After Edward Snowden’s shocking revelations about the depth of NSA surveillance were published in The Guardian and other outlets earlier this year, wondering just who is watching you and how is something that a whole lot more of us are doing. We now take it for granted that the NSA is reading our emails and tracking our movements via our smartphones. One way to protect ourselves is to use camouflage, to baffle security cams and common software such as Facebook’s facial recognition program, which makes tagging your face and the faces of your friends in your uploaded pictures much easier.

Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic has a terrific post about radical-fashion techniques to counteract such software—techniques that include misleading garb, face paint, and wacky haircuts. We don’t anticipate that everyone will turn to these tactics, but a select few may find them very useful in subverting central control (however defined). Best of all, the techniques are a subset of camouflage known as “razzle dazzle”—actually, most of the time it’s called just “dazzle”—these techniques were first developed by the U.S. and British navies during World War I. As Wikipedia explains, “dazzle works not by offering concealment but by making it difficult to estimate a target’s range, speed and heading.”
 

The U.S.S. West Mahomet, 1918
 

“Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool,” Edward Wadsworth, 1919

Amsterdam-based designer Simone C. Niquille—who, appropriately, has obscured her face on her LinkedIn picture—has developed some intriguing shirts that can prevent people from being recognized by facial-recognition software. The trick? Put pictures of famous people all over it. Hell, it isn’t all that different from fashionable tops that aren’t designed to evade facial recognition.
 

 
Adam Harvey invented the term “CV dazzle” (computer vision dazzle) to describe some of his work, which includes clothing, but he has also developed makeup and hair style techniques as well, as seen below.
 

 
Here, Jillian Mayer teaches you some practical guidelines on how to apply CV dazzle makeup on your own:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Whisker Wars’ - the world of competitive facial hair
New Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets