Next time you look at a sign or billboard be aware it might be looking back at you.
Now, some entrepreneurs have introduced technology to solve that problem. They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard. These details are transmitted to a central database.
Behind the technology are small start-ups that say they are not storing actual images of the passers-by, so privacy should not be a concern. The cameras, they say, use software to determine that a person is standing in front of a billboard, then analyze facial features (like cheekbone height and the distance between the nose and the chin) to judge the person’s gender and age. So far the companies are not using race as a parameter, but they say that they can and will soon.
The goal, these companies say, is to tailor a digital display to the person standing in front of it — to show one advertisement to a middle-aged white woman, for example, and a different one to a teenage Asian boy.
This is a step in the direction of websites like Amazon where they show you products based on which products you've previously purchased or viewed. The image processing computers behind the cameras do not identify you personally today. But they probably will in the future.
What will you be able to do about it? Get onto a web site that provides genetic engineering services and come up with some instructions to feed into your home bioreactor to modify your stem cells to give them orders to reshape your face. Then the cameras won't recognize you.
If you feel paranoid because you feel you are being watched then your reaction is rational. Though I would advise "Don't worry, be happy".
Zaba Inc.'s ZabaSearch.com turns up public records such as criminal history and birthdates. Spock Networks Inc.'s Spock.com and Wink Technologies Inc.'s Wink.com are "people-search engines" that specialize in digging up personal pages, such as social-networking profiles, buried deep in the Web. Spokeo.com is a search site operated by Spokeo Inc., a startup that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites. Zillow Inc.'s Zillow.com estimates the value of people's homes, while the Huffington Post's Fundrace feature tracks their campaign donations. Jigsaw Data Corp.'s Jigsaw.com, meanwhile, lets people share details with each other from business cards they've collected -- a sort of gray market for Rolodex data.
Check up on the political leanings of your neighbors.
Some sites use the ability to snoop as a selling point. The Huffington Post's Fundrace feature, which allows users to enter their addresses and see a map showing their neighbors' political donations, uses this come-on: "Want to know ... whether that new guy you're seeing is actually a Republican or just dresses like one?"
Got a friend, neighbor, boss, or local political figure whose personal details pique your curiosity? Give these sites a whirl and let us know if you are successful in finding out surprising facts about them.
PhD student Dima Damen, from the University’s Faculty of Engineering has developed a computer system that detects individuals parking their bicycles and can automatically warn security staff if it appears that someone other than the owner retrieves the vehicle.
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Currently at prototype stage, Damen’s system takes colour information from CCTV images when a bike is parked and stores it until the bike is retrieved. It then marries the stored information with the new image and where there are significant differences, it can raise an alert to CCTV operators. In initial tests using a camera located above a bike rack at the University of Leeds, eleven out of thirteen simulated thefts were detected.
This approach seems like it might work for cars as well. Extended further, cameras trained on a street with image processing algorithms could alert humans when someone enters a building who has never been recorded entering that building before.
I am reminded of science fiction movies where small flying police monitor cameras watch people. When it comes to suspected thieves such mini flying cameras could be dispatched to record higher resolution images and even to follow a driver of a car or bicycle to track where they go.
Privacy protection advocates worry about intrusive governments and nosy corporations. But spouses looking at divorce have the keenest interest in electronic secrets.
“In just about every case now, to some extent, there is some electronic evidence,” said Gaetano Ferro, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, who also runs seminars on gathering electronic evidence. “It has completely changed our field.”
Privacy advocates have grown increasingly worried that digital tools are giving governments and powerful corporations the ability to peek into peoples’ lives as never before. But the real snoops are often much closer to home.
“Google and Yahoo may know everything, but they don’t really care about you,” said Jacalyn F. Barnett, a Manhattan-based divorce lawyer. “No one cares more about the things you do than the person that used to be married to you.”
Spying gets used in many ways. First off, spouses check up on each other to look for evidence of an affair in order to decide whether to divorce. But even if they decide to divorce before getting such evidence they still want evidence of affairs both to justify to themselves that they are the offended party and also to strengthen their position in bargaining for divorce settlement terms.
Another purpose for spying is purely financial. If the spouse has hidden assets then discovery of the assets creates the potential for a more advantageous settlement. One story mentioned in the Times article has a surgeon secretly buying a $3 million condo in order to continue an affair while denying that the affair is still happening. Cheeky devil.
The electronic trails left by emails, phone records, hidden recording devices, and the like create a fuller picture of just what humans have been doing on the sly.
Electronic means of surveillance are only going to grow more powerful, cheaper, and easier to use. Electronic devices mountable under vehicles provide a way for spouses to track each other's movements. But in the future smaller devices will be embeddable in clothing and other personal items to record sound and video of a person's day and form a much fuller image of what people do when their spouse is not around.
Surveillance technology will also transform the handling of paroled criminals. Already some criminals have to wear a ring around their leg or mounted in some other way on them to track their movements. But imagine when a ring worn around an extremity will be able to record all video and audio for a person for days and weeks. Recidivists who commit crimes while on parole will almost always get caught. You might think that crimes could still be concealed by briefly covering up a ring. But how about miniature video recorders mounted behind eyeballs? A person couldn't conceal where they are without closing their own eyes.
What, me worry? Just think of Manhattan as a massive reality TV show.
New York - The speed with which London's ubiquitous surveillance cameras helped identify would-be bombers has prompted calls for extensive closed-circuit television networks in the US.
In the first such public effort in the US, New York is planning to begin the installation of a similar, permanent system for lower Manhattan by year's end.
In the struggle against terrorism at home, its backers say CCTV is both a forensic tool and a deterrent to all but the most dedicated suicide bombers. Sophisticated imaging technology allows cameras to alert police to unattended packages, zoom in on objects hundreds of feet away, identify license plates, and "mine" archived footage for specific data.
Opponents contend that this very technology is overly intrusive and open to abuse, raising serious constitutional questions. They also note that surveillance cameras not only are helpless against suicide bombings, but also that perpetrators may use video records to try to glorify their acts.
Science fiction writer David Brin argued in his book The Transparent Society that we do not have the option of protecting privacy. We only have a choice over who gets to watch the cameras. Do only employees of government agencies get to watch the video feeds? Or do all people get to watch each other through neighborhood surveillance cameras?
Extremely miniaturized cameras will some day let people plant bugs in offices, cars, houses, and on clothing. People will be able to find out what others say and do when they think no one else is around to observe them. As Mick Jagger put it "These days its all secrecy, no privacy".
Cell phones can report where they are because they have GPS (global positioning system) circuitry that allows them to query satellites to determine their locations. By watcing the reported changing positions of cell phones it is possible to figure out which ones are in vehicles and determine traffic speedds on roads and highways.
Engineers have developed a system for taking anonymous cell-phone location information and turning it into an illuminated traffic map that identifies congestion in real time.The system takes advantage of the steady stream of positioning cues--untraced signals all cell phones produce, whether in use or not, as they seek towers with the strongest signals. It is the first traffic-solution technology that monitors patterns on rural roads and city streets as easily as on highways.
Developed by IntelliOne of Atlanta, Ga., the TrafficAid system could not only help guide drivers around tie-ups, but also tell emergency responders where accidents are or how effectively an evacuation is unfolding by pinpointing clusters of cell phones.
"Unlike sensors and other equipment along major freeways that is expensive and takes years to deploy, our system takes advantage of existing cellular networks in which wireless carriers have already invested billions of dollars," said National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee and IntelliOne CEO Ron Herman, a former engineer and computer scientist.
Herman was inspired by a friend's demonstration several years ago of a proof-of-concept Palm Pilot software that used real-time California Department of Transportation travel-time data to route the drivers around traffic snarls."I was completely sold," said Herman. "I believed then the next 'killer app' for mobile would demand live traffic data for every road--not just select highways equipped with speed sensors--and set out to make it happen."
