PROTECTION FROM DETECTION

21 March 2025

PROTECTION FROM DETECTION

Outsmarting the Surveillance State

This article is intended for anyone wishing to avoid ISR in the public space.

"ISR is the coordinated and integrated acquisition, processing and provision of timely, accurate, relevant, coherent and assured information and intelligence to support commander's conduct of activities [...on the battlefield]".

If you don't want to be tracked by the surveillance state, this article is for you.

Entire city scammed

This is a report of actual, current, police surveillance activities in Cardiff, UK.

In a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence and surveillance, how can we fight to keep our personal privacy? The subject of this article is dodging facial recognition, but facial recognition isn’t just about identifying a face - AI can track you by your gait, your body proportions, even the clothes you wore yesterday.

Where once the bobby on a bike was your friend, now they are hiding in AI-powered surveillance vans parked round the corner, quietly logging biometric markers and behavioral patterns. Once, policing was about community, now it’s about control - the ability to freeze your rights at will, the right to freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom to protest. Need a train ticket to Coventry? Not if the system flags you as a disruptor (this would be a logical next step by the surveillance date).

How to Hide in Plain Sight

For those who value privacy, disappearing from the system requires strategy:

🔹 Stay Off the Digital Grid – Keep personal data off the internet. But if you still need a digital footprint, use apps like Fawkes, Anonymizer or FaceShield to alter your photos at the pixel level, making them unreadable to AI while still appearing normal to humans. AI can be fooled by imperceptible noise added to images, disrupting its training models.

🔹 Modify Your Appearance – Think beyond covid masks, hoodies and fawkes. AI works on confidence thresholds—if your biometric profile strays too far from its prediction model, it simply ignores you. A pronounced limp or slouch can break gait recognition. Smart glasses with infrared emitters can blind AI cameras. Reflectables will have the cameras think twice.

🔹 Clothing as a Weapon – Your wardrobe can be your first line of defense in this game of cat and mouse. Patterns known as "adversarial designs" disrupt AI’s ability to classify people correctly. Some confuse recognition software into mislabeling you as "animal" or "object", rather than a "person- of-interest". Companies like Cap_able and Adversarial Fashion specialise in garments that distort recognition models.

Becoming Invisible Without Vanishing

For those wanting to travel beyond the vanishing point, the fun part is playing with these limits. AI relies on statistical confidence, so shift a few standard deviations outside its comfort zone and you will have put yourself in a different galaxy.

With the right mix of adversarial fashion, digital obfuscation, and physical misdirection, you don’t have to disappear - you just have to render yourself unrecognisable to the machine.

PRIVACY ISN'T DEAD. 

WE JUST HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO CONFUSE THE ADVERSARY.