Posted on 12/21/2007 6:03:26 PM PST by BGHater
Edited on 12/21/2007 6:31:46 PM PST by Lead Moderator. [history]
In the era of computer-controlled surveillance, your every move could be captured by cameras, whether you're shopping in the grocery store or driving on the freeway. Proponents say it will keep us safe, but at what cost?
The ferry arrived, the gangway went down and 7-year-old Emma Powell rushed toward the Statue of Liberty. She climbed onto the grass around the star-shaped foundation. She put on a green foam crown with seven protruding rays. Turning so that her body was oriented just like Lady Liberty's, Emma extended her right arm skyward with an imaginary torch. I snapped a picture. Then I took my niece's hand, and we went off to buy some pretzels.
Other people were taking pictures, too, and not just the other touristsLiberty Island, name notwithstanding, is one of the most heavily surveilled places in America. Dozens of cameras record hundreds of hours of video daily, a volume that strains the monitoring capability of guards. The National Park Service has enlisted extra help, and as Emma and I strolled around, we weren't just being watched by people. We were being watched by machines.
Liberty Island's video cameras all feed into a computer system. The park doesn't disclose details, but fully equipped, the system is capable of running software that analyzes the imagery and automatically alerts human overseers to any suspicious events. The software can spot when somebody abandons a bag or backpack. It has the ability to discern between ferryboats, which are allowed to approach the island, and private vessels, which are not. And it can count bodies, detecting if somebody is trying to stay on the island after closing, or assessing when people are grouped too tightly together, which might indicate a fight or gang activity. "A camera with artificial intelligence can be there 24/7, doesn't need a bathroom break, doesn't need a lunch break and doesn't go on vacation," says Ian Ehrenberg, former vice president of Nice Systems, the program's developer.
Most Americans would probably welcome such technology at what clearly is a marquee terrorist target. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in July 2007 found that 71 percent of Americans favor increased video surveillance. What people may not realize, however, is that advanced monitoring systems such as the one at the Statue of Liberty are proliferating around the country. High-profile national security efforts make the newswiretapping phone conversations, Internet monitoringbut state-of-the-art surveillance is increasingly being used in more every-day settings. By local police and businesses. In banks, schools and stores. There are an estimated 30 million surveillance cameras now deployed in the United States shooting 4 billion hours of footage a week. Americans are being watched, all of us, almost everywhere.
We have arrived at a unique moment in the history of surveillance. The price of both megapixels and gigabytes has plummeted, making it possible to collect a previously unimaginable quantity and quality of data. Advances in processing power and software, meanwhile, are beginning to allow computers to surmount the greatest limitation of traditional surveillancethe ability of eyeballs to effectively observe the activity on dozens of video screens simultaneously. Computers can't do all the work by themselves, but they can expand the capabilities of humans exponentially.
Security expert Bruce Schneier says that it is naive to think that we can stop these technological advances, especially as they become more affordable and are hard-wired into everyday businesses. (I know of a local pizzeria that warns customers with a posted sign: "Stop stealing the spice shakers! We know who you are, we have 24-hour surveillance!") But it is also reckless to let the advances proceed without a discussion of safeguards against privacy abuses. "Society is fundamentally changing and we aren't having a conversation about it," Schneier says. "We are entering the era of wholesale surveillance."
Earlier this year, on a hot summer afternoon, I left my Brooklyn apartment to do some shoplifting.
I cruised the aisles of the neighborhood grocery store, a Pathmark, tossing items into my cart like a normal shopper wouldFrosted Mini-Wheats, Pledge Wipes, a bag of carrots. Then I put them on the belt at checkout. My secret was on the lower level of the cart: a 12-pack of beer, concealed and undetectable. Or so I thought. Midway through checkout the cashier addressed me, no malice in her voice, but no doubt either. "Do you want to ring up that beer?"
My heist had been condoned by Pedro Ramos, Pathmark's vice president of loss prevention, though he didn't know precisely when or where I was going to attempt it. The beer was identified by an object-recognition scanner at ankle levela LaneHawk, manufactured by Evolution Roboticswhich prompted the cashier's question. Overhead, a camera recorded the incident and an alert was triggered in Ramos's office miles away on Staten Island. He immediately pulled up digital video and later relayed what he saw. "You concealed a 12-pack of Coronas on the bottom of the cart by strategically placing newspaper circulars so as to obstruct the view of the cashier."
