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Cameras ban on phones won't stop snooping by wireless

You have to wonder how feasible it is to prevent people taking photographs in a world where photographs are worth money, and where a camera, lens, digital storage and battery can all fit into the badge on a baseball cap.

The question arises because - as we´ve noted in the past - there are secrets, and there are snoopers. And the world just woke up to the fact that "There will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years," according to research quoted by ZDNet.

Many large companies have simply banned the use of camera phones at work. It´s the obvious ploy, and very much the way corporate minds work. "We have banned cameras, these are cameras, we ban them." But can it be done?

There´s the technology solution offered by Safe Haven. It uses wireless signals to disable the phones of consenting phone users. It works on the assumption that all phones will one day be cameras, and all phones have wireless. QED: if we can build this circuit into all phones, we´ve dealt with the issue.

But in fact, a camera in the year 2007 will be virtually invisible.

Already, 256 megabytes of storage fits onto a single SD card, the size of the average thumbnail. You can store several minutes worth of video on that, and the number of photographs depends on resolution. A seriously determined spy would have no trouble sourcing - today! - a pinhole lens, a battery, and a processor/storage unit all of which would easily fit behind a jacket button, or a pen.

The idea that you strip search all your guests at corporate HQ and take their phones off them if they turn out to be camera phones is exactly the sort of thing that Human Resources departments think perfectly simple. It is, physically! but in human terms - something HR isn´t necessarily aware of - it runs straight into a small problem: some of your guests will resent it, and many of them are not people who are inclined to take your diktat seriously.

For example, half a decade ago, IBM in London suffered a series of notebook PC thefts. HR and Security dealt with the issue very quickly. "Everybody bringing a bag into the building is to be searched. If there is a notebook in the bag, we log it, log its serial number, and issue a ticket. On departure, the ticket is matched against the notebook. If they don´t match, the notebook is confiscated."

Naturally, most "honoured guests" resented being stopped and searched. Many refused to be. And of those who allowed the search, a substantial number of guests lost their tickets.

You can imagine the conversation that followed between HR, security and Public Relations, when a series of VIP guests had their equipment confiscated ... and yes, I was one of those angry VIPs. Ask yourself when instituting such policy directives: "If Bill Gates finally accepted our invitation to visit, and we tried to confiscate his phone when he left our HQ, what would the consequences be?" HR and security will say: "Ah, don't worry! - there will be workarounds." The President of the company will say: "Never, ever again, will I put myself through the humiliation of apologising to our biggest customer for his treatment at reception." And that will be that.

Some time in the future, quite possibly within five years, cameras will be sponsored.

Something like this: CNN will twig that they can´t have a cameraman on every street corner, but that amateurs have valuable footage because they just happened to be pointing a lens at the sky at that moment. A camera built into your cap, wirelessly (Bluetooth?) linked to your cellphone which uses GPS to report your position, and it´s yours, free, together with online data storage - if you assign royalties to CNN or CBS or the BBC.

Little throwaway video cameras with throwaway 4 gigabyte storage chips will be left lying around on street corners or on PC displays or on door tops or shoe straps or the blades of electric fans or inside refrigerators ... They will be activated by passing agents, will yield their data for the important time of day in seconds via UWB, and will then lapse into apparent stasis, until something happens. Solar powered, of course ...

Nothing will happen, anywhere, that isn´t recorded in MP5 format, stored indetectably, and retrievable from afar. The only way to prevent this, is by creating dead zones to radio - all radio.

We already have such things, of course, with hotels who build jammers for mobile phones. Their aim, it seems, is to force guests to use the hotel (expensive) phone. But I wonder how long it will be before someone tries it in a corporate context? And what will the CIA have to say about that?