Update on LA Cameras
The surveillance cameras in the Fashion District will be monitoring an area known for bootleg DVDs. As a result, these cameras are being used to enforce intellectual property laws. This has led to a lot of reaction across the web by bloggers that worry about IP law. See posts at Sivacracy.net and Miller’s blog.
From NBC 4:
Authorities are unveiling a system of surveillance cameras installed in the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles and paid for by the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA donated $186,000 for the purchase and installation of 10 cameras, equipped with “intelligent software, which helps identify human movement,” according to the LAPD. Officers will monitor the surveillance cameras from the LAPD Central Station and respond to suspicious activity, police said. This is the third area of the city to be covered by surveillance cameras, installed earlier in MacArthur Park and along Hollywood Boulevard.
From the Wash Times
A story on the role of federal grants for city surveillance cameras.
New York City has the largest and oldest system, with more than 7,000 public and private surveillance cameras. Baltimore, Chicago and New Orleans are installing camera surveillance networks with federal homeland security dollars.
Chicago financed its 2,250 cameras with a $5.1 million grant and is adding more cameras over the next two years with another $48 million first-responder grant. The cameras, which cost up to $60,000 each, are controlled remotely by police to zoom and rotate, and are equipped with night vision.
In 2004, homeland security funds bought $193 million worth of surveillance cameras. Similar “physical security enhancement equipment” for large cities is to be used primarily for ports, said Homeland Security Department spokesman Marc Short. “I can’t imagine a more logical expenditure of funds,” he said.
Maryland is spending $1.3 million in federal grants for a camera system that will expand to Anne Arundel, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties. Washington has a camera system, but it is turned on only for major events or during emergencies, said Melissa Ngo, staff counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
From Philadelphia’s WPVI.com: Smart Cameras:
I haven’t looked at the video yet (its Friday night), but I think
they will show a demo of the smart cameras in operation.
A few weeks back, Philadelphia police started testing so-called smart cameras. They wanted to know. Deputy Commissioner Charles Brennan/PHILADELPHIA: “Is the camera smart enough to alert us if something goes wrong? IBM said, ‘You know what it may be.’”
With the help of those experts from IBM and a couple of actors, Action News re-created one of the city’s most notorious unsolved crimes, only this time a camera was keeping an eye on the area where a female jogger was pulled off the path as the suspect tried to sexually assault her. We watched the re-enactment on a P-C miles away at police headquarters.
The smart camera is programmed to alert police to suspicious activity along the jogging trail. The programmer highlighted the danger zone. As our actor grabbed the woman, an alarm sounded and the computer instantly saved the video of what happened seconds before and several seconds after. Peter Toro/Network Architect: “The instant they hit this zone. It’ll cause a trigger. So let’s see what happens. There you go, okay.”
Behind the art museum, a similar camera is at work. Only that camera alerts police and starts recording when someone stands near a car for too long. It’s an attempt to try and catch people breaking into cars. No one has to watch the monitor 24/7. The camera signals the alert and saves the video on its own.
From EPIC Spotlight on Surveillance:
Short article pointing out the role of federal grant money in funding surveillance technology in many cities. Not much new, but a good introduction to this issue.
Online Journal is carrying a story by Andrew Kaluki, which is the best general overview article I have seen lately on the social implications of using smart cameras. He has an excellent web site titled Automated Surveillance.
The article is full of examples of how smart cameras are being used. Including some that I did not know. For example:
In Manalapan, Florida—one of the nation’s wealthiest cities—cameras and computers have been set up to run background checks on every car and driver that enters [10]. The system alerts a 911 dispatcher if the car is stolen or the driver is suspected of a crime. Infrared cameras record each car’s license tag number, and other cameras photograph the driver.
CIO has a great article on the growing market of video surveillance:
(I took a large snippets, because this is a very meaty article)
Proving ROI on digital surveillance may not be as hard as you think either. The post-9/11 obsession with security created this surge in surveillance investment, but what’s sustaining it is that digital video surveillance appears to be living up to its hype. And, when done well, it provides real ROI for the business. First off, it allows for consolidation of monitoring: You can watch many geographically disperse sites from one control room—something that was impossible with closed-circuit systems. An even bigger benefit of digital is that central control and monitoring allows you to put cameras at smaller sites and monitor them from the central operations center. With CCTV, you’d require a closed system at that smaller site and onsite monitoring, which itself requires at least one employee. Digital video also beats tape in terms of storage and retrieval. Tape-based systems can require a full-time employee just for retrieval. (For even more benefits, see “The Little Things,” this page.)
