U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.

Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.

Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.

The project's centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.

According to interviews and contracting documents, the software may also provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist activities.

The project is being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping the Pentagon develop new technologies for combatting terrorism and fighting wars in the 21st century.

Its other projects include developing software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide to predict terrorist attacks and creating a computerized diary that would record and analyze everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches.

Scientists and privacy experts — who already have seen the use of face-recognition technologies at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London — are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon.

"Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time," said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.

DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker dismisses those concerns. She said the Combat Zones That See (CTS) technology isn't intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn't be used for "other applications without extensive modifications."

But scientists envision nonmilitary uses. "One can easily foresee pressure to adopt a similar approach to crime-ridden areas of American cities or to the Super Bowl or any site where crowds gather," said Steven Aftergood of the American Federation of Scientists.

"Once DARPA demonstrates that it can be done, a number of companies would likely develop their own version in hope of getting contracts from local police, nuclear plant security, shopping centers, even people looking for deadbeat dads."

James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, believes police will be ready customers for such technologies.

"Police executives are saying, `Shouldn't we just buy new technology if there's a chance it might help us?'" Fyfe said. "That's the post-9-11 mentality."

Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said he sees law enforcement applications for DARPA's urban camera project "in limited scenarios." But citywide surveillance would tax police manpower, Kerlikowske said. "Who's going to validate and corroborate all those alerts?"

According to contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press, DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1. In the first phase, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.

In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed in 12 hours to support "military operations in an urban terrain."

The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify "what is normal (behavior), what is not" and discover "links between places, subjects and times of activity," the contracting documents state.

The program "aspires to build the world's first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic ... analysis of live video" to study vehicle movement "and significant events across an extremely large area," the documents state.

Both configurations will be tested at Ft. Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan (news - web sites), or Baghdad, Iraq (news - web sites), might be chosen but says the foreign country's permission will be obtained.

DARPA outlined project goals March 27 for more than 100 executives of potential contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.

DARPA told the contractors that 40 million cameras already are in use around the world, with 300 million expected by 2005.

U.S. police use cameras to monitor bridges, tunnels, airports and border crossings and regularly access security cameras in banks, stores and garages for investigative leads. In the District of Columbia, police have 16 closed-circuit television cameras watching major roads and gathering places.

Great Britain has an estimated 2.5 million closed-circuit television cameras, more than half operated by government agencies, and the average Londoner is thought to be photographed 300 times a day.

But many of these cameras record over their videotape regularly. Officers have to monitor the closed-circuit TV and struggle with boredom and loss of attention.

By automating the monitoring and analysis, DARPA "is attempting to create technology that does not exist today," Walker explained.

Though insisting CTS isn't intended for homeland security, DARPA outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military. DARPA described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco one month apart in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city with slightly more residents than Miami.

CTS should be able to track the day's movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, DARPA said. Even if there were 2,000 such vehicles and none showed up twice, the software should automatically compare their routes and find vehicles with common starting and stopping points.

Joseph Onek of the Open Society Institute, a human rights group, said current law that permits the use of cameras in public areas may have to be revised to address the privacy implications of these new technologies.

"It's one thing to say that if someone is in the street he knows that at any single moment someone can see him," Onek said. "It's another thing to record a whole life so you can see anywhere someone has been in public for 10 years."

You are all over the map on the systems and analogies you present.

The traffic camera is not a matching system. There are two types of traffic camera systems, triggered systems and monitored ones. Triggered systems can be based on speed of objects and/or status of traffic light with directional sensors.

A triggered system that "snapshots" a vehicle which has violated the conditions codified in the software is different than one that snapshots every vehicle and compares it to a database of "suspect" vehicles (stolen, outstanding traffic violations, unregistered, uninsured, etc.). As far as I know the latter system does not exist. I have less problems with the former where there is a demonstrated cause (violation) proir to a record being made.

I don't need or want unified law enforcement opinion, but I do want their concerns aired and addressed.

I demand that there be reasonable and probable cause for law enforcement to take an interest in me and my loved ones. I have seen the repressive effect of "secret" police and covert surveillance on people. It has always impressed me how people recently liberated from authoritarian regimes more jealously guard their anonimity and privacy than those living in socialized democracies. One reason I believe this is true is that the recently liberated realize from experience how quickly, even erroneously, one life can be removed and its impact on the rest of that society.

