

Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception. Surveillance is used by citizens for protecting their neighborhoods. And by governments for intelligence gathering - including espionage, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. It is also used by criminal organizations to plan and commit crimes, and by businesses to gather intelligence on criminals, their competitors, suppliers or customers. Religious organisations charged with detecting heresy and heterodoxy may also carry out surveillance. Auditors carry out

Opacité et transparence dans le design d'un dispositif de surveillance urbain : le cas de l'IMSI catcher

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

This thesis assesses the surveillance operated on the mobile phone network by governmental actors (intelligence agencies, police, army) and the relationship between monitored spaces and their users. Indeed, some new surveillance devices used by intelligence services redefine surveillance spatiality raising new questions in this field of research. More specifically this research focuses on one specific object: the IMSI catcher, a monitoring apparatus of the cellular network that intercepts cellphones' identity and some communications in a given area by mimicking the activity of a cell tower. While this kind of device seems to offer a tactical and a security interest in the fight against terrorism and against crime, many civil liberties organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and _La Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertÃ©s are concerned about the potential of an uncontrolled surveillance ; indeed, the controversial nature of the device could endanger certain individual and public rights. What is this technical object and which new issues comes with its use in surveillance? How and from which perspective is it problematic What does the IMSI catcher teaches us on the potential future of surveillance regimes? I look into this specific device case in a research framework at the intersection of design research practices, science and technology studies (STS) and surveillance studies. First, I deal with this surveillance apparatus as a technical object, from a perspective fed by the theoretical framework of concretization and technical lines proposed by Gilbert Simondon and Yves Deforge, through the analysis of a visual and technical documentation. Second, I use a research by design approach to explore certain assumptions regarding the nature of the object itself, its functioning and its "concrete" aspect â or rather "non-concrete" in the present case â with the help of approaches borrowed to reverse engineering and reconstitution, close to media archeology. Then, I explore possible opposition and protest trajectories with the help of prototypes designed with critical design and speculative design methods. Finally, through the writing of prospective scenarios, I build a design fiction that offers a synthesis, potentially subject to debate, around the IMSI catcher's uses, present and to come, and more broadly on the potential future of surveillance regimes.

EPFL2022

Impact of Mini-drone based Video Surveillance on Invasion of Privacy

Margherita Bonetto, Touradj Ebrahimi

An increase in adoption of video surveillance, affecting many aspects of daily lives, raises public concern about an intrusion into individual privacy. New sensing and surveillance technologies, such as mini-drones, threaten to eradicate boundaries of private space even more. Therefore, it is important to study the effect of mini-drones on privacy intrusion and to understand how existing protection privacy filters perform on a video captured by a mini-drone. To this end, we have built a publicly available video dataset of typical drone-based surveillance sequences in a car parking. Using the sequences from this dataset, we assessed five privacy protection filters at different strength levels via a crowdsourcing evaluation. We asked crowdsourcing workers several privacy- and surveillance-related questions to determine the tradeoff between intelligibility of the scene and privacy protection provided by the filters.

2015

Privacy in Mini-drone Based Video Surveillance

Margherita Bonetto, Touradj Ebrahimi

Mini-drones are increasingly used in video surveillance. Their areal mobility and ability to carry video cameras provide new perspectives in visual surveillance which can impact privacy in ways that have not been considered in a typical surveillance scenario. To better understand and analyze them, we have created a publicly available video dataset of typical drone-based surveillance sequences in a car parking. Using the sequences from this dataset, we have assessed five privacy protection filters via a crowdsourcing evaluation. We asked crowdsourcing workers several privacy- and surveillance-related questions to determine the tradeoff between intelligibility of the scene and privacy, and we present conclusions of this evaluation in this paper.

2015

Opacité et transparence dans le design d'un dispositif de surveillance urbain : le cas de l'IMSI catcher

Félicien Michel Marie Goguey

EPFL2022