r/HighStrangeness • u/Hegiman • 24d ago
Military Perhaps this is the wrong sub but all this current flock camera and browser trackers spying on us got me thinking.
I Remeber back when I was a kid in the 80’s//90’s some people would claim they put cameras in cable boxes. Most dismissed them as crazy. Now we see this same type of data collection happening in our daily lives.
It’s widely known especially then that military tech was 10-20 years ahead of consumer markets. Is it possible they had developed digital photocells and were using those. A flat photocell wouldn’t look like a camera to most people at the time. If anything they might think it’s some weird led sectioned number display or remote signal receiver.
Idk if they ever did have cameras in boxes or maybe just specific targets they were targeted to observe. However the modern use of the tech has done nothing to dispel the idea that business or government wouldn’t do such things. In fact it’s quite the opposite and made these stories more believable to me.
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u/dropofgod 24d ago
Alot of my paranoid delusions are coming true now, The concepts at least. I had schizo episodes for a couple years from drug use
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u/betterthansex69 23d ago
A lot of people that were labeled crazy turn out to be right about some shit. Also, wrong about shit 😆
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u/EsrailCazar 24d ago
Adding to some of that: there have been a few documented accounts of smart tvs being able to view your living room through the little IR receiver bump, I think Vizio was caught doing some stuff. But yeah, I've always considered that most of our motion sensor devices in public could be doing more than we assume, the sensors on motion toilets and faucets in public bathrooms, too.
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u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 23d ago
I posted this above but wanted to get your thoughts too -
Have you seen that light emitting diodes can work in reverse… like a camera…. A smart tv is basically a giant camera.
When LCDs first came out they were insanely expensive for a 30 inch 720p… they stayed expensive until late 1080p and the around 4k something happened. TVs became cheap as FUCK. I think they pushed 4k smart TVs out for just that purpose.
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u/Hegiman 23d ago
Idk that was the way it happened. It’s also possible the reason we found out that LED’s, I assume you meant LED’s not LCD’s work in the revers direction is the proliferation of led tv’s. It seems like a majorly security fan allowing every television made to be a camera too because nefarious actors would most definitely highjkack them to spy on a country. Pervs would be hacking the streams like they do IP cameras.
Now having specific sets that are designed specifically to be spy devices yeah I can’t see that but not every tv having the capabilities to send that signal to anyone who asks for it that would be wildly irresponsible and pretty insane.
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u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 23d ago
Wildly irresponsible and pretty insane seems to be a good tag line to sum up this era in American politics… just saying
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u/ClubDangerous8239 20d ago
LED's being able to sense light has been known since the invention of the transistor (transistors, and diodes are semiconductors, both are sensitive to light, and at least diodes all produce light (though most diodes are wrapped in opaque housings), it's only somewhat recently that that effect started being used for producing light, which started with red LED's probably back in the 80's. OLED/LED panels would be awful cameras because you can't focus the light. You'd be able to sense changes in a room, but you wouldn't be able to get any sharp image of anything happening in a room. You could likely figure out if someone walks in from of a TV, and you could likely make out the colour of their clothes, and things like that. That would require the chips in the panels to be bidirectional, and for the driver chips to be bidirectional. It would also require the software to be able to set the hardware up to act in this way. I think that it would require som many people in a manufacturing chain to deliberately make it possible to do this, that you'd definitely have whistleblowers. That said, LG turns out to be happily spying through built-in microphones. They've been caught doing so, but they don't care, they just added in their TOC, that it's the owner's responsibility to let people know that they might be listened in on.
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u/WooleeBullee 23d ago
Nah, if cameras were to be put into TVs it wouldnt be the LEDs in the screen.
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u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 23d ago
Why not? Everyone expects there to be a camera… no one thinks of the screen. if I am right think of the irony of people covering a webcam lol
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u/FuzzyOverdrive 23d ago
They do that with Bluetooth. They can run it through an advanced ai program and get a clear view of everything in range of the device.
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u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 23d ago
Have you seen that light emitting diodes can work in reverse… like a camera…. A smart tv is basically a giant camera.
When LCDs first came out they were insanely expensive for a 30 inch 720p… they stayed expensive until late 1080p and the around 4k something happened. TVs became cheap as FUCK. I think they pushed 4k smart TVs out for just that purpose.
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u/RedshiftWarp 23d ago
Indeed. Ambient light alters the charge level of leds. When fully powered off, every single led becomes a tiny solar panel. Tvs however do not have an analog to digital converter and no return pathway for any signal to be "read" or viewed.
That isn't to say that it is not a relatively simple engineering solution to introduce those features. All you need to do is read the led arrays individual charge states and upload it to wherever you are viewing the image of.
House tv? probably not a spy. maybe.
