美国国家公共电台 NPR Covert Fashion Provides Camouflage Against Surveillance Software

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South by Southwest also showcases art, the type of art you'd expect at a tech-focused conference. One installation features counter-surveillance fashion by a group of women of color. They first caught the eye of NPR arts correspondent Mandalit del Barco at the Sundance Film Festival a couple of months ago. Here, she introduces us to them and to their protective wearables.

MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE¹: "NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism" is a virtual reality experience. It's a science fiction-like beauty salon² for black women. Inside this virtual world, beauticians braid the client's hair with electrodes meant to boost brain power.

CARMEN AGUILAR Y WEDGE: What we're projecting here is that black women are the pioneers of brain optimization³.

DEL BARCO: Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is a structural⁴ engineer turned experience designer. She's co-captain of an international collective known as Hyphen-Labs along with Ashley Backus Clark, who is trained as a molecular⁵ biologist.

AGUILAR Y WEDGE: We are a group of scientists, architects and engineers turned artists creating critical work for critical times.

DEL BARCO: Not all of their inventions are as abstract and theoretical as the VR salon they introduced at this year's Sundance Film Festival. They also showcased a small line of covert⁶ fashion products designed to protect identities, particularly for people of color. Among the fashion prototypes they showed is an incandescent⁷ sun visor.

AGUILAR Y WEDGE: You can put it in front of your face to deflect⁸ any malicious⁹ gaze and control your identity.

ASHLEY BACKUS CLARK: Whomever you're looking at can't see in. What they see is a reflection of themselves. So if they're saying something to you that isn't nice, then they're forced to view their own maliciousness¹⁰ in the mirror.

DEL BARCO: They also introduced oversized gold hip-hop-style door knocker earrings¹¹ with hidden cameras and microphones. Clark says they could be useful during police stops.

CLARK: To begin recording¹² any sort of altercation¹³ or ambiguous interaction at the touch of a button.

DEL BARCO: Hyphen-Labs also unveiled a purple and pink silk scarf that camouflages¹⁵ the wearer from facial recognition software, the kind used by social media, online retailers¹⁶, law enforcement and the military. The scarf's fabric¹⁷ is designed with 1,200 pixelated faces meant to mislead computer algorithms.

CLARK: We're looking at, like, what if people were to wear this to protests? When you have so many faces on a garment, you can ultimately, if enough people are wearing it, break the surveillance system entirely¹⁸.

DEL BARCO: The so-called HyperFace scarf was designed by Adam Harvey, an American artist living in Berlin.

ADAM HARVEY: The idea here is that you're misleading the face detection algorithm by providing false positives. And the way that would work in practice is if you're able to reduce the confidence score of your true face, then you blend into the background of fake faces.

DEL BARCO: A few years ago, Harvey began working on designs like this when he was a student at NYU. Now, he has a whole line of nouveau camouflage¹⁴, including what he calls Stealth Wear - anti-drone burqas and hijabs. They're made from textiles fabricated with silver, which makes them very expensive. They're meant to thwart¹⁹ thermal²⁰ detecting drones and spyware.

HARVEY: If you introduce a barrier between your body's radiation of heat, which is equivalent to about a 100-watt light bulb, then you disappear. So it's a little bit magical. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's a Harry²¹ Potter cloak, which people seem to really want it to be sometimes.

DEL BARCO: Harvey says a 99 cent Mylar blanket could do the same but it isn't as fashionable. He's now working with Hyphen-Labs to come up with even more covert designs. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF FLYING LOTUS SONG, "NEVER CATCH ME")