Busted.
Pathmark uses StoreVision, a powerful video analytic and data-mining system. There are as many as 120 cameras in some stores, and employees with high-level security clearances can log on via the Web and see what any one of them is recording in real time. An executive on vacation in Brussels could spy on the frozen-food aisle in Brooklyn.
In 2006 theft and fraud cost American stores $41.6 billion, an all-time high. Employee theft accounted for nearly half of the total (shoplifting was only a third), so much of the surveillance aims to catch in-house crooks. If the cashier had given me the beer for freeemployees often work with an outside accomplicethe system would know by automatically comparing what the video recorded with what the register logged. The technologies employed by Pathmark don't stop crime but they make a dent; weekly losses are reduced by an average of 15 percent.
Pathmark archives every transaction of every customer, and the grocery chain is hardly alone. Amazon knows what you read; Netflix, your taste in movies. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo retain your queries for months, and can identify searches by IP addresssometimes by individual computer. Many corporations log your every transaction with a stated goal of reducing fraud and improving marketing efforts. Until fairly recently it was impractical to retain all this data. But now the low cost of digital storageyou can get a terabyte hard drive for less than $350makes nearly limitless archiving possible.
So what's the problem? "The concern is that information collected for one purpose is used for something entirely different down the road," says Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
This may sound like a privacy wonk's paranoia. But examples abound. Take E-ZPass. Drivers signed up for the system to speed up toll collection. But 11 states now supply E-ZPass recordswhen and where a toll was paid, and by whomin response to court orders in criminal cases. Seven of those states provide information in civil cases such as divorce, proving, for instance, that a husband who claimed he was at a meeting in Pennsylvania was actually heading to his lover's house in New Jersey. (New York divorce lawyer Jacalyn Barnett has called E-ZPass the "easy way to show you took the offramp to adultery.")
On a case-by-case basis, the collection of surveillance footage and customer data is usually justifiable and benign. But the totality of information being amassed combined with the relatively fluid flow of that data can be troubling. Corporations often share what they know about customers with government agencies and vice versa. AT&T, for example, is being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, for allowing the National Security Agency almost unlimited access to monitor customers' e-mails, phone calls and Internet browsing activity.
"We are heading toward a total surveillance society in which your every move, your every transaction, is duly registered and recorded by some computer," says Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the late 18th century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up a new type of prison: the panopticon. It would be built so that guards could see all of the prisoners at all times without their knowing they were being watched, creating "the sentiment of an invisible omniscience," Bentham wrote. America is starting to resemble a giant panopticon, according to surveillance critics like Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. "Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet," he recently wrote in a Washington Times op-ed.
One of the most popular new technologies in law enforcement is the license-plate reader, or LPR. The leading manufacturer is Remington-Elsag, based in Madison, N.C. Its Mobile Plate Hunter 900 consists of cameras mounted on the outside of a squad car and connected to a computer database in the vehicle. The plate hunter employs optical-character-recognition technology originally developed for high-speed mail sorting. LPRs automate the process of "running a plate" to check if a vehicle is stolen or if the driver has any outstanding warrants. The sensors work whether the police car is parked or doing 75 mph. An officer working the old-fashioned way might check a couple dozen plates a shift. The LPR can check 10,000.
New York's Long Beach Police Department is one of more than 200 agencies around the country that use LPRs, and I rode in a squad car with Sgt. Bill Dodge to see the technology at work. A computer screen mounted in front of the glovebox flashed black-and-white images of every photographed plate; low alarms, like the sounds of your character dying in an '80s video game, droned for the problem cars. Over the course of a couple of hours we didn't net any car thieves or kidnappers, but Dodge's LPR identified dozens of cars with suspended or revoked registrations. He said that the system doesn't violate anyone's privacy"there's no magic technology that lets it see inside a garage"and praised its fairness. "It doesn't matter if you're black, white, old, young, a man or a woman, the system cannot discriminate. It looks at everyone and everything."
