From “VERIFY HOME” to “Verify AWAY”
VERIFY HOME is one of two projects we are already working on. They are being developed in our framework of “Total Defence in the UK”. More information can be found elsewhere on this site, and collected together in the first blogpost in this secrecyone.co.uk/talkspace series: secrecyone.co.uk/blackmail.
To summarise:
- VERIFY HOME makes it possible for ordinary citizens and SMEs to evaluate the risks of going online in the presence of one person or another, a group of persons, a certain specific coffee shop or hotel wifi, a website, email tool, or indeed any other place where digital and/or online activities need to take place.
- VERIFY PLUS is primarily aimed at CISOs of large corporates who have already realised that heavily invested-into CAPEX and related infrastructures of a centralised nature are profoundly exposed to an increasingly penetrative AI. They are already considering how to modify and amend such infrastructures but recognise they willl need to make what may become a mid-term change case with data of a convincing nature to carry the change proposition before the situation imperils the survival of their employer.
But there is at least one space in the cognitive that underpins a cybercrime now morphing into a cyberwarfare on all citizens, professionals, businesses and societal actors which won’t be covered off by either of the above proposals in development.
The cognitive as employed in this increasingly prevalent hybrid and asymmetrical cyberwarfare on us all involves some people having more data in realtime about the rest of us than we can ever have about them.
One example was Google Glass a long time ago. Prior to this, Dr Steve Mann, who invented the concept of sousveillance: a citizen oversight of heavy-handed governments.
Now we have smart glasses which, in my opinion, are anything but smart.
Court cases are beginning to appear in Europe against their indiscriminate surveillance in intimate contexts of any and every person the wearer looks at.
Imagine the situation: someone looks at you with one of these glasses and immediately uncovers your name and place of residence. It also reveals you live alone. How easy it might be to communicate this information to someone else so they can check out your home and burgle they way in, in order to steal what they want well before you get back.
But there are other contexts which I shan’t go into here for the moment which mean the need for a legal and proportionate response at citizen level, including professionals, in realtime may be needed much sooner than later.
The challenge is this: how to collect data on people collecting data on you without committing the same crimes.
We believe it’s possible and we’re now working on a third “total defence-enshrined” project for citizens and businesses which doesn’t only cover off the fact of being physically recorded and doc-ed by something wearing these disreputable glasses, but will also detect, defend and protect against a much wider range of the cognitive in hybrid and asymmetrical than I am currently prepared to lay out here.
This project is called “Verify AWAY”, and it draws its inspiration from a trial by Stockholm Tunnelbana (their underground) in 2023, paid for by public money, which invented a system of surveillance that had utility in law without invading the privacy of those it was designed to defend.
After this example, I later discovered another in the US in an accident & emergency department of a hospital where, by its nature, people would come in with gunshot wounds, reluctant to answer too many questions or be filmed on their way to treatment. In order not to dissuade them from reaching out to be treated, the hospital successfully introduced a similarly protective strategy to ensure surveillance protected those in waiting- and treatment-rooms without frightening away those who could well be afraid of getting the treatment they needed, maybe as a matter of life and death.
From robustly refusing to kowtow to the impact of glasses which are anything but smart on people’s safety and security to expanding this idea to a wider defence against all kinds of cognitive attack, in ways that preserve the kind of privacy-respectful places Europe still hasn’t yet abandoned, we now have our third project:
Verify AWAY | Fight Back Against Cognitive Attack
Now click here to see the narrated video of the Verify AWAY project.
