An
investigator looking for a particular piece of video is like a
researcher working in a library with a jumbled card catalog—or in books
with no tables of contents. The solution of 3VR and other similar
companies is software that automatically analyzes and tags video
contents, from the colors and locations of cars to the characteristics
of individual faces that pass before the lens. The goal is to allow
rapid digital search; instead of functioning like a shoddy library, 3VR
hopes to be "the Google of surveillance video," Russell says. "It took
1000 [British agents] six weeks to review all the video after July 7.
Had 3VRs been in place, it might have taken a dozen or so agents a
weekend," he claims.
I recently spent a night at Chicago's Talbott
Hotel, a luxurious small retreat where the staff addresses you by name
and you have to clear a dozen pillows from the cushy king-size bed
before lying down. The Talbott is surveilled by 70 cameras, which cover
every public area of the hotel and feed into a 3VR system.
Troy
Strand, general manager of the hotel, showed me a computer screen
divided into 16 panes with different camera views. He looked up my
check-in time and seconds later retrieved video of my arrival the
previous day. There I was, towing my carry-on toward room 1504.
Strand
found a few other shots showing me, then instructed the software to
begin facial analysis. The system assessed the balance of light and dark
areas of skin tone and hair and gauged the distance between my eyes,
nose and mouth. Strand instructed the system to search for all recorded
videos showing my face, and the computer retrieved several dozen faces,
none of which was mine. There was a woman and a black man. But Strand
went through a few pages of results, and I started to show up. When he
clicked on any image, an associated video of me played—crossing the
lobby to go to breakfast, chatting with the front-desk clerk.
So-called
"facial profiling" has been surveillance's next big thing for nearly a
decade, and it is only now showing tentative signs of feasibility. It's
easy to see why people are seduced by the promise of this technology.
Twelve bank companies employ 3VR systems at numerous locations, which
build a facial template for every single person that enters any branch.
If somebody cashes a check that is later determined to be stolen, the
person's face can be flagged in the system, and the next time the con
artist comes in, the system is supposed to alert the tellers.
For
Strand, the security system's fancier features are just a bonus. The
cameras are in plain sight, so he believes that would-be criminals and
misbehaving employees are deterred. "You can't have security people on
every floor monitoring every angle of the building," he says.
There's a man
in Salt Lake City who knows what I did last summer. Specifically, he
knows what I did on Aug. 24, 2007. He knows that I checked my EarthLink
e-mail at 1:25 pm, and then blew a half an hour on ESPN's Web site. He
also knows that my wife, Anne, wanted new shoes, from Hush Puppies or
DSW, and that she synced her electronic planner—"she has quite a busy
schedule," the man noted—and downloaded some podcasts. We both printed
out passes for free weeklong trials at 24 Hour Fitness, but instead of
working out, apparently spent the evening watching a pay-per-view movie.
It was
Bridge to Terabithia or
Zodiac, he thinks.
The
man's name is Joe Wilkinson, and he works for Raytheon Oakley Systems.
The company specializes in "insider risk management," which means
dealing with the problem of employees who, whether through innocent
accident or nefarious plot, do things they really shouldn't be doing at
work. Oakley's software, developed for the U.S. government and now used
by ten Fortune 100 companies, monitors computer use remotely and
invisibly. Wilkinson had agreed to run a surveillance trial with me as
the subject, and after accessing my computer via the Web, he installed
an "agent" that regularly reported my activities back to him.
The
modern desktop machine is a multimedia distraction monster: friend,
lover, shopping mall, stereo, television, movie theater and adult video
store are mere mouse clicks away. Raytheon Oakley's software caught me
wasting valuable work time checking personal e-mails and reading digital
camera reviews online. Companies are also concerned about hostile work
environments caused by employees openly surfing porn in the
office—conse-quently, my 10:14 am visit to a risqué site was duly noted.
Employees also leak trade secrets. (Consider the case of DuPont chemist
Gary Min, who, after accepting a job with a competitor in 2005, raided
DuPont's electronic library for $400 million worth of technical
documents. He was caught by the FBI last year.) If I had downloaded any
large engineering drawings onto a removable hard drive, Oakley's
software would have alerted Wilkinson. And employees bad-mouth the boss.
I wrote an e-mail to Anne that mentioned my editor at Popular
Mechanics, Glenn Derene. Wilkinson rigged the software to flag anything
with Derene's name, and alarm bells rang. Sorry, Glenn.
Surveillance
of this sort is common. A 2005 survey by the American Management
Association and the ePolicy Institute found that 36 percent of companies
monitor workers on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis; 55 percent review
e-mail messages, and 76 percent monitor Web sites visited.
"Total
Behavioral Visibility" is Raytheon Oakley's motto. The vice president of
marketing, Tom Bennett, knows that some people fear workplace
monitoring. But the technology has many positive aspects. "We are not
Big Brother," he insists.
Employees are sometimes lazy or
dishonest, but often they're simply careless. A parent who has to leave
the office at midday to care for a sick child might copy sensitive
company information onto a USB drive so that he can work at home. An
account manager might carelessly send customer credit card numbers over
an unsecured wireless network where they can be stolen. Bennett says
that his company's software helps companies understand and improve how
workers use their computers. The Oakley monitoring application works
like a TiVo, allowing an instant video replay: where you pointed the
mouse, when you clicked, what you wrote. This can catch the guilty but
also exonerate the innocent, because the replay puts your actions in
context.
The debate over surveillance pits the
tangible benefits of saving lives and dollars against the abstract ones
of preserving privacy and freedom. To many people, the promise of
increased security is worth the exchange. History shows that new
technologies, once developed, are seldom abandoned, and the computer
vision systems being adopted today are transforming America from a
society that spies upon a small number of suspicious individuals to one
that monitors everybody. The question arises:
Do people exercise their
perfectly legal freedoms as freely when they know they're being watched?
As the ACLU's Stanley argues, "You need space in your life to live
beyond the gaze of society."
Surveillance has become pervasive. It
is also more enduring. As companies develop powerful archiving and
search tools, your life will be accessible for years to come in rich
multimedia records. The information about you may be collected for
reasonable purposes—but as its life span increases, so too does the
chance that it may fall into unscrupulous hands.
Several months
after I stayed at the Talbott Hotel, Derene, my editor, called Troy
Strand to ask if he still had the security camera images of me at the
hotel. He did. My niece Emma's Statue of Liberty shots are probably
stored on a computer, as are the records of all my Pathmark purchases.
Ramos could query my shopping trip of, say, Jan. 13, 2005, and replay
video keyed precisely to any part of the register tape—from the fifth
item scanned, pork chops, to the tenth, broccoli. That's innocuous and
even humorous on the surface, but the more I thought about the store's
power, the more it disturbed me.
"I would never do that," Ramos assured me. "But I could."
Dennis Mancino HD View 360 OTC Capital Partners
source: popular mechanics http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a2398/4236865/
At HD View 360, your state-of-the-art sprinkler system is professionally monitored.
