[Reader-list] MEET THE CANADIAN 'HUMAN SURVEILLANCE MACHINE' WHO'S MAKING A MOVIE

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear all

Please check out the link for an image of the bionic eye. Pretty
spooky i'd say...

regards

Taha

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090312.AEYEBORG12/TPStory/TPEntertainment/Movies/


MEET THE CANADIAN 'HUMAN SURVEILLANCE MACHINE' WHO'S MAKING A MOVIE

JAMES BRADSHAW

March 12, 2009

Before long, a bionic Big Brother could be watching you - and you
could end up on the big screen.

Rob Spence, a one-eyed Toronto documentary filmmaker, is developing a
prosthetic eye complete with embedded video camera, hoping to secretly
record people for a film on the rise of global surveillance.

Spence drew inspiration for the EyeBorg Project from his tiny
cellphone camera and his love of The Six Million Dollar Man, a
seventies TV show about a severely injured man who is given bionic
implants in several body parts, including his left eye. Spence's own
left eye was damaged in a childhood shotgun accident at his
grandfather's farm. It was removed three years ago.

With no money to fund the project, Spence relied on volunteerism and
professional curiosity from a number of partners, including a whiz-kid
California engineer named Kosta Grammatis and Steve Mann, co-founder
of the wearable-computers research group at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Spence has also partnered with Santa Clara,
Calif.-based OmniVision Inc., to provide the tiny camera originally
designed for colonoscopies.

Despite some technological setbacks, Spence thinks the camera could be
up and running in less than a month. He hopes to make himself "a human
surveillance machine" to investigate whether we are all "sleepwalking
into an Orwellian society." He will film his subjects secretly, but
will have to seek permission to feature them. He adds that people who
know about the project are increasingly "freaked out" about being
around him.