Some day we will have no privacy of mind.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) looks more and more like a window into the mind. In a study published online today in Nature, researchers at Vanderbilt University report that from fMRI data alone, they could distinguish which of two images subjects were holding in their memory--even several seconds after the images were removed. The study also pinpointed, for the first time, where in the brain visual working memory is maintained.
Don't become too attached to your privacy. If you do then you'll sure miss it when it is gone.
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, who has lunch with whom, 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:
- Gouge the credit card bit out of the place where it is embedded.
- Force a person to accompany a criminal to an ATM or into a store to buy things.
- Kill a person and use the dead body or body part to gain entrance to a secure facility or to pass out of a store with goods.
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 consumers track the progress of anything they send. The latter has been identified as a top consumer demand in the commission's independent surveys.
One objection that privacy advocates raise is cost. But as computer storage, CPU, and communications costs continually fall the costs of implementing such a system fall as well. Their real objection is the threat to privacy. They want anonymous means of communication. But unless the postal service eliminates drop-box mailing and anonymous purchasing of stamps this proposal will not stop someone from sending mail without revealing their identity. Granted, a letter may be traced back to its originating mail box but letters are already marked with the town they originated from. One can easily drive to another town and drop a letter in the mail there under the current system and likely under the new system as well.
If privacy advocates do not like what computers can accomplish in terms of monitoring and tracking human activity now they face a bleak future. Computer speed, storage, and communications bandwidth will all increase by orders of magnitude in coming decades. Sensor networks are going to be cheap and pervasive. New readers to this site should check out my Surveillance Society archive and look for posts that discuss the argument that the death of privacy is inevitable.
With the federal government having been effectively legislated and browbeaten out of the data mining business for capturing terrorists the activity has shifted to the states with Florida leading the way with a system called Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange).
Organizers said the system, dubbed Matrix, enables investigators to find patterns and links among people and events faster than ever before, combining police records with commercially available collections of personal information about most American adults. It would let authorities, for instance, instantly find the name and address of every brown-haired owner of a red Ford pickup truck in a 20-mile radius of a suspicious event.
Some might see this as the triumph of federalism and the power of distributed networks where no one single large entity is in charge. Some might even see this as signs of the inevitability of as surveillance and data collection technologies spread far and wide in society and people sitting at home are even recruited to watch critical facilities remotely.
The database is being developed by a company called Seisint which already markets a commercial database service called Accurint which is a database service for locating people and past and present addresses.
Accurint uses a name, past address, phone number or Social Security Number to obtain the current name, address and phone number of targeted subjects. Using proprietary compilation of data sources and association algorithms, Accurint’s ability to deliver high-quality matches and find rates is unparalleled. Accurint can also provide previous addresses and location information for relatives, associates, and neighbors. As a result, Accurint is the most accurate and detailed source for forward-looking and historical views of consumer contact information.
By leveraging unmatched capability for processing billions of records per second, Accurint has compiled the world’s largest set of accessible location data. Accurint searches more than 20 billion records that cover recent relocation to historical addresses dating back 30 years and more. Individual queries are supported via web and client applications. For high-volume requests, Accurint provides on-demand batch capabilities, drastically reducing the cost of searches. For direct legacy application access Accurint supports XML API's.
With its unique combination of data, association algorithms and search technology, Accurint offers the best-performing solution in the marketplace.
Many companies have large databases of records of their transactions and contacts with millions of people and organizations. It is not a big stretch to use these databases to do data mining to look for activity that correlates with patterns found in investigations of known terrorists.
Clearly grasping at straws the Cato Institute is peddling the idea that automated systems of collection and analysis of information will drain resources from more productive approaches to finding terrorists.
Florida's database is similar in many ways to the Pentagon's controversial Terrorist Information Awareness program. In "Total Information Awareness for the Ages," Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., director of technology policy, writes: "Ironically, the project could also increase security risks. Even the Pentagon's resources are limited: Most people are not terrorists, and it can be a costly diversion to attempt to monitor the torrent of chatter that will be generated by this misguided program. Terrorists already immerse themselves in mainstream society, even using their real names and official government documents. They can learn and anticipate the trigger patterns that will supposedly generate red flags, and then avoid them."
The Florida project will simultaneously automate information searches for commonplace police investigations and also bring together data that can be mined to patterns of potential terrorist activity. As computers become cheaper and more powerful and as communications costs fall as well the trend is clearly running in the direction where computer automation becomes increasingly more cost effective than traditional methods of police and intelligence work.
The Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog is also worried. (my emphases added)
But if each state collects and maintains citizen's data, each with different standards for correcting, aggregating and using the data, and if states string together their databases, as several states would like to collaborate with Florida to do (Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Utah so far in the MATRIX -- click here for their contacts list; and the District of Columbia and Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York in the DC program as reported by Spencer S. Hsu/WDC Post), I think we will have a far more dispersed and frightening problem than what the TIA proposed. Does this mean Safire, and Harrow do another round of columns, Congress and (hopefully) State Legislatures get involved to control this effort toward Too much surveillance (by Safire) of citizens? How effective can we as citizens be in asking for legislative oversight when there are so many different states and entities involved?
Things are spinning out of control? Woe is us? At the risk of sounding like I'm playing a broken record, these worrywarts show little sign of being familiar with science fiction writer David Brin's argument that the death of privacy is inevitable and our only choice is whether only governments or everyone will use the surveillance and data collection technologies which are continually advancing in sophistication and ease of use. In Brin's view we effectively face a choice between privacy and freedom. But those who scream loudest against government surveillance and data collection seem wholly unaware of Brin's analysis.
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has introduced a bill called the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act which, among other things, would outlaw data mining by the federal government.
The bill also would prohibit data mining by the federal government. If the bill passes, no government employee or computer could sift through federal or commercial databases to search for individuals who fit a profile.
Thus, an FBI agent couldn't look in databases to find all the people who fit the pattern of a drug dealer, but could look up the name of a person who the agent suspected of being a drug dealer.
Think about this. Can commercial companies do data mining with commercial databases? Yes, of course. Very expensive systems containing enormous and continually growing databases are built for that purpose. If companies can get access to the data and if other governments can contract with the companies then where will this law lead us? If the federal government outlaws its own ability to do data mining searches then we will be in the curious position where US companies, foreign governments, and foreign companies will all be able to do data mining about American citizens even while the US federal government will not be able to do so. Depending on how far reaching this Wyden proposal turns out to be it may not even prohibit state and local government agencies to do data mining while the federal government won't be able to. Also, private individuals will increasingly be able to collect large amounts of information about each other.
There is something selectively Luddite about this bill:
The bill also prohibits all federal agencies from conducting searches of commercial data to create hypothetical scenarios of future terrorist attacks.
