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China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

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Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#111

Post by yodon »

I made a couple trips to the South Pole in grad school. Down there you were either a scientist in a red parka, black insulated pants, and white boots or support staff in brown carharts. No part of the body could be seen at a distance and even the gloves were standard issue.

What constantly amazed me was how you could see someone walking a quarter mile away and instantly know exactly who it was.

The South Pole is a smaller population than China so I'd be worried about false positives (probably mostly within families as kids learn to stand and walk like their parents and have similar dimensions when fully grown) but I suspect it's actually a pretty robust identification technique.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#112

Post by Choco31415 »

on_and_off wrote: post #10
r-bryan wrote: post #4

In Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_, some characters would put pebbles in their shoes so gait-recognizers wouldn't recognize them.

That's what real life spies do too edit : a source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8

The relevant time stamps 4:39-5:02.

Former CIA Chief: "Changing the way that you walk requires some amendment to what you're doing. You're going to need a physical apparatus to make you walk differently. You can't possibly say, okay, now I'm going to limp. To change my walk, I put a little piece of gravel in my shoe, just a little thing that pinches my toe, and it changes my walk whether I want to or not. You can put a bandage around a knee, something that restricts you, will change your walk."

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#113

Post by eiaoa »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #67
jbob2000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in. Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).

Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

> Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#114

Post by eiaoa »

ctoth wrote: post #48
coliveira wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but it looks like China is just playing catch up on this. The US intelligence already has information on pretty much every American, their social networks, phone calls, consumer habits, etc. And through Facebook, Google and others, they also have information about mosts people around the world. Even if China is able to track everyone inside Chine they're still at a disadvantage compared to the US covert operat…

The whataboutism is strong with this one. Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful. Or abused. But useful.

> Is there a service that lets you associate your own tags with HN accounts? could be useful.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-friends/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hn-friends/ffgfcbf...

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#116

Post by PhasmaFelis »

eiaoa wrote: post #113
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested.

> Ubiquitous surveillance would presumably try to have every camera within view of at least one other camera, so sabotaging them is a good way to get tracked down and arrested. You don't have to attack the camera directly to sabotage it. Cutting power or communications cables and jamming transmissions works too.

Same thing applies to cutting cables. You'll be seen and tracked. Jammers are both trackable and illegal in most places.

Believe me, I wish it was that easy.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#117

Post by darpa_escapee »

woolvalley wrote: post #105
nabla9 wrote: post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

I think the vast noise of people sprain their ankles, the people who did get a pebble in their shoe and the old people who decided to not put on their knee brace for that quick errand and similar that would result in way too many false positives to mark them all persons of interest.

You'd think the same logic applied with profiling metrics used in areas that implement stop-and-frisk, but it doesn't stop them.

A false positive is an excuse to target someone police don't like, or suspect is guilty, so the dismantlement of a system that provides those convenient false positives will be fought.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#118

Post by Benjammer »

coliveira wrote: post #21

This is not new, and is not unique to China. Any country with intelligence units, like the US, is using data mining to identify and control their citizens. It has become fashionable lately to imply that China is the only country doing these things, or somehow doing it in larger scale. Has everyone forgotten what Snowden revealed?

Also the specific concept of gait analysis[0] has been around for decades. Changing one's gait has been an important piece of the tradecraft tool box for a long time now[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gait_analysis [1]: https://youtu.be/JASUsVY5YJ8?t=278

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#119

Post by retsibsi »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #91
darawk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In exactly what way is examining the authoritarian machinations of an authoritarian government 'racist'?

It seems likely other governments are using the same techniques and that our, I'm assuming, Western view of China as overbearingly authoritarian is tainted by a lot of cultural baggage: that the hostility of the Chinese security services towards their own population isn't as markedly different as we imagine it to be, because I - for example - have been carefully inculcated into the idea that Western governments are b…

> it's impossible to trust what our own governments say to us now.

Sure, but throwing up our hands and assuming that all states are basically the same probably takes us further from the truth.

We've got to make our own judgments somehow, and it's prety clear that despite the many flaws of our Western countries, they are meaningfully more open and tolerant of dissent, investigative journalism and the like than some other countries, including China.

Every piece of information should be taken with a grain of salt, and it makes sense to add a few extra grains when it comes to countries that we have been trained to be suspicious of. But that doesn't mean we should bury it all in a salt mine and ignore it.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#120

Post by dewiz »

cimi_ wrote: post #46

Setting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise , not speculativ…

2015: CCTV 'fightcams' detect violence 'before it happens'

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/11407094/CCTV-...

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