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These are ordinary people who enlist to screen pictures over the Internet. They sign up online and can work whenever they like, for five hours or five minutes. Sitting at home or anywhere else with Web access, they log on to HomeGuard's site and look at pictures, saying only whether they see a person or vehicle in the pictures that appear. Crucially, these spotters have no idea what they're seeing pictures of. One image might show a length of chain-link fence, the next a door, the next a catwalk. All they do is say whether they see a person or vehicle and then click. Next picture.
They're paid for every 100 pictures they evaluate. They can work at their own speed, but if a spotter doesn't respond to a picture after 20 seconds (perhaps she has gone to get a sandwich), the system simply e-mails that picture to another spotter. The system just needs three replies -- it doesn't care from whom, or from where. "There is no 'local' here," Walker says. Americans at the airport in Bangkok could log in as spotters while waiting for their flight to Taipei.
What if a spotter isn't paying attention? Interspersed with real pictures are test photos, sprinkled liberally into the mix to check the checkers. People who are not paying attention (or who are trying to mislead the system) can quickly be sequestered and given training or bounced off.
Suppose one or more spotters see a person or vehicle in a no-go zone? The data center immediately sends the same picture, plus photos from nearby cameras, to a dozen or more other spotters. If those spotters confirm the presence of a person or car, it's considered definite. Then professionals take over.
Specifically, an alarm goes off at a security center. There, the photos in question come up on a screen in front of trained personnel who, unlike the amateurs, know where the site is and who is allowed to be there. Broadcasting over the Internet, and using microphones and speakers installed in the cameras, they can challenge the person in the picture on the spot. "Who are you? May I see your identification?" A maintenance man might be asked to wait while his identity is confirmed with local management. If the person runs away, his picture can be e-mailed directly to local authorities. The whole process, from intrusion to intervention, can take place in 30 seconds or less. Or so says Walker.

"By using citizens," he says, "we can cover an enormous amount of real estate without burdening professionals with things they don't need to do." No less important: None of those citizens would need to do anything complicated or risky. "We've modeled this system on the human brain," Walker says. Each spotter is like a neuron, firing a simple binary response. "The neuron doesn't know what the brain is thinking." It doesn't need to know. The intelligence is in the system.

So, if your some Marxists US "citizens" and you want to work with the terrorits, you find out what sites they're interested in, then you sign on the spotters for those sites, and the rest is history; or you sign on as spotters first, and let them know which sites are "covered"

I'd assume that "spotters" would be shown pictures from a random selection of thousands of protected sites, for one thing this would help keep them "fresh" and alert.

Your "quality control" would consist of submitting a small fraction of images to multiple random viewers, this would allow you to quickly identify participants who were incompetent or dishonest - you could also use the same data to evaluate how reliable and effective coverage was at each camera.