Federal investigative agencies are of course allowed to look for signs of a terrorist attack by using large numbers of agents to go out into the field to collect information by talking to and observing people. The agents can talk among themselves to compare and share with each other what they find. But in the view of Senator Wyden automated analysis of information collected for other purposes is considered too dangerous and ripe for abuse to allow the federal government to do it. So this bill seeks to deny federal agents many of the efficiencies in data collection and analysis that computers make possible.
Governments do inevitably abuse powers granted to them. Wyden's bill would probably prevent some abuses. Whether it will be a net benefit depends in part on how many threats could be discovered and neutralized by using computer data mining. But the bill seems somehow naive. The amount of data collected by and about people, companies, and governments is going to rise by orders of magnitude for the simple reason that the costs of collection and processing of the information will fall by orders of magnitude. An attempt to prevent just the federal government from making use of the enormous quantities of data is bound to create some unintended consequences. One consequence might be to put the US government at a distinct disadvantage in competing with other governments and with non-governmental groups which practice asymmetric warfare.
Ron Bailey of Reason reports on how Wyden and other US Senators have also recently shot down DARPA's attempt to form a trading market to collect information on political events in the Middle East and around the world.
The senators are objecting to a pilot project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM). As the PAM website explains: "Analysts often use prices from various markets as indicators of potential events. The use of petroleum futures contract prices by analysts of the Middle East is a classic example. The Policy Analysis Market (PAM) refines this approach by trading futures contracts that deal with underlying fundamentals of relevance to the Middle East. Initially, PAM will focus on the economic, civil, and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey and the impact of U.S. involvement with each." The Pentagon envisioned enrolling 10,000 traders by October at a cost of $8 million to set it up.
Plus, this same cast of political characters also shot down the Pentagon's "Total Information Awareness" project. As Heather Mac Donald explains, this prevents US domestic intelligence agencies from modernizing their tools for gathering information on terrorists. Of course, when the inevitable attacks come the same cast of political characters will blame the FBI and other agencies for not foreseeing and preventing the attacks.
The fundamental problem with fighting against opponents who use asymmetrical warfare techniques is that they attempt to blend in to the civilian population. In many cases the only way to detect them is to use computers to scan thru a lot of information and detect patterns for how terrorist behavior deviates in subtle ways from that seen in the general population. There are not enough government agents to watch millions of people individually to look for tell tale signs. Without automated tools for detecting suspicious patterns many terrorists will likely go undetected.
Our future promises to be a surveillance free-for-all where individuals, companies, governments, and other organizations collect increasingly larger amounts of data about the actions of others. See my category archive Surveillance Society for many examples of technologies being used or developed to collect more information more easily about personal identities, activities, and movements.
International technical standards and civil aviation organisations have confirmed that they are working on deploying passports containing details that enable the "machine-assisted identification" of the passenger, which will be required by travellers visiting the US from October 2004.
Different governments are implementing different kinds of biometric passports.
Current plans call for the new passport books to include a contactless smart chip based on the 14443 standard, with a minimum of 32 Kbytes of EEPROM storage. The chip will contain a compressed full-face image for use as a biometric. European biometric passports, by contrast, are planned to feature both retinal and fingerprint recognition biometrics on their smart cards.
Some countries are using biometric data in many other forms of ID as well.
The technology will not just be used in passports but in drivers’ licenses. Malaysia is using biometric smart cards for government services. Unisys is even working on a registered traveler system which can give you a smart card with fingerprint information to use at airports and skip the check in lines.
Even without a formal approval of a national ID card system it seems inevitable that most people will end up having their biometric data recorded by one or more governments. This brings up an interesting twist: anyone who wants to pass thru an airport or other facility that has iris scanners and fingerprint checkers will end up having their biometric data recorded even if they never get a driver's license or other card that requires biometric data recording as part of the application process. Some people travelling around using multiple identities will likely be detected eventually by comparing biometric data and different names and nationalities used by the same person at different times.
If biometric datalogs are archived then British airports will become big iris pattern data collection systems.
Iris-recognition machines, which can identify people by reading the distinctive pattern surrounding the pupil of the eye, are to be installed at 10 British airports within a year.
Biometric passports might seem an improvement since they will be harder to counterfeit. But stop and think about it: A biometric passport is like a one person database of biometric data. Why have every persn carry a database for their own biometric data? After all, if a counterfeit passport can be made then a comparison of a person to the personal biometric database embedded in their passport will yield a match even though a person may be using a false identity. Many biometric identification systems do not rely on a person carrying a card. There is a central database so that each person can be scanned and compared to that database. Of course, a corrupt worker could make an inappropriate entry into that database.
One problem that biometric identification does not solve is that unscrupulous staff can issue biometric ids to people who do not qualify for them.
In Ireland, the introduction of national ID cards and biometric passports has provoked controversy, amid fears of data protection and privacy. On this front, the trustworthiness of staff with access to biometrics systems and data is considered to be important. A question the government and companies would need to ask itself in adopting biometric national IDs is "what checks and balances do you have to prevent them (staff) issuing false IDs to people," according to Allan.
One thing that biometric databases will make possible is comparisons to identify duplicate biometric data for people with multiple identities. A comparison of fingerprints and iris patterns of everyone in a massive database should not yield matches between different records. So biometrics will make it harder for a person to create a false identity if they have already been recorded with their real identity.
Even governments will find it harder to create new false identities for people. If a person travels to other countries and has their name and biometric data recorded in biometric database logs in foreign airports and yet eventually their own government provides a new identity some other government will be able to compare them to a database of previous visitors and recognize them by their older identity.
The MIT Technology Review has a report on the efforts of Honeywell Laboratories in Minneapolis, MN, the Intel Proactive Health Research lab in Hillsboro, OR, and other labs to develop technology to monitor the health and activities of senior citizens. (free registration required)
The Intel consortium is developing even more sensitive ways to follow the activities of elderly people. Its research goes beyond motion detectors and pillbox sensors to include things like pressure sensors on an Alzheimer’s patient’s favorite chair, networks of cameras, and tiny radio tags embedded in household items and clothing that communicate with tag readers in floor mats, shelves, and walls. From the pattern of these signals, a computer can deduce what a person is doing and intervene—giving instructions over a networked television or bedside radio, or wirelessly alerting a caregiver. Dishman says Intel will install the first trial systems in the homes of two dozen Alzheimer’s patients by early next year.