There's a bigger pattern here: Data collected for one purpose gets aggregated, analyzed, and used for other purposes. Devices that can get queried to report information automatically without human involvement are becoming ubiquitous. Devices that would cost too much to deploy for some reason (e.g. traffic flow tracking) can get deployed for other reasons (e.g. mobile telephones) and then reused for other less economically valuable purposes.
The continued rapid increase in speed of computers is a well known phenomenon. I think the steadily falling costs of communications and data collection will have an even more profound effect. We are going to increasingly live in societies which are extremely measured and monitored. More nooks and crannies of life will have sensors and communications devices attached to them.
Austrian hackers broke into police video feeds in Vienna Austria.
A group called Quintessenz used an off-the-shelf satellite receiver to intercept the video signal transmitted by a surveillance camera overlooking a busy square in the capital Vienna. The feed had been crudely scrambled by modifying the analogue video signal but the activists were able to unscramble it using commercial video processing software.
This enabled them to view everything recorded by the camera, and revealed both its capabilities and shortcomings. "The funny thing was, the camera wasn't able to see right below itself," says Christian Moch, a spokesman for Quintessenz, "so people could carry out drug deals underneath it without being seen".
Science fiction writer David Brin has examined the gradual death of privacy due to technological advances in his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? and in articles he has on his web site. Brin makes the point that we face two choices: A) Let only government officials watch the camera feeds (and other surveillance feeds) or B) Let everyone watch the camera feeds. These hackers in Austria basically implemented plan B on a small scale.
Suppose everyone could watch all public video cameras over the internet. On the one hand, criminals and even terrorists would be able to figure out shortcomings in the surveillance systems. But on the other hand, a lot more members of the public would be able to watch for criminals in their spare time and many more cameras would have humans watching their feeds in real time. Police can't afford to watch every camera that they have access to. As cameras get cheaper and more ubiquitous the ratio of cameras to police employees watching them will rise higher and higher.
General public access to surveillance cameras would also lead to more rapid reports of camera failures and allow the public to knowledgeably criticize choices for camera positions and choices in camera brands and quality of signals.
So would you prefer only small numbers of people to have the authority to watch surveillance cameras? Or would you prefer a much larger number of people to have access to public camera video feeds?
Update: One other point: Lots of people are going to surveil each other regardless of whether governments provide access to their video cameras. Already spouses and boyfriends and girlfriends put GPS tracking devices on cars to see where their significant other goes to. Does she stop at some apartment complex when she claims she's at a business meeting? Or does he cruise a red light district? You can bet that as nanosensors become more powerful people will be putting audio recorders in clothes buttons and sending their untrusted loved one off on their day with sensors. Then they'll find out whether some hanky panky is going on at the office. Also, business competitors will find ways to spy on each other using coming nanotech sensors.
The point I'm making is that the surveillance society is not just something governments will create. Whether or not governments help us watch each other we will find ways to listen to, watch, and otherwise sense what people around us are doing. Parents will use tiny sensors to surreptitiously find out of their kids are doing drugs or having sex. Employers will use increasingly sophisticated sensors to watch employees. Employees will use sensors to find out what their bosses say behind closed doors. Many sensing technologies will be hard to detect and even if detected will be hard to connect with whoever is using them. Privacy is going to be increasingly hard to protect.
Since I think the death of privacy is inevitable anyway the idea of computer programs looking for patterns in huge numbers of phone call records does not bother me much and it seems preferable to human spying.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
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Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.
If a computer program analyzes tens or hundreds of billions of call records and some dozens of those records are from calls you made do you feel like your privacy has been invaded? I don't. Statistical analysis of massive gobs of data doesn't make me feel like I'm being watched. It just isn't personal enough. I like the idea that such impersonal means of analysis of data can lead to the identification of circles of friends and associates around terrorists.
If intelligence agencies were restricted to using conventional wiretapping court orders aimed at watching specific individuals there'd be no way for data mining computer programs to analyse to look for useful patterns. The whole idea of the approach is to try to find the needle in a haystack by rapidly comparing very large numbers of objects. Each object gets a very limited examination and few of the objects get looked at by real humans.
What it is about privacy invasion that most bothers you? Do you simply not like the idea of people watching you? Or is the objection more along the lines of specific harms incurred as a result? Are you afraid someone who watches you will use the information thus gleaned to blackmail or otherwise harm you?
Also, if someone is going to watch you would you prefer it is employees of an intelligence agency or local police or your neighbor?
I'd rather have governments discover the identity of terrorists by doing statistical analysis of large numbers of phone calls or credit card transactions or flight reservations rather than by, say, planting bugs to listen to conversations of people with ties to the Middle East. Computer analyses seem less invasive because human minds are not finding out intimate details of lives.
The use of computers seems preferable to having law enforcement personnel going around questioning lots of people about the personal lives of other people they know. The questioning can quite unfairly hurt a person's reputation. Whereas a computer program comparing billions of records in databases does not make your neighbors or employers or co-workers or friends think you might be involved in nefarious activities.
Update: When I present the choice as computers or people watching us I think this is an accurate representation of the truth. Intelligence agencies are searching for the terrorist needle in the human haystack. Either they use automation to find the terrorists or they employ much larger (orders of magnitude larger in all likelihood) numbers of people to sit in cars watching who comes to whose apartment or who has lunch with who or where someone goes when they fly out of the country and so on.
See Heather MacDonald's City Journal article where Heather explains how the TIA project could have linked all the al-Qaeda operatives together before 9/11.
Why DARPA’s interest in commercial repositories? Because that is where the terror tracks are. Even if members of sleeper cells are not in government intelligence databases, they are almost certainly in commercial databases. Acxiom, for example, the country’s largest data aggregator, has 20 billion customer records covering 96 percent of U.S. households. After 9/11, it discovered 11 of the 19 hijackers in its databases, Fortune magazine reports. The remaining eight were undoubtedly in other commercial banks: data aggregator Seisint, for example, found five of the terrorists in its repository.
Had a system been in place in 2001 for rapidly accessing commercial and government data, the FBI’s intelligence investigators could have located every single one of the 9/11 team once it learned in August 2001 that al-Qaida operatives Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq al-Hazmi, two of the 9/11 suicide pilots, were in the country. By using a process known as link analysis (simpler than data mining), investigators would have come up with the following picture: al-Midhar’s and al-Hazmi’s San Diego addresses were listed in the phone book under their own names, and they had shared those addresses with Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi (who flew United 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center). A fifth hijacker, Majed Moqed, shared a frequent-flier number with al-Midhar. Five other hijackers used the same phone number Atta had used to book his flight reservations to book theirs. The rest of the hijackers (who crashed in Pennsylvania) could have been tracked down from addresses and phones shared with hijacker Ahmed Alghamdi, a visa violator—had the INS bothered to locate him before the flight by running his name on its overstayer watch list.
Data mining can find the needle in the haystack. It can do this without listening on phone conversations. Of course, there is a third choice: let terrorist attacks happen.
Also see my posts "Privacy Concerns Block Response To Terrorist Threat" (which includes a discussion of science fiction writer David Brin's argument that the death of privacy really is inevitable), "Heather Mac Donald on US Senate TIA Ban", and my favorite on the absurd: "Heather Mac Donald: Government Panel Opposes Google Searches By Spies".
HONOLULU, October 31, 2005 -- A new study suggests that changes in gastric physiology perform better than standard polygraph methods in distinguishing between lying and telling the truth. The University of Texas study, released today at the 70th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology, demonstrates a clear link between the act of lying and a significant increase in gastric arrhythmia.
To test their hypothesis that the gastrointestinal tract is uniquely sensitive to mental stress because of the communication between the central nervous system and the enteric nervous system, researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch recruited sixteen healthy volunteers to undergo simultaneous electrogastrogram (EGG) and electrocardiogram (EKG) recordings for three periods.
