From Chicago Sun-Times:
Chicago is looking for companies interested in putting cameras on all 118 street sweepers.
A posting on the city’s Web site states that every street sweeper would be equipped with a pair of cameras — one to capture the image of “the illegally parked vehicle and its surroundings,” the other to take a picture of the license plate.
Video evidence would be forwarded to the city’s Department of Revenue daily, then mailed to motorists along with the $50 ticket. Contractors would be paid an unidentified fee “for each enforceable citation.”
rshah Chicago
From FOXNews.com:
ANPR or license plate recognition caught a bad guy and received very good publicity.
Here is what happened:
According to news accounts, Donald Bachmann stole a pickup truck in San Jose, ditched it at a 7-Eleven, and then stole a white Toyota sedan. The police were notified. Shortly thereafter, the 12-year-old girl was walking home with her 9-year-old sister. Police say Bachmann rammed the Toyota into the older girl intentionally, severely injuring her. Her little sister rushed to aid her, but Bachmann allegedly kidnapped the bleeding girl and drove away. The 9-year-old immediately reported the crime.
Less than 15 minutes later, police say Bachmann parked the car, punched his victim and tried to sexually assault her. Miraculously, she escaped and ran to a nearby home. The residents called the police. Bachmann drove a few miles and ditched the Toyota.
The police responded to the 7-Eleven, collected evidence from the stolen truck, and found Bachmann’s fingerprints inside.
Hours later, Officer Max Boyer was on patrol, with license-plate recognition technology mounted on his patrol car. It can scan the license plate of every vehicle it passes. The computer compares the plates to databases of stolen vehicles. Boyer drove by the Toyota and a computer voice in his car said, “Stolen car.” He stopped to investigate. Police found blood in the Toyota belonging to the 12-year-old girl.
rshah Applications
An update to an older story on SmartCheck Airport X-Ray Machines:
TSA is now testing the system as an alternative to pat-downs. This story ran in InformationWeek:
“Privacy is ensured through the anonymity of the image: It will never be stored, transmitted, or printed, and it will be deleted immediately once viewed.” Ensuring privacy, as the TSA describes it, involves having security officers view images from remote locations. Thus, the security officer cannot identify the passenger, visually or by some other means, but can send word to fellow officers if a threat is detected.
According to the TSA, the scanning system applies a security algorithm to further protect passenger privacy by obscuring the passenger’s face.
. . .
“First, this technology produces strikingly graphic images of passengers’ bodies,” Steinhardt said. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts, but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags. That degree of examination amounts to a significant — and for some people humiliating — assault on the essential dignity of passengers that citizens in a free nation should not have to tolerate.”
The TSA says that since February, when it began testing backscatter scanning — a similar technology — in Phoenix, some 79% of those selected for secondary screening opted to submit to a backscatter scan rather than a pat-down.
The TSA plans to perform further testing of these systems at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and at Los Angeles International Airport. The security agency plans to purchase eight millimeter wave units for a total of $1.7 million. Millimeter wave scanners trials are currently being conducted at airports in Japan, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.
rshah Applications
From heise online:
Here is a quote:
In April 2006, a pilot project was launched in Berlin, in which train operators on three lines of the Berlin underground aimed to test the extent to which 24-hour video surveillance could reduce criminality. The pilot project included the U2, U6 and U8 lines. The Social Democratic Party, which strongly supported the project in the state parliament, anticipated a “general preventive effect.”
An evaluation of the project commissioned from the Büro für angewandte Statistik was unexpectedly cancelled after receipt of an interim report. BVG, the company responsible for public transport in Berlin, stated that the pilot project had proved its worth in the detection of assaults and criminal damage and decided to extend the project to all 170 underground stations in Berlin by the end of the year.
Civil rights group The Humanist Union has now forced the BVG, which had previously declined to do so, to release the report (PDF file). According to the report, video surveillance and recording on the three underground lines did not reduce the incidence of criminality, but in fact led to a small increase.
Of a total of many thousands of criminal incidents, video material was available in only 78 cases. In only a third of these was the recording of sufficient quality to allow suspects to be identified. In particular, the cameras were not able to contribute to a higher detection rate regarding prevention of vandalism. The report suggests that in this case the reason no usable video recordings were obtained was that criminals were taking the cameras into account in planning their malfeasance. (anw/c’t)
The report is here, but it is in German
rshah Uncategorized
From New York Times:
In the city of Shenzhen (12.4 million people), the Chinese government is rolling out 20,000 surveillance cameras that will be smart cameras. Their goal is to use facial recognition to identify police suspects as well as to detect unusual activity. Additionally, there are 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies that the police will have the right to integrate. (There are also smart cards given to citizens that contain a lot of information). They are also using cell phone signals to track the location of police officers (chicago is testing this idea).