In collaboration with Intel Research Seattle, the Proactive Health team is building an advanced smart-home system to help those like Carl and Thelma deal with Alzheimer’s. Researchers are integrating four main technology areas into a prototyping environment to be tested in the homes of patients: sensor networks, home networks, activity tracking, and ambient displays. The researchers wonder about developing a better pill-tracking system for Carl’s medications, about sensor networks to help his adult children look in on things from far away, and about computer-based coaches that help Carl keep his mind fresh.
Intel foresees the use of WiFi wireless networks to spread sensors and actuators throughout our physical environment. (PDF format).
Small, inexpensive, low-powered sensors and actuators, deeply embedded in our physical environment, can be deployed in large numbers, interacting and forming networks to communicate, adapt, and coordinate higher-level tasks. As we network these micro devices, we’ll be pushing the Internet not just into different locations but deep into the embedded platforms within each location. This will enable us to achieve a hundredfold increase in the size of the Internet beyond the growth we’re already anticipating. And it will require new and different methods of networking devices to one another and to the Internet.
The University of Rochester Center for Future Health is working on a model home in their Smart Medical Home Research Laboratory which they are using to try out a number of concepts for constantly measuring human health signs and activities.
The Center's overall goal is to develop an integrated Personal Health System, so all technologies are integrated and work seamlessly. This technology will allow consumers, in the privacy of their own homes, to maintain health, detect the onset of disease, and manage disease. The data collected 24/7 inside the home will augment the data collected by physicians and hospitals. The data collection modules in the home will start with the measurement of traditional vital signs (blood pressure, pulse, respiration) and work to include measurement of "new vital signs", such as gait, behavior patterns, sleep patterns, general exercise, rehabilitation exercises, and more. This five-room "house" is outfitted with infrared sensors, computers, biosensors, and video cameras for use by research teams to work with research subjects as they test concepts and prototype products.
There are a few things to note about these reports:
- Automated electronic monitoring of the elderly at home will encounter little political opposition as the ranks of the elderly grow and the costs of caring for them rise quite dramatically.
- Monitoring of the elderly will also be done for reasons other than health purposes. Security is a big concern.
- Home monitoring systems will inevitably be used by parents to monitor children, for younger people with disabilities and illnesses, and others with special needs.
- These technologies will be used to enhance existing electronic systems which enforce what is effectively house arrest for some parolees. Their movements will be continuously monitorable and violations will be instantly detected and reported.
- The ability to automatically monitor is necessary in order to support a large array of automated home services. A home computer will not be able to respond to human commands unless it is constantly listening and watching for them.
The last point is in many ways the most interesting. Even adults in perfect health in safe environments will want to have extensive automated sensing systems installed in their homes if those systems can save them time and effort. Well, if automated systems can detect a dirty carpet to send out the automated vacuum or it can detect a spill on the kitchen floor and send out an automated cleaning device to clean it up then many people will want the automated sensor systems that will make these things possible. Ditto for systems that can pick up dirty clothes to take them to the laundry, that can notice that the counter has lots of dirty dishes, or that can respond to a voice command to clear the table.
But less obvious sensor systems can be imagined. Picture a section of floor tile that can accurately weigh what is standing on it. If that tile was connected to a computer that also had several video cameras which intersected that position then it could recognize what was standing on it, what it was dressed in or carrying (got to adjust the weight for clothes, pocketbooks, a plate of food, or whatever), and determine that Spot the dog is getting too fat or daughter Kathy might be becoming anorexic.
The Surveillance Society is going to become widespread more because of individual choices of hundreds of millions of private individuals than because of decisions taken by governments.
Update: MIT inventor Ted Selker has a smart futon that watches your face for cues about what you want.
The seemingly normal futon in the corner is actually a multimedia couch bed. By staring or blinking at images projected on the ceiling above the bed, you can turn on a radio or set an alarm clock without moving a major muscle. While the system could create the world’s worst couch potato, it could also be ideal for people with physical disabilities.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a system for use in urban combat called "Combat Zones That See" (CTS) to better protect troops fighting in urban combat zones.
The project's centerpiece would be groundbreaking computer software capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.
Think about how useful a system like this would be for the occupation forces getting shot at in Baghdad.
The Combat zones That See (CTS) Program explores concepts, develops algorithms, and delivers systems for utilizing large numbers (1000s) of cameras to provide the close-in sensing demanded for military operations in urban terrain. Automatic video understanding will reduce the manpower needed to view and manage this impossibly large collection of data and reduce the bandwidth required to exfiltrate the data to manageable levels. The ability to track vehicles across extended distances is the key to providing actionable intelligence for military operations in urban terrain. Combat zones That See will advance the state-of-the-art for multiple-camera video tracking, to the point where expected track lengths reach city-sized distances. Trajectories and appearance information resulting from these tracks are the key elements to performing higher-level inference and motion pattern analysis on video-derived information. Combat zones That See will assemble the video understanding, motion pattern analysis, and sensing strategies into coherent systems suited to Urban Combat and Force Protection.
This project really is motivated by military needs.
Military Operations in Urban Terrain are fraught with danger. Urban canyons and abundant hide-sites yield standoff sensing from airborne and space-borne platforms ineffective. Short lines-of-sight neutralize much of the standoff and situation-awareness advantages currently rendered by U.S. forces. Large civilian populations and the ever-present risk of collateral damage preclude the use of overwhelming force. As a result, combat in cities has long been viewed as something to avoid. However, modern asymmetric threats seek to capitalize on these limitations by hiding in urban areas and forcing U.S. Forces to engage in cities. We can no longer avoid the need to be prepared to fight in cities. Combat zones That See will produce video understanding algorithms embedded in surveillance systems for automatically monitoring video feeds to generate, for the first time, the reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting information needed to provide close-in, continuous, always-on support for military operations in urban terrain.
You can read DARPA's contractor FAQ as a PDF.
DARPA says this system is being developed for use in foreign urban battlefields and is not meant for domestic use. This certainly seems like an honest statement of their motivations. However, such a disclaimer tells us little about how the system will eventually be used (though it certainly will be used for military purposes). First of all, once it is working are they going to turn down requests from, say, the City of New York, to install some cameras to watch for known terrorists? Seems unlikely. Secondly, once DARPA demonstrates some capability companies not involved in the development will rush to produce equivalent systems if the demand exists among law enforcement agencies. There are lots of engineers and scientists who could assist in the development of such a system.
However, just because DARPA's project will eventually enable large scale surveillance of cities which are not war zones (okay, at least not military war zones) does not mean that the project should be opposed by those who are opposed to increased domestic surveillance by governments. Civil libertarians who may wish try to stop the growth of the surveillance society by lobbying against government funding of the development of the enabling technologies in projects such as the DARPA CTS are at best fighting a delaying action. The ability to automatically recognize specific faces or cars or to read license plates is coming sooner or later as computers become faster, sensor quality improves, and visual pattern matching algorithms improve. DARPA's efforts might speed up the development of the needed technologies but their development is inevitable.
