[Brinworld] UK firms tout camera phone blinding tech

[Bill Stewart]

Thomas Shaddack wrote:
>>Safe Haven works by transmitting a signal in a localised environment
>>such as a school, swimming pool, office facility or factory, which
>>"disables the camera functionality of devices in the nearby
>>environment", the companies claim.
> 
> If there will be a dedicated receiver circuit in the phone, operating on
> other than cellular frequencies, it will be fairly trivial to shield or
> jam or damage it.

That's overkill.  If this thing is ever actually deployed,
it'll be a feature that _asks_ a Safe-Haven-equipped camera phone
not to take pictures here, and if you happen to have that kind
of phone, it won't take pictures there.

The solution to this is not to carry a special jammer device
if you want to take pictures where people don't want it -
it's to carry a digital camera (and besides, those get
much better pictures - the one gsm cameraphone I've tried had
only a 352x288 CCD in it, in spite of not being a cheap phone.)
Alternatively, if you want to transmit pictures there as well as
taking them, buy a phone now that doesn't have that feature,
or buy a PDA with a camera and some kind of wireless card.

Aside from places that want to protect privacy or prudishness,
one obvious market for Safe Haven is police agencies that
want to be able to bash people without being on live video.
On the other hand, they'd probably be just as happy with a
cell phone jammer, which also prevents live voice transmission,
and therefore not only blocks strategic remote recordkeepers,
but also blocks tactical coordination by a crowd's instigators.