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The Police States Dream Device: “RF Capture” WiFi Can See You Through Walls

Friday, October 30, 2015 20:09

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(Before It's News)

In a previous post at SHTF, Mac Salvo reported on a new application of WiFi known as Wi-Vi which could take surveillance to the next level. In this article below, a way to use the WiFi signals to see and track movement behind walls is examined along with mapping behind walls in 3-D.

MIT tech geeks have found a way to pinpoint location and track complex movement patterns with far greater accuracy – and what’s more, it can track people’s steps through walls, and the individuals or groups don’t even need to carry a cell phone! To get a better understanding of how the technology works, check out the video below. The MIT researchers have come up with a Wi-Fi based technology to help track the movement of individuals, even when they pass behind a wall. The technology, christened Wi-Vi, uses a low-power Wi-fi signal and its reflections to track movement. No doubt this new technology will be of interest to Obama’s Police State and various other forms of law enforcement. Care to place a wager that if they acquire the new technology during Obama’s Reign of Terror, the fact that using it on citizens without a warrant won’t make a damn bit of difference to His Highness?

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As was mentioned above, this type of device could not be lawfully used against citizens without a search warrant. We know that because of a 2001 case that went before the Supreme Court known as Kyllo v. United States. Wikipedia gives a brief description of this case below:

In this case, the United States Department of the Interior used a thermal imaging device outside of Danny Lee Kyllo’s home in Florence, Oregon. According to the District Court that presided over Kyllo’s evidentiary hearing, the device could not “penetrate walls or windows to reveal conversations or human activities. The device recorded only heat being emitted from the home.” The device showed that there was an unusual amount of heat radiating from the roof and side walls of the garage compared with the rest of his house. (The assumption is that to grow marijuana indoors, one needs to provide a large amount of light in order for the plants to photosynthesize.) This information was subsequently used to obtain a search warrant, where federal agents discovered over 100 marijuana plants growing in Kyllo’s home. Kyllo was charged with growing marijuana in his Oregon home. Kyllo first tried to suppress the evidence obtained from the thermal imaging search, but then he pled a conditional guilty. Kyllo appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court on the grounds that observations with a thermal-imaging device constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. At the Court of Appeals, the conviction was upheld. Kyllo petitioned a writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the thermal imaging of Kyllo’s home constituted a search. Since the police did not have a warrant when they used the device, which was not commonly available to the public, the search was presumptively unreasonable and therefore unconstitutional. The majority opinion argued that a person has an expectation of privacy in his or her home and therefore, the government cannot conduct unreasonable searches, even with technology that does not enter the home. Justice Scalia also discussed how future technology can invade on one’s right of privacy and therefore authored the opinion so that it protected against more sophisticated surveillance equipment. As a result, Justice Scalia asserted that the difference between “off the wall” surveillance and “through the wall” surveillance was non-existent because both methods physically intruded upon the privacy of the home. Scalia created a “firm but also bright” line drawn by the Fourth Amendment at the “‘entrance to the house.’”^[1] This line is meant to protect the home from all types of warrantless surveillance and is an interpretation of what he called “the long view” of the Fourth Amendment. The dissent thought this line was “unnecessary, unwise, and inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment”^[2] because according to Scalia’s previous logic, this firm but bright line would be defunct as soon as the surveillance technology used went into general public use, which was still undefined.

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Mac Salvo Writes:

The implications for privacy under a big brother police state are obvious.

Researchers at MIT have come up with a way to use WiFi signals to see behind walls, and map a room in 3-D. By reflecting the signal, it can also locate the movements of people or objects in the room. The Daily Mail reports:

Using a wireless transmitter fitted behind a wall, computer scientists have developed a device that can map a nearby room in 3D while scanning for human bodies.

Using the signals that bounce and reflect off these people, the device creates an accurate silhouette and can even use this silhouette to identify who that person is.

The device is called RF Capture and it was developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

The RF Capture device transmits wireless signals that travel through a wall and reflect off a person’s body back to the device.

[…]

Since only a small number of body parts reflect the signal back at any given point in time, the device monitors how these reflections vary as someone moves and walks.

Not even your four walls and a roof are to be private if this technology is used for surveillance purposes. And make no mistake, it will be. There are clearly privacy implications to this, but chances are that objections will be kept to a dull roar, with so many other tracking and surveillance activities descending upon society. There are many other related and overlapping technologies, like the radar sweep devices some police are now using to look through walls and locate suspects before going inside. However, the use of WiFi to achieve this make it even easier.

As SHTF previously reported, a new application of WiFi known as Wi-Vi could take surveillance to the next level:

“Show that Wi-Fi can also extend our senses, enabling us to see moving objects through walls and behind closed doors. In particular, we can use such signals to identify the number of people in a closed room and their relative locations. We can also identify simple gestures made behind a wall, and combine a sequence of gestures to communicate messages to a wireless receiver without carrying any transmitting device. […] It shows how one can track a human by treating the motion of a human body as an antenna array and tracking the resulting RF beam.

The system is interested furthering its control, and fishing for pretexts to cite infractions, collect revenue and play nanny over the lives of the population.

Judging from the comments, many people are at least aware of this. Here are just a few:

BadSull: “The government already has it.”

Greg: “Drones, smart tvs watching you, laptops listening to you, traffic lights tracking your last 10,000 locations and now we look through walls. Gonna have to spend a lot more resources on mental health in the future.”

James Rustles: “So, how do you defeat it to maintain your privacy? That’s the question that needs to be asked.”

JaneDoeRKBA: “Mylar faced foam house insulation , Mylar lined draperies, Mylar under a metal roof….all should work in largely defeating this technology.”

Jeffrey S.Gee: “Using a faraday cage!”

James OD: “For a multitude of reasons, it’s starting to seem like a good idea to add a layer of aluminum foil under the drywall when building a house. What’s the world coming to when the disheveled guy living out of the shopping cart under a bridge starts to make sense?”

Technology is changing the tone of reference to tin foil from one of ridicule to one of acknowledgement that these forms of spying are real science, and applicable to the methods used by various agencies and organizations who are investigating, instigating or intimidating.

Many are taking notice of the extreme intrusion the technology represents.

Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said “Your location is something that’s worthy of privacy. We know that, even within your house, where you go can reveal a lot about yourself.”

Is there anywhere left just to be left alone?