Friday, October 22, 2004

Location stamping video recordings

It breaks my heart every time I see one of those radical groups in Iraq videotaping civilian hostages, just knowing that the beheading will come a short time later. I began to wonder what it would take to identify where a piece of video might have been recorded.

Then I remember the house where I lived during college. Four doors down was a HAM operator with a big yagi antenna sticking above his house. I think his handle was Tenderfoot, or something like that because he had a bum foot. Anyways, everytime he broadcast, he totally saturated all of the electronics in our house to the point that you could only hear his audio on the television, and if someone was leaving a message on the answering machine, all you could hear was him on the tape.

It was extremely annoying, to say the least, but shows just how susceptable electronics can be to broadcasted signals.

So, what about establishing an array of beacons in trouble areas that will emit RF energy that could interfere with recording equipment. When a terrorist videotapes their proof of life video, it becomes watermarked, so to speak, and hopefully that can be used to triangulate a general location of where the video was shot.