FC: Jeff Rosen in NYT mag on police cameras and U.K. experience

From: Declan McCullagh (declanat_private)
Date: Sun Oct 07 2001 - 19:25:47 PDT

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    ********
    
    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
    
    
    
    
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