Urban surveillance networks

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/​i​xo/ (for bat­tle­field appli­ca­tions); http://​www​.sarnoff​.com/​p​r​o​d​u​c​t​s​_​s​e​r​v​i​c​e​s​/​g​o​v​e​r​n​m​e​n​t​_​s​o​l​u​t​i​o​n​s​/​h​o​m​e​l​a​n​d​_​s​e​c​u​r​i​t​y​/​i​n​d​e​x​.​asp (crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture pro­tec­tion); http://​www​.tfl​.gov​.uk/​t​f​l​/​c​c​l​o​n​d​o​n​/​c​c​_​f​a​c​t​_​s​h​e​e​t​_​e​n​f​o​r​c​e​m​e​n​t​.​s​h​tml
Posted by Jim Lewis

July 25th, 2005 | You can run... | 769 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/07/25/urban-surveillance-networks/Urban+surveillance+networks2005-07-25+14%3A19%3A10jim_lewis You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.