Security Blindspot

Almost as soon as video cameras were invented, their potential as a part of a security system has been realized. Many a show, book, or film will have people trying to outright disable the security system, including and especially the cameras. Sometimes by cutting them out altogether (though this has a tendency to raise alarms), other times by creating a loop and feeding the camera false information.

However, just as criminals and spies are always looking for ways to exploit or disable a security system, those who maintain and design such systems are always on the lookout for ways to improve them. Making the camera system impervious to outside hacking, for example, makes creating a video loop to fool the guards monitoring the feed impossible.

But sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best, and many a savvy spy or crook will know that the best way to beat a camera is to simply not be on it in the first place.

Thus come the camera blinds, areas where the cameras do not see, creating holes in the security system.

The existence of camera blinds is difficult to avoid, as most cameras are not omnidirectional with their view, and even those that can pan to see a wider field are blind in the direction they're not pointing at that moment.

Of course, a good detective or head of security will know that the use of camera blinds, which only the guards who maintain the system should be 100% aware of, could mean an inside job when a crime is committed or the system is breached.

Of course, some criminals just happen to be very skilled at researching cameras and knowing their effective range and scope.

This does not apply solely to cameras. Any hole or flaw in a security system that allows an intruder to go unnoticed will qualify, provided that it's deliberately exploited.

People who can exploit this trope tend to be Genre Savvy.

Very common in spy fiction, police procedurals, detective stories, and heist films.

In video games, a variation of Crosshair Aware is often in play. For the low-tech equivalent, see The Guards Must Be Crazy.

Compare Destroy the Security Camera. See also Swiss-Cheese Security.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Castle Town Dandelion: Attempted, with varying degrees of success, by Akane Sakuraba, to preserve her privacy. As she's a princess, and there are over 2000 security cameras monitoring the city she lives in, it's not an easy feat. And the camera pattern gets shifted from time to time to make sure she can't evade the cameras all the time. Once in a while, she'll use her power over gravity to fly, putting her above the scope of the cameras, but this has the disadvantage of providing a Panty Shot to anyone below her, and as mentioned before, she's shy. So she can't use that option often.
• In the second episode of Sonic X, Sonic infiltrates a government facility to rescue Cream, who's been captured and taken to be studied. The corridors have security cameras positioned every ten feet or so, constantly sweeping back and forth: Sonic is able to use his Super-Speed to dart from one blind spot to the next, and makes it through without being seen.

Films — Live-Action

• Used as part of the Cruel Twist Ending of the horror film ATM: the protagonist is framed for all of the killer's crimes due to killer having somehow managed to consistently stay out of the ATM's cameras scope for the entire film.
• The Great Escape: Shortly after being transferred to Stalag Luft III, Captain Hilts observes the placement of the guard towers and realizes that they have a blind spot on a particular stretch of fence, and demonstrates it by hiding from them there. He then deliberately gets caught before the guards can realize his discovery, and is tossed in the cooler.
• In The Invisible Man (2020), the protagonist uses this as part of her ploy to kill the titular character: She makes it appear that he slits his own throat on camera while wearing an invisibility suit, leaves the room and re-enters, screams in horror and calls 911 while sobbing, then slowly backs out of view of the camera. When out of view, she changes her expression to a satisfied smirk, and utters the word "Surprise."
• Ocean's 8: Mixed with Camera Spoofing, as the crew is able to hack the cameras beforehand and over time slowly shift their movement patterns to introduce blind spots where none previously existed without drawing alarm.
• These Are the Damned. The children who live in the underground bunker have charted the blindspots on the 'eyes' that keep them under constant surveillance. Unfortunately they forget that the adult protagonists are taller than they are, tipping the guards off that there are intruders.
• In The Shape of Water, Elisa finds out that in the facility she works at, there's a narrow hallway where some of the workers go to smoke in (open) secret despite there being a security camera. Apparently, all they had to do was simply budge the camera, to which security turns a blind eye and they'd never get caught. This area gets used later by Elisa and her friends to exfiltrate the Asset while security assumes it's just another smoke break.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: In the first book, Foley equips Mulch with a contact lens that lets him see the area the camera sees (visualized as yellow beams), as well as Camera Spoofing. The latter fails because Artemis and Butler are in continuous communication, and Butler not showing up on a camera is a pretty big hint that something's wrong.
• In The Expanse novel Tiamat's Wrath, La Résistance discovers the Laconian dreadnought occupying the Solar System has a blind spot in its sensor array and promptly plans an attack on that dreadnought using an antimatter core that was meant to power it.
• Jurassic Park: Hammond boasts about the level of coverage the island has with sensors and security cameras which he believes will let them know precisely where all the dinosaurs are at all times. Muldoon counters that the portions that are not covered by the camera and sensor network are continuous so the dinosaurs can freely move through them undetected. He's later proven right.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four: When Winston writes in his diary, he does so in an alcove in his apartment which he believes is hidden from the surveillance of the telescreen.