Oh, and I do think there are more important things than an individual's life or health. You'll find that many people who serve the larger community feel the same way. These are especially the people willing to sacrifice their own lives or health to defend the ideas written on a piece of parchment. So no, I don't personally care how many people die or suffer broken necks if the answer is sacrificing our liberty.

You wrote:
reasonable and probable cause for law enforcement to take an interest in me and my loved ones
My response:
Reasonable cause - you and I are sinners that need watching and it helps you and I to behave ourselves to have the government that has power to punish us watching us.
Probable cause to take an interest in us? - I thought it was probable cause to arrest us - not probable cause to take an interest in us. According to the logic of this statement there ought to be no police officers parked along the road with a radar gun pointing at us. Are you against radar guns also?

Your lack of concern for the thousands of innocent children killed each year by speeders and red light runners is remarkable. You are not willing to allow our government to use cameras to curtain red light running and speeders and thus save the lives of innocent children? And what liberty are you sacrificing by allowing them to take your photo when you are approaching a red light or entering a football stadium where they are trying to catch terrorists who will blow up you and your children??

We live in a world where some liberty needs to be curtailed to protect the innocent - I would agree with you that we need to watch the government's use of this technology and put an end to abuses of its use but you go way to the wrong side of the scale when you say video cameras capturing us in public are to be forbidden.

Reasonable cause - you and I are sinners that need watching and it helps you and I to behave ourselves to have the government that has power to punish us watching us.

Please provide any constitutional or legal foundation for this view. If you can't, please stop empowering the government simply based on your moral prejudice of my sinfulness.

I thought it was probable cause to arrest us - not probable cause to take an interest in us.

Wrong. Please read what I posted above on probable cause. The law concerning searches and seizures, especially pertaining to wiretap laws, require probable cause and are conditions prior to arrest. They are specific restrictions on the governments ability to take an interest in me without justification - and I dare you to go before a judge arguing my preconceived sinfulness as satisfactory.

According to the logic of this statement there ought to be no police officers parked along the road with a radar gun pointing at us. Are you against radar guns also?

No my logic does not argue against radar guns which are used to measure speed of vehicles, and are triggered by the officer who suspects a vehicle by observation - and then uses the device to measure the speed. I am against photo radar, but for different reasons because it is still a triggered system and actually less of a privacy issue. However, if you want to make the analogy, then I would ask again what are the rules governing the use of database matching cameras to protect me against improper and/or negligent operation, my rights to know I'm being scanned and my rights to foil and/or detect such use? Throughout the states there is a body of law concerning administrative/civil violations of traffic rules where radar/laser devices are used, the qualifications of the officers to use them, the limitations of their use for probable cause to stop a vehicle, subsequent searches and seizures, and my rights to detect, mask, foil and challenge its use. No such rules exist for the systems you advocate and you have not put forward any.

Your lack of concern for the thousands of innocent children killed each year by speeders and red light runners is remarkable.

Hardly. In fact, I'm very serious in being involved in my community to ensure it's safety. That doesn't mean that by not accepting your "big brother" solution I'm somehow negligent or ignorant. There is no requirement for me to accept your method of protection, and I am trying not to be offended by your characterizations of me as a sinner requiring government surveillance (based on what, original sin?) and subjecting myself to a system that assumes I am a terrorist until some government database proves otherwise.

I'm tired of discussing this. You get the last word. I'm not responding again.

Last word - we are both sinners - conceived that way - all of us are. Proof? Who taught us to tell lies? Comes naturally to all of us. So do all immoral desires come natural. We do not have to be taught how to be law breakers or immoral persons but we do have to be taught how to obey the law. The government has been instituted by God to punish us for breaking His laws. Our government may not know this but it was. So as one who believes this way I don't care what the constitution of the United States says at this point about cameras taking our pictures in public because if it doesn't permit it according to the supreme court then I want the court changed or the constitution changed so it will permit it. I have a right to try to have this view incorporated into the constitution if it isn't there already.

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