The researchers found that both lying and truth telling affected cardiac symptoms, while the act of lying was also associated with gastric symptoms. The EGG showed a significant decrease in the percentage of normal gastric slow waves when the subject was lying that corresponded to a significant increase in the average heart rate during the same situation.
"We concluded that the addition of the EGG to standard polygraph methods has clear value in improving the accuracy of current lie detectors," said Pankaj Pasricha, MD, University of Texas Medical Branch. "The communication between the big brain and the little brain in the stomach can be complex and merits further study."
The study started out as a high school science fair project.
Pasricha emphasises that the test will be an addition, not a replacement, for today’s polygraph devices – and only after further research involving hundreds more test subjects.
The initial study only included 16 subjects because it began as Pasricha’s daughter’s high school science fair project in May 2005 – she won second prize.
Pasricha says he needs funding to use a large enough number of subjects to test out the reliability of this approach and he's hoping for a corporate sponsor. The FBI and CIA ought to take notice. The value of lie detection is high for criminal investigations and national security.
In the long run I we'll see the development of technologies that can make the body act like you are not lying. Imagine a drug, for example, that would stimulate gastric slow waves to mimic truth-telling. The problem with such a drug is that a subject of interrogation could be instructed to tell lies in response to certain questions and the monitoring equipment could detect that the gastric slow waves did not decrease. What's needed is an implant that would not be detected in an x-ray that would allow a person to dynamically adjust the stomach's response. Perhaps a person could control the response by wiggling a toe or moving a finger that has nanosensors embedded in it.
The city of Chicago is going to take the video feeds from 2000 existing cameras and 250 new cameras and send the streaming video through image processing software that will be able to recognize a large assortment of potential security and crime threats as well as identify people who need help for a variety of reasons. (same article here)
Sophisticated new computer programs will immediately alert the police whenever anyone viewed by any of the cameras placed at buildings and other structures considered terrorist targets wanders aimlessly in circles, lingers outside a public building, pulls a car onto the shoulder of a highway, or leaves a package and walks away from it. Images of those people will be highlighted in color at the city's central monitoring station, allowing dispatchers to send police officers to the scene immediately.
Of course this report provides no indication of how well this software works in each of the scenarios cited above. How many false positives and false negatives will it generate in each case? Anyone reading this have any first hand knowledge of how well this stuff works in practice? It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. Even with a substantial error rate the software is likely to increase the productivity of the people who are employed watching video feeds from cameras located around the city of Chicago.
Any suspicious video stream will be brought to the attention of human decision makers for appropriate action. (same article here)
If the software picked up suspicious behavior, a staff member in the city's Office of Emergency Management would be alerted and could then notify police, medical personnel or a tow truck - whatever the situation called for.
With time the software will no doubt get better while cameras, computers, and fiber optic networks get cheaper. The function of watching the video feeds which is now done by humans and is probably the most expensive part of any monitoring system (anyone know for sure?). Therefore, as the threat and problem recognition software becomes more sophisticated that will drive down costs and enable much wider spread use of monitoring cameras. Now, you may be biterly opposed to the spread of such cameras. But my guess is that as automation lowers costs their use will grow by leaps and bounds. So far there just has not been much significant public opposition.
The project is being funded through federal homeland security money.
Officials estimate the first phase of the project will be completed by spring 2006.The $5.1 million project will be funded through a federal homeland security grant and will be the city's first initiative to integrate intelligent video surveillance under one roof.
My prediction: Use of video cameras for monitoring public places will grow by orders of magnitude.
Called "granny-cams", the use of video cameras placed in the rooms of elderly nursing home residences is being funded in many cases by families so that families can verify that their elderly are not being abused or neglected by nursing home workers.
About a dozen state legislatures have granny-cam legislation under consideration. Earlier this year, New Mexico joined Texas in allowing nursing home residents or their representatives to install monitoring cameras in their rooms.
Under the laws, a resident must let nursing-home operators know ahead of time of the placement of the camera. If the operator is not notified or if the equipment is not open and obvious in the room, the camera is considered covert surveillance and illegal.
Use of such cameras is a positive step in reducing the potential for elderly abuse, Cottle, an editor at the journal, concluded. In particular, Web cameras hold the greatest potential for restoring public confidence in nursing homes by giving family members access to "real time" or to recently stored footage.
Commercial outlets now sell Web-camera systems to the elderly at prices from $629 to $1,584, depending on the specifications of each camera, plus a $20 monthly fee to access the server and $10 a month for a data-only line to upload images.
"Certainly some families have the financial means to provide this quality of technological protection, however the majority of Americans do not," Cottle wrote. To be effective and properly regulated, granny-cam technology should therefore be mandated for all nursing facilities.
In some cases family members are able to monitor their parents and grandparents by watching camera video streams remotely over the internet.
Cameras also could monitor many of the basics of resident care, such as drug administration and diaper changing. By linking the camera feed to the Internet, nursing homes could handle routine assignments more efficiently.
But because of understandable concerns over privacy, Cottle advocates placing the surveillance systems in the hands of independent companies, which would then monitor the equipment and be responsible for making the data available online.
"In this way, families can check on their loved ones and nursing homes can check on their residents, and everyone will sleep a little better at night knowing that the independent source is regulating and reviewing the tapes should any problems arise," Cottle wrote.
Many people are willing to give up privacy in exchange for security. Effectively the cameras provide a way for more trusted people to monitor the actions of less trusted people. The monitoring capability provided by electronic technology allows the role of trusted agent to be separated from the role of service provider. The cameras are monitored either by family members or by third party organizations. These organizations effectively serve to audit and monitor performance of nursing homes on behalf of family members or even on behalf of the elderly themselves.
Another way to think about video cameras used in security is that they allow a trusted agent to leverage their trust to enforce and monitor more transactions and facilities. This ability to separate out the role of trusted agent from the roles of providing various other services is a big underappreciated long term trend that is changing how societies are organized. It is going to affect the structure of governments in part by allowing outsourcing of various components of governance. For example, one can imagine how this could lead to situations where particularly corrupt governments agree to remote monitoring of a large range of transactions and faciltiies in exchange for international aid. A country like Finland with an incredibly low level of corruption could literally provide remote trust services for institutions in countries with high levels of corruption such as Moldova or Paraguay.
Manapalan Florida, population 321, is going to install street cameras to photograph the vehicles and automatically check the identity of everyone who passes through.
New technology will soon track drivers who pass by the waterfront mansions of this ritzy oceanside town, checking their backgrounds to find wanted criminals and following up on those who are nearby when a crime occurs.
The article isn't explicit on this point but it sounds like the digitized images of each vehicle will be fed into optical character recognition software that will automatically extract license plate numbers. Then the license plate numbers will be automatically compared against both stolen car lists and lists of car owners who have outstanding warrants for their arrest.
"Big Brother is watching you," said Town Commissioner Peter Blum last week after commissioners approved spending up to $60,000 on the system.
"Or, Little Brother, in this case," said Commissioner Tom Gerrard, a retired telecommunications executive who is helping guide the town's foray into high-tech crime solving.
Think about the next step beyond stationary cameras and automatic character recognition. TV shows like COPS routinely broadcast video from cameras mounted in police cars during chases or during interactions of officers with occupants of cars pulled over on the side of the road. One next logical step would be to combine those cameras automated optical character recognition software mounted on police cars. But whether or not it is possible today it certainly will be in the future. A police car could have software that automatically notifies police officers when either a stolen vehicle or a vehicle of a wanted suspect was behind or in front or just passed by the squad car.
This idea could be extended much further to empower private citizens. Anyone willing to pay for the costs of a cellular data network connection to their car (and the costs of such networks can be expected to drop by orders of magnitude in coming years even while their speeds increase) could feed a stream of license place numbers and the car's current GPS-derived location to local police. Then a police computer could also do checks for stolen cars and wanted suspects.
