Public Surveillance Technology

If you tolerate this, then your childeren will be next

Many articles have been written on "James Bond" style miniaturised bugging and spying devices. The deployment of such technologies on a wide scale in a 1984 style society is a matter of logistics e.g. How many years have Cable and Satellite TV operators taken to roll out "black boxes" to their customers ? On the other hand, it has taken less than a year for an automated public surveillance system to be deployed, covering the entire UK motorway and main road network.

Of more immediate interest are the technologies being developed with the potential and intention to monitor large numbers of people, for a variety of "security" reasons. As has been stated elsewhere on this website, if these technologies are deployed in a responsible manner, with adequate supervision, public accountability and individual rights of redress for mistakes, all backed up by a legally enforceable code of conduct and regulations, then some or all of these technologies may become acceptable. Judge for yourselves:

• Camera picture quality - the price of excellent picture quality cameras has fallen dramatically - forget the grey , low quality "sweetshop" camera pictures, modern systems can easily pick out a Rolex watch or packet of cigarettes at over 100 metres, in full colour or at night.. Modern cameras are also digital - which opens up a huge number of picture enhancement and other computer techniques, both "real time" and later for "off-line" analysis
• Motion sensors - advanced software linked to a digital cameras can be used effectively for detecting the early signs of smoke and heat haze, before a fire breaks out, detecting changes to a single pixel. Recording to tape or disk can be activated by conventional passive infrared (burglar alarm type) motion detectors.
• Advanced software and/or human operators can track a targeted image (person / face) even through a crowd, and automatically hand over to the next camera in a CCTV Surveillance network. The joint project between Leeds and Reading Universities is working on combining techniques for tracking vehicles with that of identifying "suspicious" behavior of pedestrians is intended to be applied to CCTV Surveillance systems. When this sort of technology is available commercially, the potential for abuse will be staggering, unless regulatory guidelines are in place, to classify just exactly what constitutes "suspicious behavior" and what action the automated system initiates thereafter.
• If you want to see Face Recognition software in action, you can download a demonstration version of a face recognition controlled screensaver for your Windows PC . The Big Brother version of this software from Visionics is the basis for the UK developed Mandrake system, which, it is claimed can easily recognise faces in crowd at a rate of over 200 faces a second. Mandrake is already installed at a couple of football stadia, and has been linked to the London Borough of Newham's 100 plus street camera network this autumn. If a CCTV computer system can recognise your face, and log the times and dates of your visits to certain public areas, could such data be used to enforce curfews and "no-go" areas , "residents only" burclaves and apartheid ?
• Car number plates recognition - 1800 Trafficmaster checkpoints with 4264 infra-red cameras sited on over 7,500 miles of motorways and trunk roads - one every 4 miles, reporting every 4 minutes with Number Plate Recognition.
• The UK Defence Research an Evaluation Agency is also active in the field of vehicle and pedestrian target tracking e.g .ASSET Is this what has been used in Northern Ireland on Project Glutton ?
• Road Pricing transponders
• Cellular Mobile Phones - apart from the lack of confidentiality in the actual conversations with analog phones, and even with digital phones (where the encryption scheme was deliberately weakened by pressure from the snoops), by their nature mobile phones regularly check in with their nearest base stations in order to optimise signal strength. This can, of course be monitored and will pin point the phone to at least the nearest cell - approx. 1 sq. km in the country, as little as 250m in some heavy traffic city areas. It is technically possible for a certain phone to be sent "test signal" units so that it responds much more frequently with its position more frequently than normal. All phones have radio frequency "fingerprints" i.e. characteristics of the individual antenna and electronics of a particular unit, giving rise to a characteristic set of harmonics and phase shifts within the designed tolerances of the transmitted signals, enabling individual phones to be differentiated from those made by different manufacturers, and in most cases, different production batches even from the same manufacturer. Defence electronics manufacturers such as TRW, with experience in military electronic warfare and jamming happily sell such phone tapping and tracking equipment to "security forces"
• Infra Red - even domestic video cameras have some near infra red capability (check out your TV remote control)
• Low Light multipliers
• X-rays
• Millimetre wave radar - "see" metallic objects such as guns etc. through clothing
• Biosensors, sniffers
• Sound ranging / directions finding microphones on lampposts - already on trial in Redwood City, USA near Silicon Valley to pinpoint the sounds of gunfire. Similar equipment is reported to be in use in Belfast.
• CCTV operated sniper rifle - presented as a possibility in Wim Wenders' film "The End of Violence"- actually already designed and tested "for use by security authorities" @ £30,000 each by a company that designs and builds undersea robot submersibles
• Helicopter, Helium Blimp, microlight aeroplane drones mounted CCTV cameras -developed for military reconnaissance and for weapons targeting systems for Helicopter gunships and to relay electronically to Artillery commanders. The Sikorsky helicopter company has produced a remote controlled, pilotless helicopter drone called Cypher. This looks like a fly saucer and uses commercially available people tracking software to help find human targets in urban riot control situations.
• Remote Controlled Airships are under review by the London Metropolitan Police.

  Wether such devices merely zoom in on people and take more detailed photos, or actually launch "non-lethal" weapons or just shoot them, is up to you.

• The US National Security Agency is collating research into Biometric identification of people
• Neural Network Facial Recognition and Tracking
• Thermographic Face Recognition
• Police identity parades often have difficulty in getting hold of enough "ethnic minority" faces for a line-up. There is research into "multi-media" databases for use in "photo-fit" and identity parades - what if such databases are culled, in part, from Public CCTV Surveillance systems ?
• Smart Cards
• Data Visualisation Software e.g. L2's Analysts Notebook, Harlequin's Watson
• Electronic tagging