Live-Action TV

• Breaking Bad: Walt goes into a small cubbyhole in the superlab which is blocked from Gus' security camera by a small wall to manufacture the ricin he intends to kill Gus with. Jesse points out he didn't really need to take that risk (since Walt could've easily manufactured the ricin in his own home), but Walt likes the poetic irony of killing Gus with ricin made using the materials from Gus' own lab.
• Burn Notice:
  • In "Scatter Point", in order for Michael to break into Carla's office, Sam observes the guard patrols and discovers that there's a point during shift change where there's only one guard outside, who has to get up and follow if anybody goes down the alley behind the building, leaving the front unguarded. Michael attempts to exploit this but is interrupted by the Client of the Week plot; when he tries again, he finds that Carla's people spotted him on his previous attempt and have decamped.
  • "Seek and Destroy": Michael breaks into art dealer Scott Chandler's office in hopes of finding evidence linking him to the murder of his business partner. Since Chandler still thinks Michael is on his side, Sam has access to the store's security cameras and is able to guide Michael to the office through their blind spots over their cell phones—though he once nearly accidentally gets Michael seen by mixing up his right and his left.
• Corner Gas: Parodied in the episode "Security Cam". After Brent installs a security camera in the store, Karen goads Hank into trying to time the coverage of the camera in order to hide from view. Brent eventually tells Hank that the camera is stationary.
• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: A shootout at a grocery store involving armed robbers and some hapless police who just happened to walk into the situation causes a review of the store's security, including the video feed. They discover that the crooks came in from the rear loading bay and that the camera had been tilted off-kilter the day before by a disgruntled worker who was furious with management for not giving her full-time employment, meaning she didn't qualify for benefits.
• There's the BBC drama Hot Money, which was based on a real-life case where women working at a Bank of England depot, which destroyed time-served bank-notes, chose to reprieve old notes from the furnace and give them a new lease of life. Getting on for two or three million pounds in very old notes were diverted into caches and secret bank accounts before the Bank of England caught on. As cleaners were involved in the scam, they elected to clean the cameras and their lenses at just the right moment, thus blocking the shot whilst others behind them stole arm-loads of notes. All the camera saw at that moment would be a cleaner legitimately polishing the lens with a cloth.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: It's revealed that corrections officers at a New York prison have been exploiting holes in the security cameras to force themselves on female inmates, particularly and especially the blind spot that is the prison chapel, which has no coverage so that prisoners will feel comfortable offering confession.
• Leverage:
  • Season 3 begins with Nate going to prison, and subsequently finding someone for his team to help. Billy Epping didn't realize that crossing state lines with beer in his trunk was illegal, and was sentenced to a disproportionate sentence by a corrupt judge taking kickbacks from the even more corrupt warden. Epping was being targeted by gangs in the prison because he was found over the dead body of one of their members. Eliot notes that the body was found in a camera blind that only the prison guards should have known about. Nate and co. later exploit those same blinds to escape and make it look like Billy Epping had as well, only for the warden to have egg on his face when Epping is found safe in the prison with the other inmates. They also make it look like the warden took a bribe from Nate to let him go.
  • "The Inside Job", when the team has to retrieve Parker from Wakefield Agriculture, a building guarded by a dreaded Steranko security system, Nate says they need to find a way to get in without tripping the alarms. Eliot suggests that corporate bigwigs might not be willing to sacrifice their privacy, and Hardison quickly discovers that he's right, and directs him to a corner office that he can enter by using the window washing apparatus.
• Sherlock: Invoked by Mycroft in "A Study in Pink", when he phones John and directs his attention to several cameras in security-conscious England, then deliberately has the cameras pan so that they're not looking at John. Basically sending the message, "I can do anything I want to you and no one will see." John, to his credit, tells Mycroft that it's a "clever trick" but that he could have just called him on his phone.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Dax", Jadzia (the host of the Dax symbiont) is kidnapped from the titular space station by Klaestrons, who got the security sensor information from the Cardassians who had previously occupied the station. Luckily, the ship was stopped before it could escape.