Cameras could also provide feeds into facial recognition software to identify pedestrians. Existing facial recognition systems tested at airports are probably accurate enough to be useful in conditions where a few percent rate of false positives is tolerable but the error rate still limits its use in many potential applications. Recent work done a SUNY Stony Brook may provide one of the breakthroughs needed for the creation of much more accurate facial recognition software.
Science fiction writer David Brin described the future of ubiquitous surveillance and what it means for free societies in his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. You can also find out more about his views on this subject at this page on his web site.
Video surveillance cameras are more widely used and popular in Britain than in the United States. The origins of this popularity can be traced back to a single incident where a video camera (in Brtain commonly called CCTV for Closed Circuit Television) recorded 2 10 year old boys leading 2 year old Jamie Bulger away to kill him. A CCTV recording at a shopping center led to the eventual identification and arrest of the suspects. Even since then the British public has supported and pressed for ever wider installation of video surveillance cameras.
With some observers predicting the country will have more surveillance cameras than people within a decade, civil liberty groups foresee a bleak, Orwellian future, where privacy is a thing of the past.
The British, already more surveilled by video cameras than the population of any other country, may soon be watched by tens of millions of cameras.
Despite the pitfalls of blanket surveillance, though, industry analysts predict that the number of CCTV cameras in Britain will soar to 25 million by 2007.
Think about that 25 million number for video cameras used for surveillance. Is that realistic? The total population of the UK is over 60 million people. Where will all the cameras be installed that would allow the numbers to add up to 60 million? Some will be installed in buses, trains, taxi cabs, police cars, bus stations, train stations, airports, stores, banks, office buildings, and other commercial and public locations. Many such vehicles and facilities already have video cameras today in both the United States and Great Britain. A major airport or a large building could easily get hundreds or perhaps even thousands of cameras with cameras located in staircases, hallways, elevators, lobbies, garages and aimed outside at approaches. Also, street lampposts are another place where cameras can be installed. Given that the costs are dropping for cameras, recording media, and network bandwidth the 25 million number seems plausible in the longer run. Though it is hard to see how tens of millions will be added in just a few years.
While governments and commercial establishments are embracing video cameras so are private citizens. Home CCTV for personal safety and convenience is also being embraced as costs fall and security concerns mount. In Britain at current exchange rates the cameras range anywhere from approximately $30 to $150 US dollars with complete home starter kits ranging around the $500 or so dollars.
One big limitation on the utility of video suveillance is that there are too many cameras providing video feeds and it is too expensive to pay watchers to simultaneously watch tens of millions of them. Most cameras are more useful for after-the-fact viewing to identify who committed a crime only after it has been committed. Image processing that automated identification of crimes in process would allow costs to fall much further and lead to even more widespread of video surveillance.
Another capability would increase the demand for video cameras: automated computer recognition of faces. A recent report from State University of New York at Stony Brook suggests a breakthrough on computer automated facial recognition by recognizing changes in the positions of facial muscles when a person makes different facial expressions.
Guan takes two snaps of a person in quick succession, asking subjects to smile for the camera. He then uses a computer to analyse how the skin around the subject's mouth moves between the two images. The software does this by tracking changes in the position of tiny wrinkles in the skin, each just a fraction of a millimetre wide.
As equipment costs drop and computer technologies for doing automated recognition of person and activities advance the demand for automated video surveillance will grow and we will live with increasing amounts of cameras watching what we do.
Chicago police are more than doubling the number of video cameras watching city streets with the total going from 30 to 50. At the same time the police are adding gunshot detectors to the cameras for pinpointing the locations of guns that fire.
Saying they are improving something that works, Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago police officials Tuesday announced expansion of Operation Disruption, in which camera units are placed in areas to reduce violent crime and drug activity.
Fifty camera units to be equipped with gunshot-detection technology will be added to the 30 units installed in areas prone to gang violence and narcotics sales, Daley said at a news conference at police headquarters, 3510 S. Michigan Ave.
The gunshot detectors will be accurate within 20 feet.
Existing pods will be retrofitted with the same technology as the new ones, and will able to pinpoint gunshots within 20 feet and transmit the data via a microwave network to two police surveillance centers, officials said.
Expect many more types of detectors to be developed and deployed for public safety and law enforcement functions. How much longer will it be before there are detectors that can pinpoint a scream, a cry for help, or the sound of cars colliding? It is possible to conceive of image processing algorithms that can detect a person collapsing on the ground or a person being chased by another person.
Back in Chicago people in neighborhoods with surveillance video cameras are happy about the perceived increase in safety that the cameras provide.
Nellie Joyce Carter lives in the 800-block of North Harding, which has had a camera for seven months. She says the neighborhood’s safer since the very visible deterrent was put into place. She parents were afraid to let their children play outside before. Now she says the camera keeps watch over the kids and a local park.
The Chicago cameras and gunshot detectors are paid for by seized drug money.
Like the initial $750,000 camera experiment, the $2.8 million expansion and upgrade is being paid for with drug forfeiture money. Drug dealers are literally paying for police to breathe down their necks.
If there were enough dirty money to go around, Mayor Daley said he would love to see cameras installed on every street corner in Chicago.
Coincidentally the US Army and Marines happen to be deploying the "Boomerang" gunshot location detector system to Iraq.
Sensors atop an aluminum pole on the back of a Humvee pick up supersonic shock waves to give an approximate location of gunfire, and sound waves measured from the muzzle blast narrow it some more.
A cigarette box-sized display on the dashboard or windshield then shows the findings. "Incoming, 5 o'clock," says a speaker inside the box.
This military system is not an expensive system. BBN Technologies is making these detectors for $10,000 a piece and the price is expected to drop to $3,000. Electronic detection and surveillance systems will continue to decline in price while becoming more sophisticated and precise. Therefore sensors will become ever more ubiquitous and will be used to detect an increasing number of types of events and activities.
TALLAHASSEE - Evoking the slaying of 11-year-old Carlie Brucia, Florida law enforcement officials descended on the state Capitol Wednesday to urge key lawmakers to invest $35-million next year to keep minute-by-minute track of thousands of paroled criminals.
Pitched as the next technological revolution in crime-fighting and already up and running in four Florida counties including Pinellas and Citrus, the VeriTracks system uses global positioning technology to track criminals released from jail or prison. It then cross-references those locations nightly with criminal activity.
Note that many of these systems are not doing real-time reporting of location. The device constantly records where the wearer is at. But it has to be downloaded at the end of a day to find where the parolee has been. This delayed reporting is a lot cheaper because systems that use real-time tracking have to do frequent transmissions of information via automated cellular messaging. However, more expensive models support real-time reporting of locations of wearers as they move around throughout the day and night. More on that below.
Florida has been one of the most aggressive states in using satellite technology to track criminals. The Department of Corrections uses "active" GPS for about 400 probationers, mostly sex offenders and people who've committed violent crimes. About another 150 are monitored with "passive" GPS which checks offenders whereabouts less often.
The main company that provides the tracking system, Pro Tech, is based in Florida. Its system is used in 33 states.
On any given day, 5 million offenders in the U.S. are either on probation, parole or some other form of community supervision. These same offenders account for 33% of violent crimes. These staggering statistics led to the founding of Pro Tech Monitoring, Inc. and the creation of SMART® System Technology.
The key components of the SMART® Active Tracking System are a Portable Tracking Device (PTD), ankle bracelet, charging stand, and GPS satellites.
Offenders are fitted with a tamper-resistant ankle bracelet and assigned a PTD to keep near them at all times. The ankle bracelet acts as an "electronic tether" which transmits signals to the PTD.
