Wired has an interesting write-up of the methods used by an Austrian civil liberties group to protest and monitor the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces:

Members of the organization worked out a way to intercept the camera images with an inexpensive, 1-GHz satellite receiver. The signal could then be descrambled using hardware designed to enhance copy-protected video as it’s transferred from DVD to VHS tape.

[…]

And, just for fun, the group created an anonymous surveillance system that uses face-recognition software to place a black stripe over the eyes of people whose images are recorded.

So you can check the data to see if you’ve been watched. Obviously this compromises the deterence-by-obscurity of surveillance systems, but that’s not what they’re best for anyway. In fact, although I’m a big fan of using technology for detective controls I try to always warn against trying to use cameras as a deterrent/preventive control. In other words the ability of a camera to put fear into the heart of the enemy is really a function of social engineering and has little/nothing to do with the actual (core) capabilities of surveillance systems, and moreover it can end up defeating the very purpose of the cameras — to create a space reasonably free of fear.

Oh, and if any camera vendors are reading, PLEASE stop using unique URLs for network access. I admit I had not choice but to compromise on some things in my last purchase (what’s up with the lack of native support for SSH/HTTPS?) but I would never buy a system that used a fingerprint in the URL (e.g. axis-cgi/). Talk about a reality check for those who think network video recorder obscurity is effective…