******** Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 11:43:42 -0700 From: Lorraine King <l.p.kingat_private> To: declanat_private Subject: Jeffrey Rosen NYT on CCTV - theoretical & practical The New York Times | Magazine October 7, 2001 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html BEING WATCHED A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance By JEFFREY ROSEN [excerpts below the dashes] Wonder if there are some technical responses to Rosen's assertions about the reliability of the technology? Also some estimates of how soon it _will_ become reliable - before North Americans are lulled into a false sense of security because "auntie or uncle" (per Rosen's description of the feel-good advertising campaign to popularise cameras in Britain) is keeping a benevolent eye on them. Orwell was right. (And Rosen thinks so, too. He quotes Orwell in his article: "Exaggerated class distinctions have been diminishing, [but] 'the great majority of the people can still be 'placed' in an instant by their manners, clothes and general appearance...") -L ----------------------------------- [...] It's the license-plate technology that the London police have found most attractive, because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best face-recognition systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense found that they failed to identify matches a third of the time.) Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in the City of London police station, where the British war against terrorism began. I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and led up to the control station, a modest-size installation that looks like an air-traffic-control room, with uniformed officers manning two rows of monitors. Although installed to catch terrorists, the cameras in the City of London spend most of their time following car thieves and traffic offenders. ''The technology here is geared up to terrorism,'' Parsons told me. ''The fact that we're getting ordinary people -- burglars stealing cars -- as a result of it is sort of a bonus.'' Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. ''No, not using this technology, no,'' he replied. [...] Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each driver's face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial recognition technology that American airports are now being urged to adopt. ''We're experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces out of the crowd, but the technology is not sufficiently good enough,'' Parsons said. ''The system that I saw demonstrated two or three years ago, a lot of the time it couldn't differentiate between a man and a woman.'' (In a recent documentary about CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics face-recognition system that had been set up in the London borough of Newham by wearing earrings and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted that the technology will become more accurate. ''It's just a matter of time. Then we can use it to detect the presence of criminals on foot in the city,'' he said. In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate, it will become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand the biometric database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics that the City of London was thinking about using his technology to establish a database that would include not only terrorists but also all British citizens whose faces were registered with the national driver's license bureau. If that occurs, every citizen who walks the streets of the City could be instantly identified by the police and evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no matter how trivial. With the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed the possibility. ''Technically, they won't be able to do it without coming back to me,'' he said. ''They will have to justify it to me.'' Atick struck me as a refined and thoughtful man (he is the former director of the computational neuroscience laboratory at Rockefeller University), but it seems odd to put the liberties of a democracy in the hands of one unelected scientist. [...] ...the surveillance systems for the London underground and the British police feed into separate control rooms, but Sergio Velastin, a computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two systems will eventually be linked, using digital technology. Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the London underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds, setting off an alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting or trying to jump on the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are easily bored and distracted, automatic alarms are viewed as the wave of the future.) [See article for great black humour about what the CCTV operators focus on. :-)] [...] ''I actually don't think the cameras have had much effect on crime rates,'' says Jason Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the effect of the cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime. ''We've had a fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV proponents say it's because of the cameras. I'd say it's because we had a boom economy in the last seven years and a fall in unemployment.'' Ditton notes that the cameras can sometimes be useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the Brixton nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they prevent terrorism or other serious crime. [...] -- Lorraine P. King Telephone: (604) 936-6150 Cellular: (604) 723-6051 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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