In July, New York City officials unveiled the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, modeled after London's "Ring of Steel," which will include license-plate readers, automated roadblocks and 3000 new surveillance camerasadding to the 250 already in place. Chicago, meanwhile, which has 560 anti-crime cameras deployed on city streets, revealed plans in September to add a sophisticated IBM video analytic system that would automatically detect abandoned bags, suspicious behaviors (such as a vehicle repeatedly circling the Sears Tower) and vehicles sought by the police. Expanded surveillance is perhaps to be expected for these high-profile cities, but they're hardly alone. Richmond, Calif.; Spokane, Wash.; and Greenville, N.C., are among the cities that have recently announced plans to add electronic spying eyes. According to iSuppli, a market research firm, the global surveillance-camera business is expected to grow from $4.9 billion in 2006 to $9 billion in 2011.
The ability of cameras to deter criminals is unproven, but their value in helping to solve crimes is not. Recall how videos led to several arrests in the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings. The problem with surveillance video is that there's simply too much of it. "It's impossible for mere mortals with eyeballs and brains to process all the information we're gathering," says Stephen Russell, the chief executive of 3VR, a company that makes video analytic software.
An investigator looking for a particular piece of video is like a researcher working in a library with a jumbled card catalogor in books with no tables of contents. The solution of 3VR and other similar companies is software that automatically analyzes and tags video contents, from the colors and locations of cars to the characteristics of individual faces that pass before the lens. The goal is to allow rapid digital search; instead of functioning like a shoddy library, 3VR hopes to be "the Google of surveillance video," Russell says. "It took 1000 [British agents] six weeks to review all the video after July 7. Had 3VRs been in place, it might have taken a dozen or so agents a weekend," he claims.
I recently spent a night at Chicago's Talbott Hotel, a luxurious small retreat where the staff addresses you by name and you have to clear a dozen pillows from the cushy king-size bed before lying down. The Talbott is surveilled by 70 cameras, which cover every public area of the hotel and feed into a 3VR system.
Troy Strand, general manager of the hotel, showed me a computer screen divided into 16 panes with different camera views. He looked up my check-in time and seconds later retrieved video of my arrival the previous day. There I was, towing my carry-on toward room 1504.
Strand found a few other shots showing me, then instructed the software to begin facial analysis. The system assessed the balance of light and dark areas of skin tone and hair and gauged the distance between my eyes, nose and mouth. Strand instructed the system to search for all recorded videos showing my face, and the computer retrieved several dozen faces, none of which was mine. There was a woman and a black man. But Strand went through a few pages of results, and I started to show up. When he clicked on any image, an associated video of me playedcrossing the lobby to go to breakfast, chatting with the front-desk clerk.
So-called "facial profiling" has been surveillance's next big thing for nearly a decade, and it is only now showing tentative signs of feasibility. It's easy to see why people are seduced by the promise of this technology. Twelve bank companies employ 3VR systems at numerous locations, which build a facial template for every single person that enters any branch. If somebody cashes a check that is later determined to be stolen, the person's face can be flagged in the system, and the next time the con artist comes in, the system is supposed to alert the tellers.
For Strand, the security system's fancier features are just a bonus. The cameras are in plain sight, so he believes that would-be criminals and misbehaving employees are deterred. "You can't have security people on every floor monitoring every angle of the building," he says.
There's a man in Salt Lake City who knows what I did last summer. Specifically, he knows what I did on Aug. 24, 2007. He knows that I checked my EarthLink e-mail at 1:25 pm, and then blew a half an hour on ESPN's Web site. He also knows that my wife, Anne, wanted new shoes, from Hush Puppies or DSW, and that she synced her electronic planner"she has quite a busy schedule," the man notedand downloaded some podcasts. We both printed out passes for free weeklong trials at 24 Hour Fitness, but instead of working out, apparently spent the evening watching a pay-per-view movie. It was Bridge to Terabithia or Zodiac, he thinks.
The man's name is Joe Wilkinson, and he works for Raytheon Oakley Systems. The company specializes in "insider risk management," which means dealing with the problem of employees who, whether through innocent accident or nefarious plot, do things they really shouldn't be doing at work. Oakley's software, developed for the U.S. government and now used by ten Fortune 100 companies, monitors computer use remotely and invisibly. Wilkinson had agreed to run a surveillance trial with me as the subject, and after accessing my computer via the Web, he installed an "agent" that regularly reported my activities back to him.