Update: The London Underground is about to test a software system called Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance System that does automated computer monitoring of digital cameras at tube subway stops.
If the trial due to go live in two London Underground stations this week is a success, it could accelerate the adoption of the technology around the world. The software, which analyses CCTV footage, could help spot suicide attempts, overcrowding, suspect packages and trespassers. The hope is that by automating the prediction or detection of such events security staff, who often have as many as 60 cameras to monitor simultaneously, can reach the scene in time to prevent a potential tragedy.
The software is marketed by Ipsotek (Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance and Observation Technologies), a firm that is a spin-off of the research done by their managing directory Dr. Sergio Velastin at Kingston University.
Dr. Sergio A Velastin obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Manchester (UK) for research on vision systems for pedestrian and road-traffic analysis. Joining the Department of Electronic Engineering in Kings College London (University of London) in October 1990, he became a Senior Lecturer and founded and led the Vision and Robotics Laboratory (VRL). In October 2001, Dr. Velastin and his VRL team joined the Digital Imaging Research Centre in Kingston University, with which he is still associated, attracted by its size and growing reputation in the field.
Note how the basic research being funded by a variety of governments in vision processing leads inevitably to automated systems that can monitor and detect patterns in human behavior.
Most video surveillance cameras in New York City are privately owned.
The use of surveillance cameras erupted into a major issue in 1998 when the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) mapped the city and concluded that there were 2,400 surveillance cameras in Manhattan alone, a number that Mr. Brown believes has tripled.
Former NYCLU head Norman Siegel said that 89 percent of the cameras were privately owned and 11 percent publicly owned.
There is an important implication of this report: efforts to restrict the use of surveillance cameras by governments will have little effect upon the rate of growth of the use of surveillance cameras in general, This pattern of many times more privately than publicly owned security cameras probably holds throughout the United States and likely in a number of other countries as well. One factor that may make international comparisons difficult is differing patterns of public versus private ownership of port facilities, airports, bus and train stations, and other facilities where cameras could be used for security purposes.
As it now stands there does not appear to be substantial public opposition to government operation of surveillance cameras. Therefore my guess is that even government operation of surveillance cameras will continue to expand quite rapidly.
Some private organizations that operate surveillance cameras are not conventional commercial interests. For instance, the apparently private foundation Surf Life Saving Queensland wants to install surveillance cameras to prevent drownings.
CIVIL libertarians and naturalists have vowed to fight plans to install surveillance cameras at a Sunshine Coast nudist beach.
There is some irony in the notion that nudists on a public beach do not want to have their privacy invaded.
From a government police agency's perspective the proliferation of private security cameras makes their jobs easier. If privately owned and operated cameras are positioned to record public approaches to privately owned establishments and then a crime is committed in an area the private cameras will often be useful in police investigations. This form of usefulness is becoming increasingly common as private video surveillance cameras proliferate. To take just one recent example, police in Melbourne Australia are looking thru footage from a hotel's video footage even though the murder case they are investigating didn't happen in the hotel whose camera might have caught the crime.
As Moran's family began planning his funeral, police were examining footage from a surveillance camera on a hotel near the murder scene at North Essendon.
As video surveillance systems fall in price and increase in capabilities their use will grow by orders of magnitude. We may reach a point where most stores, hotels, bus stations, airports, and other public places operate multiple cameras. The cost of data storage capacity will fall so far and become so miniaturized that much more of the images recorded by surveillance cameras will be recorded and retained for longer periods of time.
What is really going to drive the push toward pervasive monitoring by video cameras is the spread of WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) internet access networks. The island nation of Niue has the first nationwide WiFi network.
ALOFI, Niue, The South Pacific -- The Internet Users Society – Niue (IUS-N), today announced that it has launched the world’s first free nation-wide WiFi Internet access service on the Polynesian island-nation of Niue. This new free wireless service which can be accessed by all Niue residents, tourists, government offices and business travelers, is being provided at no cost to the public or local government.
The number of areas covered by WiFi networks looks set to grow rapidly.
Today, IDC predicts that by 2006, 3 billion cell phones will be in use, and 50 percent of Internet users will be mobile. Gartner Dataquest estimates that by 2007, nearly 120,000 Wi-Fi hotspots will exist worldwide, with Asia accounting for about a third of these.
Using WiFi-enabled webcams and cellphone cameras an increasing number of people are going to send still images and motion video pictures of wherever they are to wherever they want to send them.Video surveillance is no longer going to be the done mainly by police, public transportation agencies, and private businesses. The general public is going to be in on it. The depiction of the surveillance society of David Brin's Earth science fiction novel is looking more prophetic every day.
In the San Francisco Bay area of California commuters put an electronic device - essentially a form of radio frequency ID or RFID - on their cars that allows them to automatically pay tolls. Those devices are going to be detected by antennas that will be installed on literally hundreds of millions of Bay Area freeways in order to track how quickly cars move from one sensing antenna to the next one. This will be done to measure and report traffic congestion and traffic speeds in real time.
Using small electronic antennas under overpasses and on signs, the system will calculate freeway speeds by tracking drivers' FasTrak units -- devices that pay bridge tolls electronically.
As a FasTrak device passes by one of 150 roadside sensors, an electronic signature will be entered into a government database and then scanned repeatedly as the vehicle passes other sensors
Note the pattern here. An electronic ID device tracking is adopted for one uncontroversial purpose and goes into widespread use. Then new uses are proposed. Unless a large public outcry ensues the tracking devices are checked for at more locations and for more purposes. The cost of collecting data to track the movement of people and things will steadily decline and the collected data will be put to a steadily increasing number of uses.
There are safeguards in this use of FasTrak to prevent highway sensors from reporting the identity of the individual vehicles whose speeds are being measured. But I bet those safeguards could be lifted with just a firmware revision to prevent the scrambling and encryption of the vehicle identities.
The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting piece on the practice of hospitals and other health care providers sending medical charts out to be read and typed into computers. Many medical transcriptionists in the US work in their homes doing the work. But an increasing number of medical records are being sent to India to be entered into computer format.
Last month, for example, India celebrated World Medical Transcription Week. "India has become the favorite country for outsourcing in the U.S.," Prasenjit Ganguly, vice president of the country's largest medical transcription service,
This passing around of hard copy medical records into homes and even to other countries certainly does not inspire confidence that medical privacy is being well protected. While the advance of electronic communications makes it easier to send records abroad to be translated in the longer run technology will probably eventually eliminate the need for human medical transcriptionists entirely. Scanning software ought to eventually be able to read many paper charts. Also, voice translation software ought to be able to transcribe video records made by doctors. But eventually all data entry on medical charts will be done directly into encoded digital form. Even voice records should be translated into properly spelled words just as doctors speak into a recording device.