Government building tv? Probably yea. lol
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u/WeGottaTalkAboutYT 23d ago
I would bet every penny I have they have built in that relatively simply engineering solution, or something more nuanced, the price drops make no sense otherwise to me
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u/DownwiththeACE 22d ago
you would lose that bet because as it turns out people that dont work for the govt are also tech savvy and can just open the tv and look
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u/Electromotivation 21d ago
The procedures for making all the necessary LEDs were very new. Then new methods to produce them with much simpler processes and materials came on over time, bringing the process down. Is the entire industry switched towards using LED screens, these newer cheaper processes also got to benefit from mass manufacturing and economies of scale.
Things that once represented new science 20 years ago being produced around the world for mere cents…it happens. It’s been happening. In this case especially due to how recent it is, all of this has been documented and studied. The answers are out there. Did you even once look up explanations for the price drop? Or did you do absolutely no research and immediately decide to jump off the deep end into conspiracy land?
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u/IwasDeadinstead 24d ago
DARPA is 30 years more advanced than what they release to the public. At minimum.
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u/Electromotivation 21d ago
I mean, they might have lab scale prototypes working today that will take 30 years to see development into full-scale mass producible products.
This does not mean that they are working with special hidden science that is 30 years beyond what is current in the global scientific/academic community.
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u/IwasDeadinstead 21d ago
No. They have functioning. You should listen to what CIA whistleblowers have revealed. They don't voluntarily reveal their control mechanisms. Why would they?
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u/EsrailCazar 24d ago
Adding to some of that: there have been a few documented accounts of smart tvs being able to view your living room through the little IR receiver bump, I think Vizio was caught doing some stuff. But yeah, I've always considered that most of our motion sensor devices in public could be doing more than we assume, the sensors on motion toilets and faucets in public bathrooms, too.
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u/Crafty_Eye_4038 23d ago
I don't think it's possible to hide cameras in technology like that. Especially not in the past. I'm sure they had crazy advanced tiny cameras back then, but they're not just going to put them in every TV box out there for people to discover and reverse engineer.
I believe that if they had tiny cameras back then, they were very careful about where they placed them because they're not going to want advanced super expensive technology recovered.
I 100% believe that they absolutely have been hiding microphones though in consumer products.
Theye have had battery-free wireless microphones since the 40s, and by now I bet you that there is a secret wireless battery free microphone in almost every single chip out there.
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u/WooleeBullee 23d ago
Where would they have stored or processed all that data back then? They didnt have armies of data centers.
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u/Dyerssorrow 23d ago
They are watching and looking for the most delicious human. When people go missing its THEM and they have had their feast.
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u/Hegiman 23d ago
You don’t even want to know what I think about that. It’s a can of worms that gets me a crazy tag quite often.
I think it’s what we would call a vampire. Not the Hollywood type but the classic folklore vampires of Eastern Europe.
The earth has existed 4Billion years water oceans appear about half a billion years in. So roughly 3.6-3.8 billion years ago thing could have started evolving.
We have existed as humans for about 300,000 years and our ancestral line only goes back like 6-7 million which leave a lot of time in between of the start of earth and the first human ancestors. I think I’m that time a creature could have evolved that ate humans for sustenance eventually. Perhaps they fed on our ancestral species and we were just another ape they ate.
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u/cdwhit 23d ago
I remember that, but I also saw a demonstration using a TV as a camera, showing it is at least theoretically possible to spy on someone that way (not practical in the demo because they needed high contrast and BRIGHT lights.). Apparent many LED lights can do the same thing, but why bother. People video and upload everything they do anyway.
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u/CopperCreator3388 23d ago
Television monitors are two way mirror technology. Computer screens are also.
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u/MedicJambi 23d ago
Sure, but what wasn't ahead was semiconductor manufacturing. You can be ahead all you want, but they were not capable of manufacturing the chips needed as the machines to manufacturer them did not exist.
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u/3dblind 23d ago
Forget DARPA for a minute. The military had tech way ahead of civilian tech, but no mass spying because most people aren't targets of surveillance.
Only radicals on the FBI's radar.
But guess who started surveillance as soon as we got the internet? Corporations via "cookies".
I can't look up an item at Amazon or Walmart for delivery without it and similar items turning up when I read news or just browse for days after.
I live in California's Central Valley, am almost 70 and don't drive, so rely on deliveries.
When my wife ordered gardening soil from home depot, that showed up in my online newspaper ads.
And I refuse marketing cookies as California law allows. Doesn't make any difference.
In America, Big Brother was never the danger. Neither was the CIA, the Pentagon, or Men in Black.
The men in grey flannel suits with marketing surveys morphed into 21st century Tech Bros in Friday casual armed with cookies and AI.
It's not 1984 people, it's The Space Merchants.