The modern desktop machine is a multimedia distraction monster: friend, lover, shopping mall, stereo, television, movie theater and adult video store are mere mouse clicks away. Raytheon Oakley's software caught me wasting valuable work time checking personal e-mails and reading digital camera reviews online. Companies are also concerned about hostile work environments caused by employees openly surfing porn in the officeconse-quently, my 10:14 am visit to a risqué site was duly noted. Employees also leak trade secrets. (Consider the case of DuPont chemist Gary Min, who, after accepting a job with a competitor in 2005, raided DuPont's electronic library for $400 million worth of technical documents. He was caught by the FBI last year.) If I had downloaded any large engineering drawings onto a removable hard drive, Oakley's software would have alerted Wilkinson. And employees bad-mouth the boss. I wrote an e-mail to Anne that mentioned my editor at Popular Mechanics, Glenn Derene. Wilkinson rigged the software to flag anything with Derene's name, and alarm bells rang. Sorry, Glenn.
Surveillance of this sort is common. A 2005 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute found that 36 percent of companies monitor workers on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis; 55 percent review e-mail messages, and 76 percent monitor Web sites visited. "Total Behavioral Visibility" is Raytheon Oakley's motto. The vice president of marketing, Tom Bennett, knows that some people fear workplace monitoring. But the technology has many positive aspects. "We are not Big Brother," he insists.
Employees are sometimes lazy or dishonest, but often they're simply careless. A parent who has to leave the office at midday to care for a sick child might copy sensitive company information onto a USB drive so that he can work at home. An account manager might carelessly send customer credit card numbers over an unsecured wireless network where they can be stolen. Bennett says that his company's software helps companies understand and improve how workers use their computers. The Oakley monitoring application works like a TiVo, allowing an instant video replay: where you pointed the mouse, when you clicked, what you wrote. This can catch the guilty but also exonerate the innocent, because the replay puts your actions in context.
The debate over surveillance pits the tangible benefits of saving lives and dollars against the abstract ones of preserving privacy and freedom. To many people, the promise of increased security is worth the exchange. History shows that new technologies, once developed, are seldom abandoned, and the computer vision systems being adopted today are transforming America from a society that spies upon a small number of suspicious individuals to one that monitors everybody. The question arises: Do people exercise their perfectly legal freedoms as freely when they know they're being watched? As the ACLU's Stanley argues, "You need space in your life to live beyond the gaze of society."
Surveillance has become pervasive. It is also more enduring. As companies develop powerful archiving and search tools, your life will be accessible for years to come in rich multimedia records. The information about you may be collected for reasonable purposesbut as its life span increases, so too does the chance that it may fall into unscrupulous hands.
Several months after I stayed at the Talbott Hotel, Derene, my editor, called Troy Strand to ask if he still had the security camera images of me at the hotel. He did. My niece Emma's Statue of Liberty shots are probably stored on a computer, as are the records of all my Pathmark purchases. Ramos could query my shopping trip of, say, Jan. 13, 2005, and replay video keyed precisely to any part of the register tapefrom the fifth item scanned, pork chops, to the tenth, broccoli. That's innocuous and even humorous on the surface, but the more I thought about the store's power, the more it disturbed me.
"I would never do that," Ramos assured me. "But I could."
For some reason, I really do care. It's just another loss of freedom, drip, drip, drip.
When the cameras are in a casino, you can opt not to go there. When they're in every nook and cranny of our lives, I find that problematic.
btt
I undertand it bothers people and I would take their side in a fight against them. They just don't bother me at all.
BTW it's nice to see you still fighting away.
Still thees a WIDE difference between a baby monitor and DARPA data mining project
“If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” - gag me alert!
Good night! We now have jobs for all of our public school underachievers. With all of those cameras, there will be jobs jobs jobs for lens polishers. For those who spent their education days playing video games instead of studying, there will be jobs for them: watching those monitors if they can be kept from playing video games instead. Oh, I forgot. There will be cameras watching the monitor watchers too.