Advanced integration of test equipment and lab results with medical computer databases should entirely eliminate the paper copies of test results. Increasing portions of medical records will never even be generated as hard copy in the first place.
So my FuturePundit forecast on medical record privacy is in the short term even greater distribution of written medical records to distant countries for data entry. But in the longer term all human medical transcriptionist work will be entirely eliminated.
Will the end of hard copy medical records increase medical privacy? Or will medical records be sent between health care providers, insurers, and other organizations more rapidly and in larger quantities? Will increasing numbers of workers of those organizations will be able to more quickly and easily look up details of your medical history? Will the result be that so many medical records are accessible by any one person that a black market in medical record information will become easier to develop since a single worker in a hospital chain or insurance company will be able to sell the records of many people to interested parties?
The paper currency for the European Union may get RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags. (or see here)
"The main objective is to determine the authenticity of money and to stop counterfeits," said Prianka Chopra, an analyst with market research firm Frost and Sullivan in report published in March. "RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags also have the ability of recording information such as details of the transactions the paper note has been involved in. It would, therefore, also prevent money-laundering, make it possible to track illegal transactions and even prevent kidnappers demanding unmarked bills," Chopra said.
The Register has come up with a list of humourous applications for RFID currency.
Talking Euros for blind people and confused octogenarians: "No dear, I'm a fifty. Put me back in your purse and look for a five."
The curious thing about this particular item is that it is not so far from one real application of RFID currency: automatic currency counting in banks and other commercial establishments. In fact, a blind person could pass a hand-held device which has an embedded speaker over a note to have the note tell the person the denomination of the note.
Paper currency probably has a limited lifespan because counterfeiters will eventually figure out how to duplicate anything. It might well be the case that in 20 or 30 years physical unnetworked currency will be too easy to duplicate using nanotechnology for it to continue to be a safe store of financial value.
Priceline.com founder Jay Walker has founded a new company USHomeGuard whose purpose is to employ people to watch critical infrastructure sites over the internet using web cams to alert security officials of potentially dangerous intruders.
But if onsite cameras beamed photos to the World Wide Web, Americans could monitor these sites from home. If they spied a potential attacker - a masked man trying to scale a power plant fence, or a van parked next to a reservoir - they could alert security agents with a click of the mouse. Agents would call local authorities and help avert disaster.
This proposal is very much in keeping with ideas that science fiction writer David Brin has described in his non-fiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? and in his fun fiction read Earth. There is a definite inevitability to Walker's business idea regardless of whether his company eventually succeeds in making it into a commercial success.
Government employees will amount to only a small fraction of the total number of people watching security cameras and other surveillance sensors. Far more people in private companies will conduct electronic surveillance. But the largest users of surveillance technologies will likely turn out to be private individuals watching their families, homes, romantic interests, celebrities, and anything else that interests them.
Applied Digital Solutions has brought out embeddable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips capable of being implanted in a human body.
Imagine a tiny chip the size of a grain of rice that can be implanted under your skin to provide instant access to a range of potentially life- saving information. Or indeed, any information.
American company Applied Digital Solutions demonstrated just that at the IDTechEx Smart Tagging in Healthcare conference, held in London last month.
Paramedics could know instantly that a person they find passed out has a medical condition or an allergy to a particular drug. But the uses do not stop there. As storage device densities continually increase the amount of information storable by little chips embedded in a person's body will go up by many orders of magnitude.
Boston Globe reporter Angela Swafford has written a good article that surveys many of the possible uses for this technology. She even had a VeriChip inserted into her own body.
Theoretically, this VeriChip will allow doctors to call up my medical records even if I'm too badly hurt to answer questions. It is also supposed to allow me to get money from an automatic teller machine by flashing my arm instead of punching in my PIN number. Or reassure airport security that I am a journalist, not a terrorist.
Nokia and MasterCard are planning to put RFID chips into cell phones to make them into credit cards. There is not a whole lot of difference between an ATM card and a credit card and therefore it seems reasonable to expect that you could become your own credit card as well. But then how can someone who can't control their credit card spending cut their cards in half?
Applied Digital Solutions is also developing a subdermal GPS Personal Location Device.
PALM BEACH, FL– May 13, 2003 – Applied Digital Solutions, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSX), an advanced technology development company, today announced that it has developed and successfully field tested a working prototype of what the company believes is the first-ever subdermal GPS “personal location device” (PLD). Field testing and follow-up laboratory testing of the disk-shaped prototype confirm that the specially designed antenna and the induction-based power-recharging method function properly.
The dimensions of this initial PLD prototype are 2.5 inches in diameter by 0.5 inches in depth, roughly the size of a pacemaker. As the process of miniaturization proceeds in the coming months, the Company expects to be able to shrink the size of the device to at least one-half and perhaps to as little as one-tenth the current size.
The induction-based power-recharging method is similar to that used to recharge implantable pacemakers. This recharging technique functions without requiring any physical connection between the power source and the implant.
Dr. Peter Zhou, Vice President and Chief Scientist of Applied Digital Solutions, said: “We’re very encouraged by the successful field testing and follow-up laboratory testing of this working PLD prototype. The specially designed antenna is working as planned. While reaching the working prototype stage represents a significant advancement in the development of PLD, we continue to pursue further enhancements, especially with regard to miniaturization and the power supply. We should be able to reduce the size of the device dramatically before the end of this year.”
Last year, the Company announced that it was accelerating development of PLD in response to demand from high-risk countries and other potential customers. The exact timing of commercial availability of PLD is unclear pending further technological refinements and achieving any required regulatory clearances. The PLD technology builds on United States Patent Number 5,629,678 for a "personal tracking and recovery system" which Applied Digital acquired in 1999.
In its PLD announcement last year, the Company said it is committed to providing customers with a full range of “personal safeguard technologies” that enhance personal safety, security and peace of mind. Other technologies in the Company’s line-up of life-enhancing technologies include VeriChip™, Digital Angel™, and Thermo Life™.
You might be wondering what this product is for. My added bolding of the statement about the "high-risk countries" points to one obvious use. They are probably referring to countries where kidnapping of wealthy people for ransoms occurs much more frequently than is the case in the most industrialized countries. Perhaps the device will be able to periodically broadcast a signal that reveals the location of a person once kidnapped.
