Vision 2: Self-hosted Security System

A potential solution to regain some control from Big Brother

We live in an age of increasing surveillance. Between the mobile cameras in our pockets and security cameras mounted on buildings and homes, cameras are cheap and bountiful.

Few like the idea of being recorded and losing their privacy. The effect of a panopticon's existence takes its toll. Stories of Big Brother always watching and remembering your every move are haunting and now descriptive of the age we live in. Even Batman Begins highlights the power of centralizing these cameras, creating a mass tool for tracking.

One reaction would be to anti-camera, but then we need to examine why we have cameras in the first place. Do security cameras have a place in our ideal world? I think so. Property owners may need to keep an eye on their property. We've had security cameras for many years before the Internet, and I don't think they're the center of the problem. We need to allow people to watch their properties and homes.

The center of the problem is the centralized cloud service. The Internet of things has connected all sorts of sensors to the Internet and placed them in our private homes. Everything from Google Nest to control our climate control to Amazon's Ring that watches our front door. These are centralized through a large tech brand connected to the cloud.

We buy these sensors because they improve our quality of life. That's great; it's an improvement. I can be at work and check to see if I have packages at home. But I have trust issues with large tech companies trying to stay non-corrupt. I've worked in Information Technology for many years. I know administrations aren't supposed to breach privacy, but it happens. And the less than-ideal employees, and you're going to have a lot of those if you're staffing a large organization, will break the organizational rules. And the organization has little reason to enforce its rules until it causes significant trouble for them.

Law enforcement is now working with Amazon to utilize the network of Ring cameras to help solve crimes combined with their own cameras. I'm not a fan of crime, but video-based law enforcement is not only the lazy way to serve a community but puts a considerable distance between police and the people. I understand it increases their safety, but I find it at the cost of our own.

So online centralized video-connected cameras and storage need to change. We need the ability to check on our packages at home from work without storing them in a centralized big tech cloud service. So what do we need to figure out how to do this. We should have this technology already.

At the Bluegem Network, we've had a couple calls where this problem came up, and we discussed some potential solutions, and this is what we came up with.

If we're not putting the videos in big tech's cloud, we need to store them somewhere. A home file server or NAS (Network-Attached Storage) would be an excellent place to start. The number of cameras one has and needs of the length of history ultimately decide storage requirements. We have more video compression algorithms than ever before, and even the brand/model of the camera adds complexity to the mix. Even a little storage will cover more than it has in the past. We could also put the video on a rented server, which keeps it out of the hands of big tech and centralization. Still, I've found that the distance between the cameras and the storage becomes an issue. You don't want an intruder cutting your internet cord first and then storming your house. Then your cameras couldn't record to the cloud (which many of these current cloud-based systems fail at).

So a home-based server is preferable. There's a meme going around that the average person doesn't want to run a server in their home. Still, the reality is that depending on how you define a server, they're already running many consume-level servers in their homes. If you make a product simple enough and it solves a real problem, people might use it.

So to turn this goal into a product, you must start by targeting people with a server in their home. After reviewing the open source options to use a base, the Raspberry Pi community has several projects connecting various manufacturer-brand cameras, including some do-it-yourself projects. They have some tutorials and low-cost options. Most of this stuff is aimed at engineers, makers, and tinkerers. But an organization could take those to the next level of polish and create the ultimate guide.

The ultimate guide could lead to a purchasable kit with existing manufacturers and software pre-configured into a home appliance. Now you could fork off and even make your own hardware to sell, tightly integrating the software and hardware as Apple does to deliver the best customer experience. Selling hardware can be a big gamble, though.

This organization created would need a strong marketing arm. Luckily the core of this vision is built around solid values that are easy to sell. You do not need to use fear, uncertainty, or doubt as some security products love to do. Instead, we can focus on sovereignty, privacy, and dignity by not relying on others. If you sell the mission of changing the world, the selling of the guides and products should come easy, but like any marketing, it will likely be a grind. And because the vision is a movement, it has to be marketed by an organization. I don't think a decentralized community could do this as effectively.

As an organization, you can also take open source projects to the next level by registering with the smartphone app stores and helping create the mobile tools that most cloud-based consumer products currently have that the open source projects do not. Having an equivalent customer experience to the cloud-based products we're replacing is vital.

For mobile apps connecting to home servers, a consumer will need to have the ability to allow incoming connections into their home Internet connections. Unfortunately, consumers might not know how to port forward on their router for their home servers. While there are technologies like UPNP (Universal Plug aNd Play) that help get around this, there are Internet connections that won't be able to allow incoming connections. The organization could provide hosted STUN (Session Traversal Utilities for NAT) to help work around this technical detail. You could charge a monthly fee, spin up a user-supported non-profit, or just host them for free.

One idea that was brought up was that blockchain infrastructure could be used to incentivize people to run their own network relays. These blockchain efforts could also create a potential funding source for the project.

This is taking existing technologies and organizing them around some principles; we've injected our experiences to drive it into a potential project with a decent chance of success. We will continue to think and iterate on this idea and may even build some of it. We're putting this unfinished idea out there like an open-source vision. You are free to attempt to build it on your own. The world would be a better place to have this, and if you're the better person/team to make it, that's great. Then, we can focus on the next great thing.