U.S. Develops Urban Surveillance System
July 1, 2003
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon 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 Federation of American Scientists.
Pike agreed.
"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,
or Baghdad, Iraq, 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."
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On the Net:
range permitting, do also a fine job.
Not that I'm not advocating anything like that also., it would be illegal of course. But it could be tried out in a few cities too...
Or, we could just castrate reprobates like you.
Poor faker/KOBE. Stuck behing a computer with no clue how to organize.
That's right. I'm gonna shove it in your face everyday!
Organize!
Organize!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....