The PTD uses GPS signals and a wireless network to locate and report an offender's every move. The PTD monitors the signal strength of the GPS satellites to ensure accurate location information and incorporates a motion detector to monitor movement in areas of insufficient GPS signal strength. Pro Tech's Offender Tracking Center (OTC) monitors this information. The PTD is equipped with an LCD, used to notify the offender of violations and for sending text messages from the agency. This patented communication capability has demonstrated it's effectiveness in modifying offender behavior and reducing recidivism.
Authorities can even create multiple Inclusion and Exclusion zones, and be notified by fax, pager or email whenever a zone violation occurs.
Note the use of Inclusion and Exclusion zones. Depending on the implemention the real-time reporting devices can utilize this capability to reduce the cost of reporting because the wireless reporting method can be used to do real-time reports only when a criminal enters a forbidden zone or is moving around in a forbidden zone.
Minnesota is also using the Pro Tech Monitoring devices.
On average, offenders will use the devices for six months. The technology will cost the Corrections Department $175,000 to $200,000 a year based on the annual release of about 45 Level 3 offenders. The daily cost of about $17 for the technology and vendor expenses is in addition to the $20 daily expense for monitoring offenders on intensive supervision.
Another supplier of this type of equipment, iSecureTrac, is selling to a number of jurisdictions around the United Sates including jurisdictions in Florida and Mississippi.
Court Programs will place tracNET24 units on a wide range of offenders including deadbeat dads, juveniles, domestic violence and misdemeanor cases, and those on pre-trial release for felonies. By adopting tracNET24, Court Programs is providing Mississippi and Florida with the most advanced offender tracking available. The device allows authorities to monitor, via a satellite system, the whereabouts of offenders who are outfitted with small 12-ounce personal tracking units (PTU). A PTU receives signals from the Department of Defense's GPS satellite system and after the PTU is docked for charging, the PTU downloads the offenders' movements into a database accessed by correction officials. In addition, authorities may program exclusion areas, places where the presence of an offender is prohibited; such as certain residences, schools, and child care facilities. tracNET24 gives authorities verifiable records of where offenders have been, 24 hours per day, seven days a week.
The more expensive iSecureTrac model is also capable of real-time reporting of violations of exclusion zones.
Currently only law enforcement agencies and the companies that sell these devices have access to the position data that is collected. However, if public demands ever arose for wider access this could easily be done with current technology. Imagine, for instance, the ability of, for instance, a battered women to get a beeper that would notify her in real-time when her ex-husband was too close to her current location. She would need to wear a similar device (unless at home or some other fixed location) that would report where she was so that the central database could compare that to the location of some guy who is a threat to her.
There are a lot of other possible uses of this technology. Schools could get real-time reports of convicted pedophiles in their vicinity. Also, night clubs could be notified when a convicted rapist enters their premises or shopping mall security could be notified to watch someone in a parking lot..
The key to using real-time data to allow people to avoid criminals is that a person's location must be compared to another person's location. That requires a huge of real-time messaging of the location of both criminals and of the far larger population non-criminals in order to do the comparison. However, one way around that problem would be to add to a criminal's worn device a transmitter that is constantly broadcasting his location with a low power radio transmitter over a distance of, say, a half mile. Then anyone in the larger population could just use a radio receiver coupled to an embedded computer to notify that a criminal is nearby. Buildings could contain such receivers and building security could be alerted automatically when known criminals are nearby. The notifications could be filtered by types of previous convictions or other characteristics.
The ability to track the locations of people has a lot of other applications of course. As the tracking devices become smaller and cheaper expect to see parents putting them in their children both to protect their children from kidnapping and also simply to find out what trouble the kids are getting themselves into.
Another possible interesting application would be to manage affinity groups. Imagine a traveller who is cruising down a road trying to decide which night club to try out. If people registered with an affinity tracking service then a traveller could choose a club or restaurant whose currently present patrons fit some desired demographic profile. One obvious problem with such a service is that just because one person likes a particular type of person doesn't mean that most who fit a desired profile will like that person in return. Look at celebrities for example. They are loved by all sorts of people who the celebrities would very much like to avoid. So a service would need to develop eligibility criteria that require matching of preferences in both directions before that person driving down the street would get a flashing light on their car LCD pointing them to a particular bar or night club.
Security video cameras, known as Closed Circuit TV or CCTV in Britain, are so popular among the British that the British are the most monitored by video cameras of any people on Earth.
The technology has become popular and widespread, with the result that Britons are by far the most watched people on earth, with one camera for every 14 people, according to recent estimates.
But questions remain as to their effectiveness.
A government review 18 months ago found that security cameras were effective in tackling vehicle crime but had limited effect on other crimes. Improved streetlighting recorded better results.
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"I have talked to offenders about this," says Gill. "They say they are not concerned by security cameras, unless they were actually caught by one
My take: even if criminals are not deterred by the presence of cameras if the cameras are of suffciently high quality to enable identification of perpetrators of crimes then the cameras ought to increase conviction rates. What would be interesting would be to find data on what percentage of charges brought against suspected criminals use video evidence. Have video cameras increased clearance rates (i.e. the rate at which police can identity and charge a suspect) on various types of crimes? Also, is the rate of conviction higher in those cases which include CCTV evidence? Also, what percentage of all types of crimes in public places are caught by CCTV in areas where it is heavily deployed? Even when a crime isn't caught by a video camera there can be cameras pointing to areas nearby that could record images of those entering and leaving an area around the time a crime takes place. So how often does that happen?
The Midlothian and Borders Police claim CCTV crimes are solved at high rates.
Dalkeith and Penicuik are both reaping the benefits of town centre closed circuit television systems. With over 50 incidents recorded on camera this year and a 100% conviction rate in the courts, the cameras are undoubtedly helping deter anti-social behaviour on our streets.
But is the 100% for all 50 cases or for a smaller subset of cases for which charges were brought?
From some UK Home Offices studies in lighting and CCTV for crime reduction and prevention:
The major findings from the reviews are:
- Street lighting and CCTV work in cutting crime particularly when used within a package of other crime reduction measures.
- Improved street lighting reduced crime by 20%.
- CCTV was especially effective in reducing vehicle crime in car parks, leading to a 41% reduction.
The UK government Home Office report on street lighting and crime prevention is a downloadable PDF. Also, the matching report on CCTV and crime prevention is available as a downloadable PDF as well. The report claims that CCTV works very well to reduce crime in car parks (in American English "parking lots").
Overall, the best current evidence suggests that CCTV reduces crime to a small degree. CCTV is most effective in reducing vehicle crime in car parks, but it had little or no effect on crime in public transport and city centre settings.
...
Both published and unpublished reports were considered in the searches, and the searches were international in scope and were not limited to the English language.
The search strategies resulted in 22 CCTV evaluations meeting the criteria for inclusion. The evaluations were carried out in three main settings: (1) city centre or public housing, (2) public transport, and (3) car parks.
Of the 22 included evaluations, half (11) found a desirable effect on crime and five found an undesirable effect on crime. Five evaluations found a null effect on crime (i.e., clear evidence of no effect), while the remaining one was classified as finding an uncertain effect on crime (i.e., unclear evidence of an effect).
Results from a meta-analysis provide a clearer picture of the crime prevention effectiveness of CCTV. From 18 evaluations – the other four did not provide the needed data to be included in the meta-analysis – it was concluded that CCTV had a significant desirable effect on crime, although the overall reduction in crime was a very small four per cent. Half of the studies (nine out of 18) showed evidence of a desirable effect of CCTV on crime. All nine of these studies were carried out in the UK. Conversely, the other nine studies showed no evidence of any desirable effect of CCTV on crime. All five North American studies were in this group.
The meta-analysis also examined the effect of CCTV on the most frequently measured crime types. It was found that CCTV had no effect on violent crimes (from five studies), but had a significant desirable effect on vehicle crimes (from eight studies).
