CCTV

A German art project could help the British avoid the oppressive proliferation of surveillance cameras in their country. The IRASC is simple, consisting of a circle of infra-red LEDs mounted on a headband. The infra red is invisible to The Man, but will cause CCTV cameras to flare out over the face of the wearer, obscuring his identity and making this the digital equivalent of a hooded sweatshirt.

This is not a production unit, but given that you'd only need a hat, a battery and a few LEDs, you could easily knock one up in the garage.

Surveillance cameras are now so powerful that they were able to zoom in on individual spectators at the Rugby World Cup and read their text messages.

Details of police monitoring used for the first time during the tournament were discussed at a privacy forum in Wellington.

Superintendent Grant O'Fee told the forum how one incident at the Rugby World Cup tweaked in my head a concern about possible privacy breaches.

Camera operators who were scanning the crowd for unruly behaviour or suspicious packages chose to zoom in on a person who was texting.

He was actually texting about the poor quality of the game of rugby. But it did occur to me that there was an issue there - had he been texting something that was of some consequence to us, there may have been privacy issues.