A Spy Camera

Last year, the Minneapolis Police Department received a “generous gift” from Target Corporation: enough money to purchase thirty surveillance cameras, which were strategically placed within a ten-block radius downtown. We Minnesotans like to keep to ourselves, so when the ACLU tried to stand up to Big Brother, many of us quietly cheered.

Compared to other cities, though, we should count ourselves lucky. Chicago has more than two thousand surveillance cameras scanning its windy streets, and, according to a recent BBC story, the average Londoner is caught on Closed Circuit Television (the Brits’ official surveillance system) three hundred times a day.

Anyone can hack into an unencrypted wireless surveillance camera and view what the cameras are monitoring. The practice of “war spying” derives from “war driving,” where computer nerds with WiFi cards in their laptops cruise through neighborhoods and business districts in an attempt to “borrow” an unsuspecting victim’s Internet access. (“War chalking” is a system of graffiti that advertises where to find these open nodes.) War spying lets anyone with a video camera and a two-point-four GHz wireless video receiver (about fifteen dollars online) tap into the signal. Remember that creep last year who was using a camera to look up women’s skirts at Target? Wireless, if not guileless. He was spotted on Target surveillance cameras.

In San Francisco earlier this year, two war spies drove around town and picked up twelve different cameras within an hour, including one in a hotel room. And a news station in Oregon tried it out in Seattle—where they picked up images from a restaurant, art gallery, tattoo parlor, and a random room where some guy was sitting at a computer—and they ran a salacious scare story the following week. (No surprise there.)

The attraction for newscasters and non-newscasters alike seems to be not so much tapping into a prime view of that abandoned parking ramp, but in discovering illicit surveillance—in other words, spying on the spies. Or at least seeing what they see.

In the ongoing effort to nurture my own geek gene, I decided to see for myself. The same day I received my equipment in the mail, I drove around the Twin Cities looking for hidden cameras. With every muffled noise or burst of static, I almost wrecked my car trying to see if anything showed up on my video camera’s thumb-size screen. I drove through Uptown, Downtown, Edina, and St. Paul, convinced I’d soon see scenes from a locker room or bathroom where someone had hidden a camera. Worst-case scenario, I figured, I’d at least catch a glimpse of the front of a gated house as I drove by. Would they be able to watch me watching them watching me?

After a few hours of this, all I’d seen was a number of other bad drivers on the other side of my windshield. I decided to head home. Suddenly, just as I was pulling up to my house, the static gave way to a real voice, one that sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe it was someone I know! I stopped in the middle of the street and fumbled for my camera. People were talking! I could make out a face. I recognized that face!

It was Cartman from South Park. I had picked up images from the wireless cable box inside my own home. I guess I left the TV on. Like Cartman says: Pretty sweet.—Molly Priesmeyer