Across the three settings, mixed results were found for the crime prevention effectiveness of CCTV. In the city centre and public housing setting, there was evidence that CCTV led to a negligible reduction in crime of about two per cent in experimental areas compared with control areas. CCTV had a very small but significant effect on crime in the five UK evaluations in this setting (three desirable and two undesirable), but had no effect on crime in the four North American evaluations.
The four evaluations of CCTV in public transportation systems present conflicting evidence of effectiveness: two found a desirable effect, one found no effect, and one found an undesirable effect on crime. For the two effective studies, the use of other interventions makes it difficult to say with certainty that CCTV produced the observed crime reductions. The pooled effect size for all four studies was a non-significant six per cent decrease in crime.
Unfortunately the Home Office study on CCTV and crime says little about arrest rates and conviction rates. What portion of crimes of each type in an area with CCTV were recorded by CCTV? How many of those recordings were of sufficiently high quality to allow arrest of perpetrators? Is CCTV image quality a serious obstacle for the effective use of CCTV? My guess is that the answer the final question is "Yes" and that advances in technology will improve image quality and perpetrator identification rates.
We had our car stolen in Dec 2000 in front of CCTV cameras. The police caught the thief by chance. He was convicted sentenced to community service (this was his EIGHTH offence), and ordered to pay us £80 compensation. We had seen nothing of the money and he has committed 4 more offences. He is only 18, which means he will probably carry out more serious crimes in the future. It is about time that the law was brought down hard on even first time offenders. First time means first time caught.
Anon, ScotlandI retired as a Chief Superintendent in 1996, having been a Divisional Commander for some years. By the time I retired I was ashamed of the service we were able to provide. A daily struggle to put out a minimum number of officers, sometimes as few as 8 or 9 from a paper total of more than 200. Where were they all? Attending courses, tied up in court, and dealing with time wasters complaints (every villain now complains as a routine, and boy does it use up police time). We need to get back to good old fashioned policing. It's time for us to return to the criminal being afraid, not the public.
John Lilley, EnglandI was mugged recently. The police turned up after quite some time. Records later showed that by the time they responded to my call my cards were already being used around Brixton. I was more than willing to give up my time to look at CCTV images near to where the mugging took place and where the cards were used to try to spot this guy. The police didn't seem to know how to respond to that suggestion - it was like it had never occurred to them.
I was more than willing to go out of my way to catch this guy who had caused me and doubtless many other people an awful trauma. The police just weren't interested. I'm a lawyer and I think I would have made a good witness. I am very sure about what I saw. Unfortunately, I was never given the opportunity to demonstrate this. I received three offers of counselling from the police. The best therapy they could have given me would have been to get the coward who did it in the dock.
Claire, England
There is a limit to what technology can do to counteract the decay of a culture that has lost belief in the right of law-abiding people to defend themselves. One of the hardest problems when trying to guess about the future is that there is no way of knowing whether any given culture will partially or totally decay and become very degenerate. More generally, what technology can make possible is a far larger set of possibilities than what people will choose to do with it.
Mark Andrejevic argues that people are becoming less afraid of surveillance and some are even eagerly embracing it. (same article here)
Today's college students have none of the fear of "Big Brother" that marked their parents' post-McCarthy Cold War generation. In fact, their fascination with the notion of watching and being watched has fueled a dramatic shift in entertainment programming and ushered in the era of Reality Television.
Mark Andrejevic, an assistant professor of communication studies in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, says a number of factors including technology and economy paved the way for the rise of reality television, but none so much as a transformation of Americans' attitudes toward surveillance. He explores these factors and more in his new book, "Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched," (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.)...
Andrejevic believes that the interactivity of the Internet paved the way for reality TV mania. He interviewed producers of early reality programs such as MTV's The Real World who said that they initially had a hard time finding people willing to have their lives taped nearly 24 hours a day for several months. That was 1992. Now they hold auditions in college towns and thousands of young people form lines snaking for blocks just for the chance to audition.
"There are now more people applying to The Real World each year than to Harvard," Andrejevic says.
The key to that success is connected to people's increasing comfort with levels of surveillance that were once anathema in American society, Andrejevic says.
"In my book, I have attempted to think about the ways in which reality TV reconfigures public attitudes about surveillance," he says. "We're trained to make a split between private and public surveillance -- to be worried about government surveillance but not private, which is entertainment or gathering information to serve you better. We're moving into a period where that distinction starts to dissolve. Private surveillance is becoming so pervasive that it's time to start worrying about it as a form of social control."
That viewers of reality programming don't worry about surveillance or social control is testament to the power of television as a messenger, Andrejevic says.
"The cast members on these shows are constantly talking about how great the experience is, how much they have grown personally because of it," he says. "It connotes honesty -- you can't hide anything about yourself if you're on camera all day every day. It becomes a form of therapy or almost a kind of extreme sport -- how long can you withstand allowing yourself to be videotaped?"
There are many precedents for some elements of the reality TV shows. Various precedents have each introduced some element of what goes into a reality TV show. Consider all the TV shows that broadcast pictures and video footage of celebrities trying to go about their private lives and the TV shows dedicated to showing pictures of houses, cars, clothes and other things that celebrities own. Sometimes the celebrities cooperate with the paparazzi photographers because the celebs want to promote themselves. Other times celebs get quite angry at having their privacy invaded and yet viewers do not switch away from such shows in disgust out of seeing someone's privacy invaded. But even this is nothing new because gossip columnists have been reporting on details of the private lives of public figures for decades and have found large ready audiences for their reports.
There is even a TV show called Cribs where celebrities allow camera crews in to film the insides of their houses. But Cribs is not an entirely novel idea. For decades there have been magazines containing picture spreads of the insides of especially stylish houses whose non-celebrity owners wanted to show off their tastes and affluence to the readers of such magazines.
New generations are growing up viewing television shows that let anyone see the lives of others recorded either voluntarily, as is the case of most reality TV, or involuntarily, as is the case with paparazzi celebrity stalking but also with some reality shows like COPS where criminals are filmed being chased and arrested by police. The results of surveillance are increasingly seen as entertainment and as within the realm of the public's right to know. Perhaps the government can not watch us all but TV show producers can.
Real life is increasingly beginning to resemble the science fiction fantasy world of David Brin's novel Earth where he portrayed a future world where old folks video recorded everything happening around them in order to protect them from crimnals. But in the real world equivalent phone cameras are being used to surreptitiously make nude photographs and otherwise satisfy the desires of voyeurs.
The phones, with their discreet lens, tiny size and ability to immediately transmit images onto the Internet or other cell phones, are a voyeur's dream.
The phones first appeared on the market in early 2001, and for the last several months, media reports out of Asia have called attention to incidents such as nude photographs of unsuspecting victims turning up on the Internet.
As governments rush to pass laws restricting the usage of cell phone cameras prosecutions under the new laws are beginning to take place. Jack Le Vu, 20, of Sammamish Washington state, has been charged with pursuing his panty fetish by taking pictures up a woman's skirt while crouched down at a supermarket shelf.
A witness told investigators Mr. Vu pretended to scan the shelves July 10 as he followed a 26-year-old woman in a supermarket, crouched down with his cellphone extended beneath her skirt and then stood, punched a few buttons on the phone and looked at the screen.
Vu may be facing up to 5 years of jail time.
Charged with voyeurism, a felony under state law, Vu pleaded not guilty Monday in what officials believe is the first case of its kind in King County.
Last spring, Hawaii passed legislation outlawing "upskirt" snapshots and video, but a First Amendment expert says such laws may be unconstitutional, according to the newspaper article.
That position has been supported by the Washington state Supreme Court, which last year overturned the convictions of two men who, in separate incidents, took "upskirt" photos with plans to sell them on the Internet.
Any legal experts reading this who care to comment?
Long a staple overseas, "cam phones" arrived here in 2002, promising sleek and cheap--under $100--fun with a voyeuristic twist. And they're taking off: 7 million of 72 million cell phones shipped in the U.S. have cameras; by 2007, 51 million out of over 110 million will have them, predicts research firm IDC.
