DALEY DOES DARPA ONE BETTER

Last year, I took at look at a Darpa pro­posal to keep an entire city under watch. The idea was to net­work together sur­veil­lance cam­eras, and use com­puter algo­rithms to watch out for sus­pi­cious behav­ior.
But it looks like the city of Chicago may beat Darpa to the punch. “A highly advanced sys­tem of video sur­veil­lance that Chicago offi­cials plan to install by 2006 will make peo­ple here some of the most closely observed in the world,” the Times says.
“Cameras are the equiv­a­lent of hun­dreds of sets of eyes,” Mr. Daley said when he unveiled the new project this month. “They’re the next best thing to hav­ing police offi­cers sta­tioned at every poten­tial trou­ble spot.“
Police spe­cial­ists here can already mon­i­tor live footage from about 2,000 sur­veil­lance cam­eras around the city, so the addi­tion of 250 cam­eras under the mayor’s new plan is not a great jump. The way these cam­eras will be used, how­ever, is an extra­or­di­nary tech­no­log­i­cal leap.
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.
The Times notes that Daley & Co. “designed the sys­tem after study­ing the video sur­veil­lance net­work in London.” It’s an odd choice. Because the British cam­era sys­tems’ role in reduc­ing crime has been, at best, incon­clu­sive.

September 21st, 2004 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.