But the key to IP-based video surveillance’s appeal is the ever-expanding roster of applications being attached to it. In other words, surveillance isn’t just about security anymore. For example, British bed superstore Dreams recently deployed video surveillance for measuring foot traffic through a store to understand both peak traffic times and also shoppers’ browsing habits, which in turn allows them to better configure merchandise around the store. Of course the surveillance is used for security as well, but it’s also being utilized to train new employees.
Training, in fact, has become a possible killer applet for video surveillance, due in large part to the increased quality of the images. Video of cashiers at a grocery store doing their jobs correctly (and incorrectly) is edited into video packages that train new hires. Sandy Jones, a surveillance consultant, says Dreams isn’t alone in its use of cameras to assist retail; other companies are using surveillance for similar purposes. Still others are using cameras to improve logistics, assembling trains at humpyards (where the rail cars come off boats and trucks), for example, or monitoring assembly lines for quality control. Suddenly, surveillance is a business enabler, not just barbed wire.
Many CIOs say they spend considerable time fending off aggressive surveillance vendors. “I almost canceled our contract twice over what I thought was really aggressive behavior,” says Greg Meffert, CTO of the City of New Orleans, who is in the middle of a citywide surveillance project that will eventually include 1,000 wireless, IP-based cameras. “All they wanted to do was tell me how great I was and then, ‘Why aren’t you rolling this out faster?’”
“The vendors are coming at us with the ‘wow’ factor,” says Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport’s Bowen. “If you don’t pay significant attention to it, you’ll buy lots of things that can do lots of stuff, but your [total cost of ownership] and integration will be no good.”
Meffert provides a great example of a successful, IT-driven digital video surveillance deployment. When the current New Orleans city administration came into office, he says, the city had about two days worth of cash on hand and ranked at the bottom of a list of major cities when it came to technology infrastructure. “Everything we could do had to either be budget-neutral or save us money,” he says. New Orleans’ paramount problem was its murder rate, the highest of any city in the country, and Meffert believed a high-end wireless surveillance system with motion detection could help. But that would require a huge investment in the neighborhood of $300,000 just to start a pilot.
To jump-start the program, Meffert piloted the system in one of the highest-crime areas of the city. In six months, the murder rate in this area dropped 57 percent; auto theft, 25 percent; and burglary, 32 percent. He then started a website, Iseecrime.com, where neighborhood watch groups could sign up to become part of the city’s surveillance network. For $5,000, people could “adopt” a camera, and the city would integrate those views with its overall surveillance operations. In two days, Meffert says 220 groups and individuals registered. “That’s a million bucks right there,” he says.
All this success convinced the city to up its investment to more than $4 million for the first 300 cameras and to deploy as many as 1,000 cameras around New Orleans. (Right as Meffert started his pilot, the American Civil Liberties Union filed two restraining orders and threatened a lawsuit against the city; privacy and ethics issues abound and should not be discounted.)
But Meffert believes that the public safety rewards outweigh the privacy issues. He recalls an incident in which someone shot one of the wireless cameras. When damaged, the cameras automatically send a signal to police headquarters along with the last 10 minutes of footage from the location. (There’s up to a week’s worth of footage archived from every camera at any given time, depending on the camera’s setup.) Headquarters reviewed the video and forwarded it to a cruiser in the area. Meffert says those officers quickly tracked down the suspect who, it appeared, had done more than shoot at cameras. He was wanted for murder.
A Reuters story has a few interesting facts:
The surveillance camera market has swelled to between $5 billion and $6 billion from about $2 billion before Sept. 11 — and will grow at 25 percent a year, Greiper said.
New technology allows cameras at sensitive federal buildings, major ports and transit hubs to differentiate between people and the objects they carry. If someone leaves a briefcase in an elevator at the Pentagon, for example, the camera will look back to find who left it and send the person’s picture to a guard’s hand-held security device.
Nice Systems, which makes this kind of technology, has seen its share price jump nearly 50 percent to about $32 in the past five months. In February, the Israeli company reported earnings of 47 cents a share, up from 9 cents a year earlier.
Story on masslive.com about guidelines for camera usage. The rules were modeled on rules adopted in Chicago.
I couldn’t find the Chicago rules online, but I found two others. Middletown, NY and State College, PA
Update:
John Hopkins policy statement
A follow up to the original post.
The Baltimore Sun is reporting the bill went through:
The bill also calls for a task force to study security issues at malls and make recommendations to the council — a provision added Monday to address concerns of business leaders and county officials, including County Executive James T. Smith Jr.
As amended, the law requires owners of about 100 shopping centers — about half of those in the county — to install video surveillance cameras that cover 75 percent of their parking areas during business hours.
Mall operators will have 18 months to complete the installations, and may apply for county assistance with the camera costs, expected to range from $10,000 to $50,000, depending on the size of the property.
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