stars of CCTV

OK, so the Iranian police - well, the Basij, the IRGC, the spooks, the cops, the repressive state apparatus anyway - are publishing photos of demonstrators on the Web and trying to crowdsource the job of identifying the faces on their CCTV tapes. It says here. And, indeed, here they are.

Now, this is obviously a case where throwing a multi-gigabit DDOS attack at them would do nothing but gooood. If you want to load that page several thousand times, or post completely spurious information to it, of course there's nothing I can do to stop you, even though it is no doubt against the Computer Misuse Act.

But what depresses me about this project is that the idea was originated by the West Yorkshire Police after the Bradford race riot of 2001; they got the Telegraph & Argus to publish, day after day, front pages of CCTV or other surveillance images of rioters, in the hope that the public would turn them in. Which they did.