I didnt know, until the terrorist bombing attacks, that most London buses have video cameras installed on them. There are thousands of cameras in London and increasing numbers in New York, Chicago and other major cities. Large swaths of the downtown areas are covered. Coverage goes up significantly if you include private cameras that monitor stores, parking lots and office buildings.
Camera surveillance networks have real benefits crime and traffic fatalities go down, and they generate useful evidence for a post-facto investigation but the limitations are obvious thousands of hours of tape that look like Warhols Empire State (Warhol pointed a camera at the building for 8 hours when a pigeon flew by at hour six, audiences burst into applause since it was the first thing to happen).
the key to better surveillance is to replace human watchers with computers. Once the imagery has been translated into bits, software can look for patterns has that car circled us twice, how did that pile of trash get to the roadside — and can merge imagery with data from other sensors (infrared or sniffers). Some call this intelligent video surveillance. Londons transit system already links fixed cameras to an Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) computer system to identify cars that park or drive in bus lanes.
Using urban surveillance networks to prevent attacks (rather than to prosecute the attackers after the fact) is in the too-hard category for now. Some prototype systems will notify an operator when the network detects a suspicious pattern, but this works best when tracking cars rather than people. A lot more code would need to be written to make urban sensor networks able to warn in advance of a mass transit attack. This is the false negative problem the attacker walks by the camera without triggering an alert. So where we are now is that a city could deploy a sensor network but it couldnt make use of the data generated for early warning and prevention of attacks. Putting lots of cameras on subway lines might have a deterrent effect, but my guess is that this would be minimal for suicide bombers.
The usual concerns are (1) privacy and (2) false positives, where a system would incorrectly flag a face or a behavior pattern as suspicious. Some people worry about the use of this technology for political control, and the place where this seems to be happening is (surprise) China, where the Golden Shield project includes constructing a digital surveillance network in Chinas cities.
Here are a few links: http://dtsn.darpa.mil/ixo/ (for battlefield applications); http://www.sarnoff.com/products_services/government_solutions/homeland_security/index.asp (critical infrastructure protection); http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/cclondon/cc_fact_sheet_enforcement.shtml
Posted by Jim Lewis
Urban surveillance networks
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There is a Swiss company working on that. They have equiped several metros, etc.
Crowd Management seems amazing…
http://www.visiowave.com/index.asp?index=intelligentVideo&S=sc13
Software isn’t good enough yet. Keep it in the labs before we rely on them to catch criminal activity. Until then, we need to take the footage away from officials and give it to the public. Once all surveillance is open to public viewing (and with wireless hotspots everywhere these days) many people (instead of one bored person in a room) will be watching all the public areas at all times. Not only will this provide better surveilance (hundreds of eyes are better than two) but people will be able to use them for everyday life. For instance, parents can check to make sure their kids are at the mall like they said they’d be, or people can see if their party is still waiting at the Square for them, or if the bus is still there by chance, and many, many more possibilities.
One thing remains certain: surveillance should never be left to the government.
Spy cameras have forensic value, but do nothing to lower crime in the long term. When cameras are installed, a brief dip in crime is usual. Once people figure out that no one is actually monitoring anything, then things return to their previous state.
Precisely! Which is why an open camera network is essential – everyone will know many other people are watching. Police will have to go through proper procedures when making arrests (accountability, finally) because they know people are watching and will drop the hammer if they see anything wrong. This is the vision for the transparent society, and a path we must follow, else we’ll make ourselves an Orwellian future.
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