The article states:
Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights. . . . Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.
rshah Facial Recognition, Other Cities
From the Economist.com:
A nice analogy for how people have been accustomed to wide spread surveillance:
Ross Anderson, a professor at Cambridge University in Britain, has compared the present situation to a “boiled frog”—which fails to jump out of the saucepan as the water gradually heats. If liberty is eroded slowly, people will get used to it. He added a caveat: it was possible the invasion of privacy would reach a critical mass and prompt a revolt.
If there is not much sign of that in Western democracies, this may be because most people rightly or wrongly trust their own authorities to fight the good fight against terrorism, and avoid abusing the data they possess. The prospect is much scarier in countries like Russia and China, which have embraced capitalist technology and the information revolution without entirely exorcising the ethos of an authoritarian state where dissent, however peaceful, is closely monitored.
I am often asked about the passivity of Americans with regard to widespread surveillance. I usually tell journalists that there hasn’t been a “love canal” type of disaster with surveillance. Until something like that, Americans will keep trusting government. However, while its not bad that we trust government, there is still a need for policies that set limits and accountability for government surveillance. We shouldn’t give government a carte blanche.
rshah Policy
From chicagotribune.com:
An update on the current state of cameras. Chicago is buying 100 more cameras, bringing the total to 559. [I have no idea what types of cameras are counted to get to 559, my history shows a much smaller number of the latest high-tech cameras since 2004]. Gunshot detection is still buggy and not ready for deployment. The new cameras are smaller than the original cameras and have no lights and resemble street lamps.
Speaking at a West Side news conference, Daley reminded reporters of critics who complained the cameras were invasive when he introduced them in 2004. “They underestimated people who live in this city people who have to deal with gangs guns and drugs on a daily basis,” Daley said. “All wealthy people have cameras in all the high rises, suburban areas. … Why can’t the average person in the city of Chicago? Everyone wants a camera. They want to have a camera in front of every home, every block, because they feel much safer.”
Over the last 20 months, criminal activity captured by police cameras “directly assisted” in making 1,458 arrests, said interim police Supt. Dana Starks. In the first murder case the cameras may have helped solve, police a few months ago nabbed a suspect in the killing of a 14-year-old boy who was shot not far from the street corner at 23rd Street and Marshall Boulevard where Thursday’s news conference was held.
rshah Chicago
From the Chicagoist:
The police in Chicago Lawn will be tracked by cell phones with GPS tracking. This is a pilot project that the city hopes to expand. The goal here is to better supervise the police, which should increase their safety and address concerns about police misconduct. The question in the article is whether the officers will accept the tracking. Will the data be used for major crimes or will it be used for minor infractions such as picking up dry cleaning?
I am more interested in how this data is integrated into the overall systems. You could see many uses of knowing exactly where police officers are located for incident response. Also, over the long term, the data could be used to figure out areas that the police are focusing on too much, while overlooking other areas. It could also be used to see what officers are the best responders. Lots of potential uses . . .
rshah Applications, Chicago
Here is a brief summary of some of the news regarding IBM and Chicago’s venture on smart cameras:
Here are the goals as laid out in the CNN story:
In the first phase, IBM helped the City experts and network engineers to design and implement a surveillance strategy infrastructure to capture, monitor and fully index video for real-time and forensic-related safety applications. This entailed building a unified fiber network throughout the downtown Chicago area, deploying a critical wireless infrastructure to offer flexibility as required, installing hundreds of new surveillance cameras, linking thousands of preexisting cameras to the network, and creating a fully redundant backend system to monitor the video, store the images and allow for business continuity and disaster recovery applications.
The Chicago OEMC and IBM are now teaming to expand the surveillance system and to add analytics that provide license plate recognition, trending projections and intelligent search capabilities to the existing infrastructure. Chicago’s security solution is designed to provide several benefits to both city officials and citizens including: real-time video surveillance intelligence for proactive homeland security monitoring; faster response time to emergencies; more effective deployment of emergency responders; and increased travel efficiency through traffic congestion tracking.
IBM is pushing their smart camera technology. I assume its based off the Smart Surveillance System that I previously noted. The system features some security cameras that can detect gunshot sounds that prompt the cameras to turn toward the sounds before automatically calling 911. The system can also read license plate numbers. They are hoping to roll this out to other cities, but Chicago is first.
IBM is collaborating with Firetide and Genetec.
Firetide has a mesh technology that “supports wireless public safety applications ranging from traffic control and VoIP communications to covert and overt video surveillance. The Firetide system allows Chicago’s first responders to access databases rapidly and is configured to allow the addition of thousands more video access points in the future.” – From InformationWeek
Firetide’s mesh network operates within the 2.4 GHz, 4.9 GHz public safety licensed band, or 5.0 GHz band. “Because the technology is radio-agnostic, any license-free or licensed spectrum (can) be meshed,” said Bo Larsson, Firetide CEO, in an e-mail. ‘Firetide is unique in that our nodes can be decoupled from access points. Sometimes the best location for an access point is not the best place for a mesh node.”
IBM chose Genetec’s Omnicast as the main video management platform for building the Operation Virtual Shield system.
rshah Chicago, Vendors
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