My sarcasm has one important point: no one has a clue about the cost-to-benefit of all this watching. All of those cameras and all of the support electronics is quite a cost. Most of this stuff is out in the weather and has lower durability. Small camera systems can be thousands of dollars to install but that is only the first installment on years of maintenance. Maintenance costs can be staggering. Once you have those pictures, who will utilize that information? All of this cost needs to be weighed for benefit. And, it these costs are being supported by government, we the taxpayer are paying for it.
We can hide in burkas! The new fashion rage will be unisex burkas. There will be burkas for our dogs.
I will agree to the use of the technology of, say, ubiquitous cameras monitoring private citizens while going about their business when, and only when, government hires a person with a loaded Glock pointed at the head of anyone and everyone (presumably, one person per) monitoring the cameras, said watcher being statutorily immune from ANY prosecution for discharging the weapon.
By George, I think you're right - got any suggestions?
so it's failsafe? Even tho human eyes are on it - and interpreting - you could never be misidentified?
I wouldn't trust in that - indeed, if the 'machine' says a thing is so, that will be that - unless, hopefully you can 'find' you on another machine at the same time somewhere else.
I predict some pretty bad unintended happenstances
Pommes Bleues...
Can’t speak for the others, but .30-06 works REAL good.
I choose to be where the cameras aren't nor will be - for about 98% of my time...where I can still live a bit freer. There still are such places.
It's not that I'm afraid of being watched - it's just that I don't feel the need to be - I'm not a herd animal.
It's MY business where I go and what I do. I will not go meekly into that world where one group of people watch others - and discern who's doing what...no matter their rationale.
The devils can also quote scripture...
How is that? We're not the ones who are watching the cameras.
Surveillance is a two-edged sword. The bad part is being filmed everywhere when you go out in public (except maybe the rest room). The good part is that you can prove where you were if charged with something you didn't do because you are a dead ringer for someone else who committed a crime.
There's no way out of leaving electronic fingerprints all over town. When I'm out and about shopping, I make sure I save all my receipts, even if I pay cash because then I can use it to prove my whereabouts if that ever came into question, as it has the date, time, salesclerk ID etc. I know the system is not my friend, that I am already assumed to be guilty, not innocent.
Maybe people are more free in a third world country than here. The government doesn't have the means or technology to track every move.
that would be a stupid and puerile reaction.
I NEVER said for anybody to do anything. Speak for yourself.
Right. LOL now go try and buy a fully automatic weapon. One set of rules for me another set for thee is our governments creed. Usually the only persons supporting such intrusions are those with vested interest either working for the companies which make them, a local law enforcement chief who just can't live without them, or some fool more than willing to sacrifice rights and freedoms for a false sense of security and insist everyone do likewise because our parties person in elected office says it's good for the nation.
Fear the government which fears your guns. Fear the government which fears your freedoms and right to privacy. Fear the government who thinks it has the right to spy or intrude on your right to privacy in almost every venue of your life. Fear thenm because soon they will be your master.
Hey Joe you were driving reckless yesterday your left front tire touched the yellow line on the interstate. We also noticed you were smoking inside your car as well. Please mail in a mandatory $250 fine. Hey Joe you screwed in an illegal 100 watt incandescent bulb in your living room didn't you. Our camera saw you. Please mail in your fine or pay a $125 fee to contest this in court.
We also heard though our street mounted audio monitors you have a sexual encounter with your wife last night. Nothing wrong wink wink we just wanta say atta boy way to go although the infared pictures aren't as good as our other cameras. You do practice mandated birth control right? Our records show your recent purchase of such at the pharmacy. BTW you are 5 days late on your health insurance payment. We noticed by your internet logs you hadn't paid. Oh BTW Joe you are over your limit this month in allowable time units for allowed religous worship time. We are certain you will correct this matter. We also noticed you did not spend equal time in a mosque or satanic service as required under United Nations diversity statutes. You do realize this could result in revocation of your religous privlidges don't you? We expect to log your appearance there for daily prayers.
Remember things run so much better when all good citizens cooperate with us.
I’ve “heard” of it. Amazing!
http://www.holosonics.com/
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