Table of Contents

BigBrother.lu

It's like GeoCaching, but with a touch of political hacktivism.

In order to allow the citizens of Luxembourg to see where they are being tracked and filmed, we decided to call an old idea back on the daily agenda: a digital free (as in free speech) map, available with as much as possible information about CCTV system throughout Luxembourg.

http://lyon.sous-surveillance.net/ is exactly such a map realized with Spip by the hackers from the Lyon Hackerspace in France. Currently the map include Lyon, Paris, Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand & Angers. Now Luxembourg has joined the initiative as the first international country.

But what are now the objectives of C3L with Luxembourg - Under Surveillance?

Well first of all spreading the information and use of this map. It is essential that such a map contains someday most or even all the CCTV system available in public areas. As the software runs stable, is easy to use and focuses on the essential combined with different maps and views, it is the best solution.

The second goal of course stands in a cross-relationship with the first one: when spreading the word of the map, it means we'd like to make people aware of BigBrother. 27/7 the CCTV systems are recording and you can be tracked every where in major cities today. The administrators of these systems know where their systems are and how they work, but citizens only know that these white boxes with black glass are following their steps. So it gets time to map all the digital eyes following us, so we at least have the possibility to avoid them in order to keep one of most fundamental basic human rights: Privacy.

Get involved?

Basically everyone can help us out! :)

Either you provide us with the information marked as required below by sneakernet or mail, or you get on the streets yourself or in a group with GPS devices or SmartPhones, log & deploy everything on your own.

HowTo: Log & Deploy

Here you'll find the information that can be stored for every camera on the map. Gathering and submitting as much information of a location is most valuable.

Log

Data Option(s) Note(s)
GPS Coordinates Longtitude & Latitude log coordinates directly in front / beneath the object
Direction 0°-360° /
Angle 0°-360° /
Appearance Clearly visible ; Dome ; Built-In ; Cased ; Radar /
ZoomYes / No /
OrientationYes / No /
OperatorPublic / PrivateThis information can be retrieved from the public register of CNPD.
Operator (Company) Name / This information can be retrieved from the public register of CNPD.
SurveillancePublic Area ; Parking ; Traffic ; Shop ; Bank ; Building /
Description / /

Deploy

  1. Create an account on the official http://luxembourg.sous-surveillance.net/ site. Click on the power button in the upper right corner and the registration form will appear in the upper left corner. After having submitted a username and e-mail address, you will receive an e-mail with a confirmation link that must be verified. After this your good to go.
  2. Go again to http://luxembourg.sous-surveillance.net/ and log yourself in.
  3. Directly in front of you, you see an camera icon with a plus that says "Créer une caméra" ("Add a camera"). Click on it and your fine to deploy the information you gathered above.
  4. Fill out all the information you logged above and hit the save button at the end of the page.
  5. You'll be forwarded to a finished version of the data you saved. On your left side you'll see a box with a bold number (id of your entry) in the top of it, beneath you can choose between several options. Every options does what it is called, so to publish select: published online and hit the edit button below it.
  6. Done! You can see your work on the official map: http://luxembourg.sous-surveillance.net/ or navigate directly to your entry with: http://luxembourg.sous-surveillance.net/?camera<PUT ID HERE>

CNPD

To fetch all the authorizations from the CNPD database as xml file, have a look behind the following link:

http://www.cnpd.public.lu/cnpd_registre/services?operation=recherche_responsables&mode=tous

The easiest way to download the file and converting it in CSV is probably the following: <sxh [bash]>wget "http://www.cnpd.public.lu/cnpd_registre/services?operation=recherche_responsables&mode=tous" -O cnpd.xml cat header.csv > cnpd.csv

xml2 <cnpd.xml | 2csv /acteurs/acteur id key nom pays ville secteur status description no_deliberation date_publication form_pk trait_pk >cnpd.csv </sxh>

Note: this may take a while and some browsers are likely to crash, because of the amount data coming through.

To get this link, open wireshark, follow the TCP Stream and have a look on the output.

A few other links are also interesting:

We'll soon provide a sqlite database here with the same data sets.

Chat & Follow

References