Privacy and Security Law Blog

Posted by Lance Koonce

Most readers of this blog are well aware of the risks of unencrypted wifi, but a Toronto-based artist is demonstrating some of those risks in a rather graphic way.

Michelle Teran is presenting a series of performance art pieces in which she leads a small group of onlookers through the streets of a city (recently, Cardiff, in Wales) carrying a video monitor and receiver tuned to the 2.4GHz band on which many wireless equipment operates, such as closed-circuit video monitors. When she finds unencrypted signals she displays the unintentionally-broadcast signals on her monitor for her audience.

In the artist's words:

A tiny fraction of the radio spectrum has been allocated for public use. Taking advantage of this unlicensed part of the spectrum, the result has been an increase in use of wireless devices that are transmitting on this narrow band. Private use of wireless internet, cordless phones, bluetooth and wireless surveillance cameras has turned the average consumer into 'micro-broadcasters', who transmit their personal narratives through the airwaves. The culmination of these autonomous and synchronous acts contributes to an invisible, ad-hoc network of media overlaid within the socially codified spaces of urban environments, the café, the home, the apartment building, the office, the store, the bar, the hallway, the entrance, the parking lot and the street.

'Life: a user's manual' focuses on the use of wireless surveillance cameras within public and private places that transmit on the 2.4 Ghz frequency band. Easily intercepted using a consumer model video scanner, the captured, live images create a sequence of readings and views of the city and its inhabitants which are observed while walking through the streets.

More details on Teran's recent performances are available in an article today in Wired.

Teran notes that while there are a few titillating moments, primarily the "scenes observed are mostly of daily banality, absence and stillness. The camera, for the most part, watches nothing."

Still, you may want to think twice about that closed-circuit monitor you are contemplating installing in your home for "security purposes" - an unencrypted system might actually render you less secure, or compromise your privacy.

Or . . . perhaps even worse . . . turn your home into a hang-out for performance artists.