A really cool health application would be to combine a heart monitor with GPS and cellular phone digital message broadcast to alert emergency workers when a person is having a heart attack. Other people with medical conditions such as epilepsy or diabetes that put them at risk of experiencing acute medical emergencies could also benefit from the ability of an embedded device to automatically make a cellular call for help. One could imagine people in high risk occupations such as forest fire fighters and search and rescue workers that have a risk of their being lost or injured in remote locations benefitting from having such a device in them.
A lot of other applications for this kind of technology can easily be imagined. For instance, parents could use it to keep track of the movement of their kids, either to find them at any moment in time or to download a record of their movements when they come home. This could be done surreptitiously so that a kid would never even know that a device had been implanted.
Law enforcement officials could require use of embedded RFID/GPS on parolees as a condition of parole. Stalkers who have court orders placed on them to avoid a celebrity or ex-girlfriend could similarly be tracked. Another really interesting application would be counter-terrorism. Imagine a suspected terrorist having a GPS tracking device secretly implanted. One way to do it would be to drug a suspected terrorist using food sent to his hotel room followed by insertion of a device while he slept. He might never suspect that he fell asleep because of drugs in his food if the drugging was done at a time late enough at night.
What would be even more clever would be to put components of a nanotech GPS device in food split up into a number of pieces too small to detect. The pieces could all be absorbed and then all migrate to the same destination in the body to hook up with each other and start functioning. A really sophisticated device could even record spoken conversations for later download. Then when the terrorist stayed in a hotel room or visited a restaurant that had embedded devices for triggering a radio download an encrypted transmission could be sent at his body to start the download.
Simpler RFID technology is on the verge of being used by clothing retailers to prevent theft and track inventory more accurately. Benetton announced a move to embed RFID tags in all Benetton clothing but after a furor was raised Benetton backed off from the proposal a month later. Another application is to combine RFID with a temperature sensor to allow perishible packages to indicate more accurately when shelf life has been expired.
Some day more advanced embeddable GPS tracking and radio transmitting devices will be interfaced to one's nervous system to allow one to instruct one's own embedded device to report that one believes one is either being kidnapped or otherwise in danger. Picture a mental keyboard where in one's mind one could type up a digital message or select from a list of prewritten messages and then order one embedded cell phone to send a brief digital message to a security agency, police, family, or employer.
In a comment section of a previous post someone has just posted claiming that a police force secretly put a GPS tracking device on his car. This leads to the obvious question of whether doing that is legal. Here's an article that reports routine installation of GPS devices by private investigators to track individuals who are not even married.
Virginia Beach Private Investigator Lee Oakes uses GPS everyday. He secretly installs magnetized units - it can take as little as 10 seconds - under the cars of individuals his clients pay him to follow.
I could see how a private investigator would have less legal problem doing it for one half of a married couple since the car that would be tracked would typically be jointly owned by the couple. But an example cited in the article involved tracking a fiance who had a cheating heart. Well, the article claims this is perfectly legal:
Again, using a GPS tracking device on a vehicle is not illegal...as long as you don't commit a crime (breaking into the car, tapping into the car's power supply, altering the car's driving characteristics, etc.) installing the device.
This might vary by state. Does anyone know? This article is reporting on Hampton Roads and Virginia Beach and so it is dealing with Virginia state law.
Also, are there fewer restrictions on monitoring and surveillance by private individuals than by police forces and other government agencies?
If current law remains in effect how ubiquitous will monitoring of others become? Because of continuing technical advances the devices will only become cheaper, smaller, and easier to use.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is working on a PDA that can detect nuclear materials.
The device, known as RadNet, is designed to make calls, surf the Web, act as a Personal Digital Assistant, pinpoint locations with Global Positioning System technology and sniff out nuclear materials with a cutting-edge sensor. It is one of several national security projects being worked on at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The detector may eventually be built into a large assortment of vehicles and it could report detected radiation and a GPS-determined position automatically.
Livermore's Simon Labov, director of the lab's new radiation detection center, sees RadNet phones in the hands of police, firefighters and U.S. Customs agents. One day, though, Labov imagines the gizmos will be built into taxis, rental cars and trucks.
The effect would be to create a large network of roaming sensors over a large area.
“In effect, all of the phones operating at any time are part of one large detector that is spread out throughout an entire geographic area,” Labov explained.
The deployed detectors would all report back to a central database where patterns of radiation changes could be detected and tracked.
With continuous monitoring and data collection, the system can look for patterns of radioactivity in a given area and detect changes that indicate a hazardous condition, he added.
A system of this sort wouldn't require human carriers to be looking at radiation detectors continuously. A microprocessor could automatically continuously read the radiation sensor in each device and it could automatically call in any reading it encountered that was above some threshold level.
Any type of sensor that can be paired with a microprocessor to look for anomalous sensor readings could be deployed in a similar fashion. A variety of chemical and biological agent detectors will surely be developed that can operate for long periods of time without the need to resupply reagents. Then mobile networks of automated biological and chemical terrorism detectors will be deployed along with the nuclear materials detectors.
But there are ways that chemical detectors could be used for more conventional law enforcement purposes. Consider how dogs can detect the smell of a person and track that smell. DNA samples are now widely collected from criminals. If some aspects of a person's scent are stable thru a period of years then it is not hard to imagine that some day scrapings of skin and sweat will be taken from each felon to be analysed to build a chemical signature of that person's scent. Then when chemical sensing technology becomes sufficiently advanced sensors that can detect specific chemical scent signatures could be deployed to continuously analyse the air in public areas. Wanted criminals could be identified by their scent as they pass a public detector. One could easily imagine banks allowing the deployment of such detectors so that the chemical signatures of bank robbers could be recorded along with video recordings.
Smart Dust to allow cheap and widespread distribution of sensor systems.
"Smart dust" devices are tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in silicon and fabrication techniques, these "motes" could eventually be the size of a grain of sand, though each would contain sensors, computing circuits, bidirectional wireless communications technology and a power supply. Motes would gather scads of data, run computations and communicate that information using two-way band radio between motes at distances approaching 1,000 feet.
That dust you got on your shoes in the company parking lot may be spy sensors planted by a competitor who wants to listen in on company meetings. Or perhaps the dust in your pet's hair was put there by your ex-spouse who wants to find out who you are spending your time with.
When sensor systems become cheap and as small as dust particles it is going to become much easier to lay out sensor networks for a large variety of reasons. Of course this will inevitably lead to microscopic sensors that are designed to detect other types of sensors.
Here's another sign of how many ways location identification technology will be used to track groups of people.
Finnish mobile operator Radiolinja Oy has developed technology to monitor traffic by tracking cell phones in cars without identifying the owner. The technology, developed as an alternative to video-monitoring systems, could also be used to monitor the flow of crowds at public events or the number of cars passing roadside billboards as a tool for advertisers.
