As for tooling to take one down, I do discourage the laser route because it’s a risk to the eyesight of those in the surrounding area.
Oh, I’m not talking about something powerful enough to destroy a camera, just to make it so that it can’t read anything while the laser is aimed at it. Laser dazzlers are a thing when it comes to countering satellite reconaissance, and if someone could work out the software side enough to rapidly identify cameras on earth, I’d think that it’d be a legal way to keep them from doing omnipresent monitoring.
I’d think that a lower class lasers, of the sort used in a low-power laser pointer or similar, should be fine:
A Class 1 laser is safe under all conditions of normal use. This means the maximum permissible exposure (MPE) cannot be exceeded when viewing a laser with the naked eye or with the aid of typical magnifying optics (e.g. telescope or microscope).
A Class 2 laser is considered to be safe because the blink reflex (glare aversion response to bright lights) will limit the exposure to no more than 0.25 seconds.
I don’t know if it’s possible to do that, though, with current software; identifying camera lenses might be a hard problem. And if someone made a successful implementation, I could imagine laws against it being passed (“criminals will use it to evade surveillance!”)
Oh, I’m not talking about something powerful enough to destroy a camera, just to make it so that it can’t read anything while the laser is aimed at it. Laser dazzlers are a thing when it comes to countering satellite reconaissance, and if someone could work out the software side enough to rapidly identify cameras on earth, I’d think that it’d be a legal way to keep them from doing omnipresent monitoring.
I’d think that a lower class lasers, of the sort used in a low-power laser pointer or similar, should be fine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_safety
I don’t know if it’s possible to do that, though, with current software; identifying camera lenses might be a hard problem. And if someone made a successful implementation, I could imagine laws against it being passed (“criminals will use it to evade surveillance!”)