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Comment by blurbleblurble | Hacker News Reader

Why are the stakes so high? Well, research "integrated communications and sensing" to find out. IEEE is pushing this paradigm shift. The radio hardware isn't just being used for communications between active devices anymore. It'll be useable for passive and biometric sensing applications, including but not limited to passive localization and identification of people without phones. Next generation wireless standards are being explicitly designed to facilitate this.

That said, for some reason I doubt that hardware deployed in the 5 eyes nations won't also be used for surveillance purposes, just that the institutions controlling the systems will be different.

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> It'll be useable for passive and biometric sensing applications, including but not limited to passive localization and identification of people without phones.

What? How? Why are all these tinfoil hat conspiracies turning into reality ... like your TV or alarm clock spying on you.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.04859.pdf

802.11bf is a thing. It doesn’t seem completely out of the picture for such a technology to be abused once it is implemented.

There are already production systems like the WiZ lights which use wifi for person detection (https://www.signify.com/global/our-company/news/press-releas...).

In short, your body affects the signal. And through MIMO there are multiple simultaneous signals being sent between different antennas on wifi-devices. With just one signal, wifi sensing doesn't tell you much. You sort-off have to look at signal loss and guess if it is lower because the signal is passing through you.

With multiple signals, not only do you get multiple data points on signal loss, you also get a phase difference between the signals (i.e. a signal that passed through you is delayed a bit compared to signal that didn't pass through you). By integrating that knowledge from various signals (or rather 'channels') and probably doing a whole lot of other smart stuff, potentially some training / fingerprinting (i.e. if they are at position X, then the signals do Y, for many different positions), you can get location data.

This is scheduled for 2024 via IEEE 802.11bf in Wi-Fi 7 Sensing, it's passive radar that passes through the walls of homes and business, e.g. neighbors or adversaries can identify humans, activity, typing, combination locks, etc. Anything involving motion which causes Doppler shift. Hundreds of papers have been published over the past decade and it can be done with hardware that costs less than $20.

Defenses are either cat&mouse electronic warfare or shielding the walls/floor/roof of some rooms (e.g. research labs in business, industrial systems, home offices, bedrooms) with materials like aluminum radiant barrier or expensive drywall (e.g. QuietRock) designed for RF shielding of SCIFs.

Prior threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31561338#31563572

> reason I doubt that hardware deployed in the 5 eyes nations won't also be used for surveillance purposes

Well that makes sense. They didn’t cite privacy concerns.

In the future we won’t see tanks driving over dissidents. Such barbarities gone, a safer more technocratic dystopia awaits. Smart cities. Chilling.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri predicted it, again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwqN3Ur-wP0

Could you elaborate on what exactly "integrated communications and sensing" is and why it's so important here. I tried to do some quick reading but I failed to find any good high level overview of what it is. Most of what I was able to find seemed like academic research papers around beam-forming.

The status from 3 years ago was already pretty scary.

https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/IdentificationThroughWall...

Wow, this is equally fascinating and frightening. Is it correct to say Cross-Modal-ID is an application of "integrated communications and sensing" technology then? Am I understanding relationship correctly?

I'd say that's a good way of putting it, though the way I understand it is that "integrated sensing and communication" is an engineering approach intended to facilitate more applications like this and to push them to the theoretical limits. The main reason being to help communication and sensing applications coexist in the same spectrum.

Thanks, that helps as do your two links above. Cheers.

It's an approach to wireless engineering aiming to make it much easier for sensing and communications applications to use the same spectrum simultaneously. There are so many papers on the topic and some of them are more technical but a lot are focused on possible applications. The name "ISAC" is kind of an umbrella term to describe a bunch of different approaches both old and new.

For the passive sensing applications you can mix and match these keywords in Google scholar:

"Device free", "gait recognition", "passive", "localization", "identification", "activity recognition"

For example: "device free localization" is a keyword for papers about tracking people who don't have phones. Another similar one would be "passive identification". You might also try "adversarial localization".

See this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11457

And check this out: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1812720569488179637...

Some of these papers are more than a decade old, and are written about standard WiFi hardware. So for researchers this kind of stuff is old news.

WiFi radiation makes a great source of illumination for sensing applications.

This paradigm shift appears to be driven in part by the increasing congestion of the sub-6 GHz frequency bands. Integrated communications and sensing devices should be able to share spectrum.

Prior threads on Wi-Fi 7 Sensing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758434

Which standard? Where can we read about how these standards are designed to facilitate biometric sensing?

I believe they're referring to 802.11bf "WLAN sensing"

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