If the resolution of the locations is sufficiently fine then this technology could also be used by stores to track the flow of people in a store and get an idea what patterns of movement people use. Since a person could be tracked to the check-out stand it may even become possible to associate movement patterns with purchase patterns.
I predict that parents who are afraid of child abduction will have location detectors embedded in their children. Then the parents will move on from using it for emergencies to using it for routine tracking of their children. The same will be done with pets that have a tendency to run away.
MIT's Technology Review has an excellent article entitled Surveillance Nation.
It’s not all about Big Brother or Big Business, either. Widespread electronic scrutiny is usually denounced as a creation of political tyranny or corporate greed. But the rise of omnipresent surveillance will be driven as much by ordinary citizens’ understandable—even laudatory—desires for security, control, and comfort as by the imperatives of business and government. “Nanny cams,” global-positioning locators, police and home security networks, traffic jam monitors, medical-device radio-frequency tags, small-business webcams: the list of monitoring devices employed by and for average Americans is already long, and it will only become longer. Extensive surveillance, in short, is coming into being because people like and want it.
As surveillance systems become steadily cheaper and easier to use their use will skyrocket. Personal usage of surveillance systems will be just as extensive as government and corporate usage. For instance, I predict that within 10 or at most 20 years most houses will have cameras installed in them tied to the internet and sending out encrypted feeds so that their owners can look at what is happening in their houses when they are not home. Parents will embed surveillance systems into the cars they let their teenage kids drive so that the parents can know where the kids go, who rides with them, and whether the kids drive dangerously.
Imagine nanotech that allows instant testing for drug use. Governments and employers will not be the only users of cheap and miniaturized drug testing technology. It is easy to imagine a form of nanotech drug detector that can be unknowingly swallowed and absorbed into the body. Then when Mom gets suspicious that Junior is smoking pot she can give him a slice of cake that contains nanosensors and then Dad can secretly install a sensor on the front door that will interrogate the nanosensors every time Junior comes home.
Or how about nanosensors installed in the upholstery of a car that can detect marijuana or cigarette smoke or even beer fumes? Dad could check Junior's car by passing a small hand-held detector near it to interrogate its embedded sensors.
One way sensor usage may evolve at a personal level will be the sharing of sensor feeds among friends to allow people to organize into groups to help each other. For instance, imagine a group of people who are close friends letting each other watch the video feeds of their homes when they are not there. This could be done for security reasons or to track what their children are up to. If one person in the group has a job that gives her a lot of time to look at a video display then she could spend time watching what is going on in her own home and the homes of a few of her friends.
One can imagine neighborhood cooperation for detecting the movement of children. Every child could have embedded location detectors and many houses could have electronics for interrogating such detectors. Then a sharing of detector feeds could allow parents to detect whether their kids are still in the neighborhood. Automated software could even inform parents when their children are moving out of the area where they are allowed to roam.
Sharing of data feeds by government agencies, companies, and individuals will all lead to much greater scrutiny of the actions of individuals There are many causes of the greater sharing of data streams (e.g. detect fraud, detect terrorists, detect robbery attempts, detect bad credit risks, look for changing patterns of product demand). At the same time, the costs of collecting, sharing, and processing of data will all decline as the ease of sharing steadily increases.
Global Position System (GPS) devices are being used to track the movement of spouses and workers.
Spouses who believe mates are having affairs, employers who suspect workers are misusing company vehicles or parents who wonder if their children are where they are supposed to be are among those using devices tied to the global positioning system of satellites.
The ability to track children with GPS will likely eventually lead to the embedding of GPS devices inside the bodies of children. Then parents who are worried about kidnapping will be able to rest assured that they will be able to find their children if they are kidnapped. Of course, a very sophistication kidnapper will be able to shield or remove locator devices. But the devices would at least be an obstacle for most kidnappers and would allow quicker location of children who are murdered by perverted killers.
GPS is used to track stolen cars and find accident locations.
Working with police, Avis turns on the system only if the car appears to have been stolen, Deutsch says. The system will also automatically activate if the air bag inflates, indicating a possible accident. In that event, Deutsch says, you may hear a voice through your radio ask, "Are you OK? Are you all right?" The system indicates your location for emergency aid.
GPS is used as a substitute for criminal incarceration.
GPS monitoring gives local governments a cheap alternative to incarceration and allows offenders an opportunity to continue working and living at home. Law enforcement agencies can create "electronic fences" around areas that are off-limits to offenders. The GPS system can be programmed to alert police if a pedophile enters a schoolyard, for example.
Kenosha Wisconsin police charged Paul Anthony Siedler with use of GPS to stalk his ex-girlfriend.
Kenosha police allege that Seidler placed a Global Positioning System tracking device under the hood of the woman's car and began monitoring her movements. Charged with stalking, burglary, disorderly conduct, and reckless endangerment,
GPS is being studied for car insurance billing by the mile driven.
With new technology on the scene to accurately record mileage, the time is also right. Traditionally, some insurers have worried over how the would record mileage accurately with such a system. Progressive Insurance, the fourth-largest US car insurer, has pioneered this area. For two years, it has been testing "smart" insurance in Texas, installing miniprocessors that use GPS technology to record distance and time driven. Pleased with consumer response, Progressive is considering a national rollout of the policy.
One can easily imagine how this technology could be enhanced to bill at different rates in different driving conditions. For instance, driving in rainy or snowy conditions or at night or in densely populated areas which have higher accident rates could be more expensive.
The Oregon Road User Fee Task Force has proposed billiing in-state cars for mileage driven in-state to compensate for new car technologies that reduce the amount of gasoline fuel needed and hence the amount of gasoline tax collected.
“We also have to have a way to track mileage only within the state,” Whitty said. This rules out basing the fee on odometer readings, which would include out-of-state driving.
“Technology has improved to the degree that this can be done, with an electronic device,” he said. The device, in a car, would be linked to the Global Positioning Satellite or GPS system, which allows pinpoint navigation by bouncing signals off satellites.
A British government advisory panel has proposed nationwide use of GPS to implement road use taxes.
All cars will be fitted with a 'big brother' satellite tracking meter to charge drivers up to 45p a mile for every journey taken under radical plans to slash congestion on British roads.
The scheme, proposed by the Government's independent transport advisers, would see drivers handed monthly bills charging them for every single journey.
GPS is even coming to cell phones so that callers to emergency numbers can be located.
Many rental fleets and trucking companies already use satellite positioning systems to track cars and cargo. Companies promote similar products for keeping tabs on kids, Alzheimer's patients or cheating spouses. Washington is also promoting locator technology. By October, the Federal Communications Commission wants cell phones equipped with locator technology to help emergency responders find callers.