The fight to protect privacy is seen by some as a losing battle.
"The evolution, the penetration, the spread of digital capture capabilities in phones is going to be so fast, so wide that it might be a losing battle ultimately," said analyst Alex Slawsby of IDC, a leading technology industry analysis firm.
Count me in the ranks of those who think privacy will erode regardless of what governments do about it.
Obviously digital cameras already allow pictures to be taken fairly easily for later download into a computer and posting to the internet. So what do mobile camera phones bring to the table? First of all, they offer greater ease of concealment. Most cameras are bulkier and easier to spot in use. Also, phones offer the ability to immediately send a picture. The result is that more people will use them to take more pictures to send to other people or to post on the internet.
And textamerica figures to cash in on this latest hotbed of digital technology.
The Rancho Santa Fe startup offers free moblog hosting to users around the world, and last month initiated a moblog where San Diegans could post photos of the wildfires, often taken before any firefighters or news media were on scene. (The textamerica service is free, but the user is charged by the carrier for sending the image.)
Camera phones are also turning out to be useful for the apprehension of criminals.
A 15-year-old boy foiled an apparent abduction attempt when he pulled out his cell phone camera and snapped photos of a man trying to lure him into a car, police said.
The teen also photographed the vehicle's license plate and gave the evidence to police, who arrested a suspect the next day.
An increasing portion of all the places we go to will have video devices recording whatever transpires. People will install them for security in their homes just as businesses and governments install them in offices, stores, busses, taxis, and other locations. Cell phone cameras are part of a much larger trend.
Many local governments in the United States are moving to restrict the use of cell phone cameras even as the quality of the camera pictures steadily improves.
Trying to distinguish between a camera phone and any other cellphone has also complicated matters. The Elk Grove Park District in suburban Chicago enacted a ban in November that covered the possession of any cellphone - not just camera phones - in park-owned restrooms, locker rooms and showers.
"There is no reason to have a cellphone while you're changing and showering," said Ron Nunes, one of the park district's commissioners. "I'd rather protect the children and the public more than someone who wants to call home and see what's for dinner." Fresh in the town's memory was a 2001 incident in which a man used a fiber-optic camera to secretly take pictures of children in a park shower.
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Alex Slawsby, an analyst with IDC, said that by next year the typical camera phone sold in the United States would have a resolution of at least one megapixel, about three times the current average - doing wonders, no doubt, for the rendering of sloppy restaurant patrons.
South Korea's government is requiring that cell phones beep when a picture is taken.
More likely to gain prevalence are camera phones that make some kind of noise to alert bystanders of the possibility that their photo is being taken. In November, the South Korean government ordered manufacturers to install beeping sounds of at least 65 decibels on camera phones made and sold there, after officials received a flood of complaints about camera phone-wielding peeping toms.
In the future digital cameras will get smaller, cheaper, easier to conceal, higher resolution, have higher storage capacity, and will be integrated with electronics to allow smart software to control when something of interest is seen in order to trigger when a picture will be recorded. Wireless network bandwidth will increase by leaps and bounds. Technological gimmicks like the South Korean government beeping cell phone requirement will at best slow the rate at which surreptitious picture taking spreads.
There is a new fad in web logging called the mobile weblog or moblog. A moblog is a web log which displays pictures taken with cell ohone cameras. See, for example the Gary Dann photojournal as well as Neutral Zone, Furry Felines!, Wallace, the pug, and countless others. I think "moblog" is a poorly formulated term. It sounds too much like "mob log" which might have something to do with the use of electronic communications to organize spontaneous mobs (which itself could easily spawn a type of photo web log to record strange things that mobs might be organized to do).
In a way what is happening is that the invasion of celebrity privacy by paparazzi photographers and video camera operators is being extended to include the invasion of privacy of non-celebrities as well. People who used to expect that their relative anonymity would allow them to conduct their daily activities free from surveillance and recording by others are at greater risk of being photographed. But there is a big rate-limiting factor in all this: there are not enough people to view all the pictures. Besides, most of the pictures are pretty boring anyhow.
Advanced Digital Solutions has announced their Veripay embedded radio frequency ID (RFID) cash and credit card technology.
Some day we may be able to walk into a store and be completely alone and not have to see a living person in sight, imagine walking out holding the items you want and being billed instantly just as you leave the store. No confrontations, no customer service, no cute check-out girl, isn't our future grand.
To entice you more, APS is offering $50 Off to the First 100,000 registrants at the time of the their first "chipping" procedure.
Does anyone remember James Coburn in that 1967 paranoid classic movie The President's Analyst? At one point Coburn's character is kidnapped by "The Phone Company" because "The Phone Company" wants Coburn to convince the President of the United States to authorize the implantation of embedded telephone devices in everyone's brains that would allow everyone to think a phone number and have a phone connection made instantly to that phone number. Well, this proposal is not quite as radical. But effortless totally automated and instantaneous shopping check-out certainly would take us in that general direction.
The chip is embedded in the arm.
VeriChip is a subdermal, radio frequency identification (RFID) device that can be used in a variety of security, financial, emergency identification and other applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip product contains a unique verification number that is captured by briefly passing a proprietary scanner over the VeriChip. The standard location of the microchip is in the triceps area between the elbow and the shoulder of the right arm. The brief outpatient “chipping” procedure lasts just a few minutes and involves only local anesthetic followed by quick, painless insertion of the VeriChip. Once inserted just under the skin, the VeriChip is inconspicuous to the naked eye. A small amount of radio frequency energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the verification number. In October 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that VeriChip is not a regulated device with regard to its security, financial, personal identification/safety applications but that VeriChip's healthcare information applications are regulated by the FDA. VeriChip Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions.
Recall that one reason carjackings have become popular is that it is much harder for criminals to steal unattended cars that have more technologically advanced anti-theft features. So attempts to steal a car from a person who has the key in hand or in the ignition are a response to technological advances in anti-theft technology. Well, it is easy to imagine some of the ways that criminals might respond to embedded credit cards:
Biometric tests combined with an embedded chip would eliminate the value of just taking the chip out of the body. A really advanced biometric test could even check the body temperature or iris response to light in order to verify that a person is alive and conscious. Another possible counter would be to put sensors on the device that check via various means whether it is still in the target host body and whether that body is still alive and free of trauma. One can even imagine an embedded cell phone technology where the device would phone for help in event that it is either removed from its host or the host is significantly harmed. So each counter the criminals might develop could be met by still more technological counters.
Yet this is precisely why Katherine Albrecht, the founder of the consumer advocacy group CASPIAN, finds Veripay frightening: "It's a lot easier to cancel and credit card account than it is to gouge a chip out of your arm." She worries that the chips will provide tracking opportunities for advertisers wishing to know the intimate shopping habits of particular consumers.
If the idea of this device seems too creepy keep in mind that the use of it is voluntary. Will embedded credit cards take off in popularity? Or will some other first application be able to better break through popular resistance? For instance, I'd expect embedded devices that could identify a person's location to catch on with less resistance than embedded credit cards might encounter since many parents would be strongly attracted to the idea of being able to rapidly find a kidnapped child. Another target market for embedded devices that will meet with less resistance are devices for health problems. An embedded device that would have the ability to do a cell phone call to alert that a person is having an epileptic fit or a heart attack would be attractive to many people. Also, for Alzheimer's patients the ability to find them if they wondered off or for law enforcement personnel to scan one of them to figure out who they are and where to return them would be of some value.
A bill currently working thru the US Congress will expand the scope of FBI DNA data collection and storage.
WASHINGTON — DNA profiles from hundreds of thousands of juvenile offenders and adults arrested but not convicted of crimes could be added to the FBI's national DNA crime-fighting program under a proposed law moving through Congress.