Video Games

• Deadly Rooms of Death: In The Second Sky, the Guardian of Nethlekempt Farrows forbids entry to A1 because his guards damaged the Living Walls with their swords, and forbids entry to Beethro because A1 could follow him inside. Beethro has to fool the Guardian by positioning A1 in his blind spot.
• Five Nights at Freddy's 3: The Hostile Animatronic Springtrap is intelligent enough to know what the field of vision on Fazbear's Fright's cameras are. Whenever possible, he'll try to conceal as much of his body off-camera as possible; combined with the cameras' poor quality and how dim the place is at night, he easily blends into the scenery, making figuring out where he is that much harder.
• Metal Gear has the player navigate the rooms while avoiding cameras, an easy task due to them having tunnel vision. This is optional, as it only sets off the alarm which sends enemies.
• Metal Gear Solid includes surveillance cameras, which have a blind spot directly underneath the camera, and whose vision cone is shown on the radar. Alternatively, they can be destroyed by explosives, with later games allowing the use of first-person view to shoot cameras.
• Persona 5: The Palace of Junya Kaneshiro, head of a local yakuza, is modeled after an immense bank, with security cameras abound. Some are fixed on one location, whilst others switch on and off based on a rotation. While cutting the power to a number of the cameras is required to advance, at times the player will need to use Thief's Eye to see where the camera is looking, and then avoid its line of sight.
• In Rainbow Six Siege, the attacking team has to create their own blindspots by shooting out cameras in the location they're infiltrating, as dead defenders can still help out their team by spectating.
• Starcraft II: Several of the game's stealth missions allow the player to see the vision radius of detectors, and either avoid their patrols, disable them with abilities, or teleport across gaps in their vision.
• The World Is Not Enough: The first stage has James Bond infiltrating Lachaise's penthouse, the second floor which contains five cameras, but also conveniently-placed alcoves for players to control Bond to duck into and avoid detection (alternatively, just shoot away with Bond's Walther PP7). Finishing the level without being detected once will net a higher score.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: The black fog obscures parts of the surveillance network Moebius has all over Aionios. Once Ouroboros figure this out, they use the fog as cover during some of their missions.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: In "Rise From The Ashes", one of the witnesses manages to avoid being seen by the security camera in the evidence room when leaving due to knowing what its range of sight is.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: In "To Surveil, with Love", surveillance cameras are installed all over Springfield. Bart discovers that the only spot the cameras can't see is in the Simpsons' backyard, leading to him and Homer starting charging people to come there and do illegal activities.

Real Life

• Many modern security cameras are under reflective one-way domes that prevent people from knowing which direction they're pointed at any given point. Also, decoy domes may be installed, preventing people from knowing where the cameras actually are.

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