A large assortment of other technologies are being used to help catch cheating spouses.
Whatever happened to the lipstick stain on the collar? In the old days of freewheeling adultery, a hang-up call in the middle of the night was the worst a philandering rogue had to worry about. Now there are itemized cell-phone bills, call-display screens, automobile tracking devices, Internet history folders, stealth-mode keystroke-recording software programs and spray-on sperm detectors all waiting to trip you up.
The spy business is a $3 billion a year industry in the United States, and spouses are leading the way, employing a range of techniques to catch their mates at adultery.
Lots of other technologies can be used to track and monitor people and to detect types of behavior. Semen detection tests available for order on the internet are used to detect spousal sexual activity with other people.
The Original CheckMate Semen Detection Test Kit will quickly and easily monitor your spouse's sexual activity outside of the relationship by detecting invisible traces of dried semen that is left in their undergarments after sex...
In spite of the rise of DNA testing, GPS tracking, and phone conversation recording hidden cameras are still the most popular seller.
“Spy cameras are definitely our No. 1 seller,” says Ursula Lebana, owner of Spy Tech in Toronto, Canada. “The cameras have become so small that they will fit into anything. People bring us their own items—lamps, music boxes, humidifiers—and we install cameras in them. You could be on camera anywhere. If you’re not doing anything wrong, then it should make you feel safer.”
The total surveillance society of the future will not be one where only the government is watching. Even business surveillance of employees and customers is only a part of the larger phenomenon. Individuals will increasingly track the movements, conversations, electronic messages, and activities of others in a growing number of ways. Spouses will surveil each other. Parents will track the movements and activities of their children. Portable automated chemical assay devices will make it easy for parents or others to rapidly and easily check for drug use.
Imagine the possibilities that will be opened up by steadily higher density recording media. Gifts of jewelry which have hidden audio storage capacity will provide a way to record the conversations of someone for romantic or business reasons. Nanotech electronics will likely eventually allow the recording media to be the jewelry itself. Detection of an embedded piece of nanoelectronics may turn out to be extremely difficult to do.
Automated processing of video, sound, scent, motion, location, other types of sensors, and electronic information will make it easier to sort thru the growing number of sensor feeds that individuals, companies, and governments will monitor. David Brin argues our only choice is between limiting powerful surveillance technologies solely to government use or allowing everyone to use them. Privacy is inevitably going to decrease. There is no feasible way to stop a large decrease in privacy.
Some types of technology are so easy to move around on a black market that restrictions on their use by the general public will have the effect of allowing only criminals and governments to use them. Some types of information will be so widely desired that even otherwise non-criminal citizens will opt to use them even if their use is illegal. Miniaturization of electronic monitoring devices and the ability to embed them in common items will make it very hard to detect or control their use.
One's privacy is not just a matter of where one goes or what one says or does. It includes financial data as well as medical details about oneself such as health records and even details of one's very structure. One crucial set of details is one's personal DNA code. As I've argued previously, in the long run DNA sequence privacy is going to be impossible to protect. It will simply be too easy to get a sample of someone's DNA sequence. Note how the semen detector service is a viable business because samples of biological material of even a spouse's lover is easy to get without the spouse or the lover knowing that one has done so. Once DNA sequencing machines become sufficiently fast, sensitive, and cheap that biological material will surely be usable to find out the DNA sequence of a spouse's lover. One way that information will be usable would be to predict the approximate physical appearance of the lover so that a private detective could more easily spot the lover as part of an investigation into a spouse's cheating. Once the results of DNA sequencing can be used to predict approximate physical appearance of a person then the ability to do DNA sequencing on saliva, blood, skin, semen, and other biological material will also be used by police, private investigators, and intelligence agencies to develop profiles of suspects.
The widespread embrace of the use of surveillance technology by the general public demonstrates a popular willingness to watch and track other people. This trend looks set to continue to grow with no end in sight.
A computerized image processing system is being used in public places in the UK to identify criiminal activity and other problems in crowds:
EU policy to encourage more people off the roads and onto public transport, as well as addressing the needs of public service operators, has led to a series of collaborative research projects between universities and industry for several years. Leading UK universities in this area include Kingston University, Reading University, University College London (UCL), and Kings College London (KCL), among others. The research groups in the Digital Imaging Research Centre (DIRC) at Kingston University, led by Dr. Sergio A Velastin, formerly of KCL, and the Centre for Transport Studies (CTS) at UCL, where the key researcher is Dr Maria-Alicia Vicencio-Silva, are working collaboratively in a number of related areas directly aimed at alleviating some of the public transport issues highlighted.
Under EPSRC and EU-funded projects, the teams have developed a distributed pedestrian monitoring system, based on image processing techniques, that brings suspicious images to the prompt attention of staff. The system consists of a set of networked modular components using open standards for communications and annotation along with a number of dedicated supervisory PCs, called MIPSA (Modular Integrated Pedestrian Surveillance Architecture). It can be connected to an existing conventional CCTV system (16 cameras/MIPSA), collecting and storing the video streams, routing them to image processing devices, and feeding processed data back to the CCTV control centre using a unified interface.
In order to ensure the system is reliable and robust, thus reducing the possibility of false alarms, simple image processing techniques have been used. Video data is first processed to separate motion from the fixed background. One of the key enabling elements of this project is the DSP video processing based hardware, designed and manufactured by UK firm, Sollatek Ltd (www.sollatek.com), which is used to provide the fast calculation of motion data from the video streams. While UCL researchers have identified the features that need to be extracted, the Kingston University team has concentrated on the image acquisition and processing requirements.
In operation, the system takes conventional video inputs, combined with site-specific information from the CCTV operators, to detect unusual motion patterns which can arise due to situations such as congestion, trespassing and threatening behaviour. Excessive permanence of an object that is known not to be part of the background, for example, could indicate loitering, an injured person or even a suspect package. Similarly, large areas of motionless objects could indicate congestion, while an object moving against the flow could indicate an incident requiring further attention, such as gate jumping. In this application, extracting the basic image properties is sufficient; the system does not need to refine the nature of the incident further, but simply alert the relevant CCTV monitor operator.
It can detect patterns of movement characteristic of pickpockets:
He fends off concerns by explaining that it's very difficult to recognize people in these images, and also that no one is going to be targeted for features like unusual clothes or an identifiable walk. Instead, he says, more universal situations will be programmed into the system, such as people walking against a crowd, which can be a sign of pickpocketing. "They're only going to be stopped and investigated if there is sufficient reason to do so," he says.
This technology of course will become increasingly sophisticated. Science fiction author David has argued that pervasive monitoring by computer cameras and other sensor systems is coming in our future. See his book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?. You can also find out more about his book at this page on his web site.