insecure cameras / by Sebastian Morales

Last summer I happened attend a coding meetup, there I actually met Leon Eckert who turns out to also be an ITP student (2nd year)! One of the presenters during the meetup was showing a project he did with insecure cameras pulled from insecam.org. At this point I became really intrigued by the concept and once in NYC, I started looking for cameras in the city. 

Most of the cameras happen to be inside buildings. Aside of being a little creepy they are not very interesting to me, this lead me to focus in just a couple of cameras which pointed to the outdoors. 

After going through the 100 or so cameras in nyc, I came across two that looked promising, the problem then was that not a lot of information is given about the location of the cameras, except for... well, the camera feed itself. 

TRACKING THE LOCATIONS

The first camera I found was actually the one with the cobblestone ground, this actually narrowed down the search significantly since only a couple of streets in ny have this type of pavement. 

Looking through the internet, I came across this NYC Bike Maps website that lists all the streets in the city with cobblestone pavements. 

http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/cobblestones/

After a long virtual walk I finally found that distinctive red building!

Time to go pay a personal visit!

The second camera was a little harder to find but eventually I did.

Also, thanks to Tiri for joining my last minute adventures! and thanks to  for capturing some of the images. 

Thinking forward, I am not exactly sure what do I want to do with this knowledge, the first thing that comes to mind is a video but there could be other things to explore. Perhaps distance the project from questions of privacy and surveillance and use the cameras a medium to explore something completely different. 

In the mean time, here a quick video a couple of friends and I did:

This post was originally posted as an ITP Blog Post