The article reports that thirty states already collect DNA from juveniles. What accounts for some of the opposition to the spread of this practice as compared to the already universally accepted collection of fingerprints must be the fear that DNA can tell more about the innate characteristics of a person than fingerprints can. But if that fear is justified then what drives the opposition is fear that the truth about human nature will be used to treat people who are innately different in ways that are in response to those innate differences.
There is fear in the minds of many modern liberal thinkers that people will not be considered equal before the law if it is known that they have innate tendencies to behave in ways different from each other. So there is an element of "don't want to know" in the attempts to prevent information from being collected that might at some future point turn out to be useful for automatically identifying differences in innate behavioral tendencies.
Given that juveniles commit assault, murder, rape, armed robbery, and a large assortment of other crimes and that some juveniles do so repeatedly that part of the expansion of DNA collection does not strike me as unreasonable. It is hard to see why juveniles should be treated so differently than adults when they commit crimes every bit as brutal as those committed by adults and when juvenile criminals can pose threats as repeat offenders every bit as great as those posed by adult criminals.
Given that we do not now have the ability to analyse DNA to produce a detailed picture of genetic factors that influence behavior the current drive to collect more DNA samples is being driven by the same purpose for which fingerprint evidence is already collected: it allows the identification of more criminals from evidence found at crime scenes. This provides a few different benefits in terms of protection of the innocent population. First, it increases the rate at which criminals are caught. This removes dangerous people from the streets and also increases the deterrent effect of the law on would-be criminals.
But more accurate identification of criminals does something else that is rarely mentioned: it decreases the rate of investigation and conviction of innocent people. Every time a criminal commits a crime there is some chance that an innocent person will be incorrectly suspected of having committed it. This reduces the rates of false arrests (with all the stigma and costs which are entailed), trials in which innocents are found innocent (which have to be terrible and expensive ordeals for innocents caught up in them), and trials in which innocents are found guilty (even worse). Each crime that is correctly connected to a real perpetrator is a crime that is unlikely to involve a prosecution of an innocent. Also, if the deterrence effect of the law is heightened and more criminals are jailed the result is that fewer crimes will be committed and hence fewer innocents will be incorrectly implicated in something they didn't do.
A reduction in crime rates reduces victimizations both by criminals and by governments. It also reduces the amount of fear and inconvenience visited upon those who live with considerable risk of becoming crime victims. Proposals for measures that will have the effect of reducing crime rates need to be weighed with all of those factors in mind.
Modelled after aircraft flight data recorders that are used to record crash information car data recorders are now cheap enough to become widely used.
On Nov. 6, Ireland's Transportation Minister announced an agreement to outfit the nation's vehicles with black-box data recorders and link them to an emergency notification system. Under the agreement, Safety Intelligence Systems (SIS), a private New York-based company, will partner with IBM (IBM ) as its exclusive information-technology provider, to supply the boxes and build a comprehensive crash-data network.
The data recorders can use cellular links to automatically phone in location recorded from a built-in GPS sensor. The recorders can report location, pattern of deceleration leading up to the end of the accident, and other information that can be used to determine the likelihood of occupant injury.
Insurance companies in the US may eventually offer discounts to drivers who agree to install recorders. The recorded information has many uses and not just from accidents. Picture recording and reporting of all vehicles that come down an off-ramp to measure whether the vehicles have a problem decelerating in the length of ramp available and whether vehicles tend to slide on a particular ramp or road curve when road surfaces are wet.
There are of course privacy concerns about the use of this sort of technology. But even if individuals resist allowing recorders to be placed in their own cars or place limits on what can be done with the data from their own cars the privacy issue will play out differently for fleet vehicles. An operator of a fleet of delivery vehicles would love to know whether any driver drives too quickly, tends to wait too long to decelerate, tends to accelerate thru intersections (a sign of running lights just turning red), or takes side trips that are not on the approved route. Fleet operators will probably be more willing to provide insurance companies with greater access to recorded data in exchange for lower rates. One can imagine a day when insurance companies will routinely come to fleet operators to demand that particular reckless drivers be fired before they cause accidents. One can also imagine how insurance companies will be able to develop databases of driver behavior and even make hiring recommendations to fleet operators based on the performance of those drivers in previous jobs.
Fleet data recorders could also provide useful information about driving patterns that lower gas mileage or increase tire wear or general vehicle wear. But fleet operators are not the only vehicle owners who will want to collect data on the driving of others. How about parents who want to monitor the driving behavior of their teenage kids? Here's a future conversation that will eventually take place many times: "You can't have a car unless the car has a very high capacity recording device". What's the kid going to do, say no? Here's a case where there would be no government or insurance company involvement where it would be hard to argue against it on civil liberties grounds. Do parents not have a right to monitor their kids in this manner?
A really smart box that was monitoring g force shifts and direction might even be able to detect drivers impaired by drugs, alcohol, or some other factor and the box could report this while the driving trip was taking place. Police could be summoned with a continuously updating position and direction of the vehicle. Or the vehicle could be ordered to shut down or at least to slow down to some low maximum speed.
Of course, in the longer run the computers will gradually take over driving responsibilities. This has already begun in a limited manner with ABS and even with airbag deployment. But more work could be done. For instance, a computer could detect a traffic light changing color or even be told by a radio signal that the light has changed color. Then the computer could flash a light or otherwise indicate to the driver that he is too close to the intersection to make it thru safely. Also, computers could be told that a traffic accident or fog is up ahead and alert a driver of the need to slow down and of where the exact danger lies. Also, a driver could be given optional adaptive cruise control (and this has already been tested - deployed anywhere?) that would decelerate a vehicle in order to maintain some maximum distance from the car in front.
The Washington Post has a great article on the growing problem of identity theft.
Identity theft is perhaps the most glaring symptom of the ills that have accompanied the data revolution of the 1990s. Bounced checks. Loan denials. Harassment from debt collectors. Victims of identity theft -- and there are millions of them -- are often haunted by the consequences for years.
Some government officials estimate that as many as 750,000 people a year are victimized. Others think that number is way too low. Last month Gartner Inc., a business research group, estimated that 7 million Americans have fallen prey to identity thieves in the past year alone, an extraordinary figure mirrored by a new survey from Privacy & American Business, an industry-funded think tank. Another study, by Star Systems, a company that facilitates the majority of U.S. ATM transactions, suggests that almost 12 million Americans in all, or about one in 19 adults, have been hit by such fraud.
One of the tales of identity theft has a Washington DC think tank manager worrying that he'd be arrested for murder because of murders committed by someone using his identity.
Bergin explained the warrant meant that he, the real Michael Berry, could be picked up for murder. The law enforcement computers would tell officers they were looking for a black man. But cops are so used to getting reports marred by mistakes, she said, they might ignore that detail if they had the right name.
The article is worth reading in full. As electronic information acquisition and transmission becomes steadily easier to do we are going to be faced with the problem that it is going to become just too easy to gather the key pieces of information needed to pull off identity theft. We need the widespread adoption of reliable biometric means of identification. We also need legal changes to put more responsibility on financial institutions to prevent identity theft. A person suffering under the consequences of identity theft has limited means by which to put a stop to it while financial institutions hand out key information far too readily while simultaneously making too little effort to verify identity.
If we count the faking of sender email addresses the commission of identity theft even more common than this article reports. I'm currently getting a large number of 100k+ email messages on one of my email accounts and many of the messages appear to be bounces of email by spam filters on other pop servers. Someone is sending out 100k sized junk mail using my email address as the return address.
The US Postal Service is proposing to implement a system similar to what Federal Express and UPS have where they label and use computers to track the movement of every single item they deliver. This has predictably raised objections from privacy advocates.
The Postal Service estimates that it delivers about 670 million pieces of mail to more than 138 million addresses daily, leading to concerns among law enforcement and government officials that it is too easy to use the system for criminal or terrorist activity.
The commission said the Intelligent Mail could bolster security, as well as let