Chicago to Integrate Private Cameras
[From Plan to use private cameras to help city surveillance :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Politics]
Mayor Daley is sponsoring an ordinance that would authorize the “city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications to reach out en masse to private businesses and sign agreements with them to share video from their privately-owned surveillance cameras.”
This type of partnership has been done in other countries, but I don’t know of any large scale programs in the United States. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed if the government is monitoring private cameras, which may be focused on either public or private areas.
From a technology side, it will be interesting how this is implemented (and how much it costs). It appears to rely on a hardware based VPN system. The city has said:
The public-private hook-up was made possible by software tied to Operation Virtual Shield. That’s the security grid that linked existing fiber optics into a single network and paved the way for hundreds more surveillance cameras, sophisticated software capable of spotting suspicious behavior and for mass transit cameras to be monitored by the 911 center.
“You’ll have a piece of network gear that will talk to a piece of network gear from us and, through software, we’ll establish that point-to-point relationship on a dedicated pipe that’s talking language only you and I can talk….What we’ll do is ride the Internet. It’ll be fully-encrypted video” that cannot be compromised by hackers, Argiropoulos said.
As with other efforts by Chicago, if this is successful, expect other cities to follow. I hope to follow this more closely and provide a legal/technical analysis of this issues as they arise.
There must be more than a hundred different video recorders deployed in Chicago. It’s going to take a herculean effort even to support a small fraction of them. I am very curious how this will actually be implemented.