Techdirt. Stories filed under "cctv"

EU Surveillance Team: We Need More Surveillance To Justify More Surveillance

Glyn Moody — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 05:14:11 PDT

Whether or not you believe that CCTV surveillance makes the world a safer place, there's a big problem with deploying it more widely: you still need someone to look at that footage and pick out the things of interest, and it's much harder adding new personnel than adding new cameras.

Techdirt has already reported on one attempt to get around this problem, based on smartphones and crowdsourcing. The other obvious approach is to automate the process. That is, to develop systems that can be trained to analyze CCTV streams -- perhaps in real time -- in order to try to spot activities that look "suspicious" in some sense, which can then be passed on to human operators for further evaluation and possibly action.

That's exactly the aim of the European Commission's INDECT research project -- short for the rather unwieldy "Intelligent information system supporting observation, searching and detection for security of citizens in urban environment." Here's how it describes itself:

The aim of INDECT is to develop a platform for: the registration and exchange of data associated with threat recognition, acquisition of multimedia content, inteligent processing of information related to automatic threat detection and especially terroristic threats as well as recognition of serious criminal behaviour or violence. New techniques for intelligent analysis of data will allow recognizing such situations, and giving alert before it is too late. The obiective is also to recognise danger events that could lead to terrorist attacks (e.g. left luggage at an airport, automatic recognition of dangerous tools). The definitions of situations and their parameters will be provided by police department.

As this makes clear, the emphasis is very much on analyzing data quickly enough to act on it before crimes are committed or attacks are carried out. However, that last sentence about "parameters" being provided by the police will naturally raise concerns that this is simply a chance for the latter to deploy yet more technology in ways that will be harmful to things like privacy and civil liberties.

To its credit, the INDECT project seems well aware that its work raises important ethical questions:

All of the research activities within INDECT project are carried out so as to ensure the appropriate balance between the protection of the rights of the individual and the protection of society. INDECT research project has an Ethics Board, which was established to ensure strict compliance of research outcomes with already established rules concerning privacy, data protection, to ensure genuine informed consent of all those participating in the project, and to ensure that information is only used for its intended research purpose. It is also responsible for managing and monitoring all ethical aspects of the project. These aspects include the promotion of gender equality.

That comes from a page on INDECT's Web site devoted entirely to ethical issues. The closing paragraph of that section is as follows: The sentence: "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear" is only true if every aspect of the criminal justice system works perfectly, on every occasion. Tools based on INDECT project research outcomes will provide EU Member States with the technology to ensure that decisions around public safety are based on the maximum amount of relevant information available.
This suggests that the project's participants believe that having even more information available about members of the public is not only justified by the deeply-flawed logic "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear", but that governments have what amounts to a duty to gather that information in order to make that argument true. It's a wonderfully circular piece of reasoning that totally overlooks the possibility that a better solution might be to gather less information about people in public spaces.

Sadly, it seems that, alongside the copyright ratchet, which only ever allows this intellectual monopoly to get stronger and longer, we now have a surveillance ratchet, which can only envisage large-scale snooping become ever-more pervasive and intrusive.

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London Police Want To Crowdsource Guilt-Free Surveillance

Glyn Moody — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 13:47:00 PDT

One of the earliest proposals for mass surveillance was the Panopticon:

a type of institutional building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

The design consists of a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff of the institution are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses, daycares, and madhouses, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is his prison which is most widely understood by the term.

As the rest of the fascinating Wikipedia entry on the subject explains, Bentham never managed to build his Panopticon prison, despite being given relatively large sums of public money to do so. But his idea not only lives on, it has come ever closer to realization thanks to new technologies. Boing Boing points us to this latest approach, based around smartphones and crowdsourcing: The Metropolitan Police is hoping to use crowd-sourcing to identify people suspected of committing crimes in last year's riots in London.

Officers are to upload up to 2,800 CCTV images taken during the disorder in August on to its smartphone app.
What's particularly striking about this scheme is the scale: "My hope is that the two-thirds of Londoners who own smartphones will download this app, and help us identify people we still need to speak to.

We need Londoners to browse through the app every week or so as new images will appear regularly. This is a fantastic way for Londoners to help us to fight crime."
In the case of the London riots, the CCTV images may be relatively unequivocal about crimes being committed; but the new scheme is already being extended beyond those exceptional events: The app will also include a further 2,000 images of people wanted by the police for offences not connected to the riots.
That's worrying because there is no way of knowing what these people are accused of -- they might, for example, be involved in legitimate street protests against the UK government, or against multinational corporations in the UK, both of which have been subject to controversial policing in the capital. That seems a real possibility, given what Facewatch, the company behind the scheme's technology, says about its service: An online crime reporting system for businesses to report crime providing the full evidential package required by the police

A way for businesses to deter crime by instantly sharing images of suspects between group members
In addition: All images from reported crimes are viewed by the police who will try to identify and match suspects using the information provided.
This raises the prospect not only of deterring crime, but of deterring protests, since participating companies will be able to pass photos of protesters who are alleged to have committed criminal acts to the police, who can then add the faces to all the others on their smartphone app. Londoners can then help identify them without concerning themselves about the legitimacy of the requests, since they will just be part of the constantly-updated stream of alleged criminals. Jeremy Bentham would have been proud of such an efficient, anonymous system of control.

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A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose... Until Police See It On CCTV, Say It's A Knife & Throw You In Jail For 3 Months

Mike Masnick — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:06:14 PDT

The UK has really been quite aggressive in installing CCTV surveillance cameras all over, trying to spot trouble before it escalates, but apparently they're not very good at it sometimes. Glyn Moody points us to the story of the police spotting a man, who had been previously convicted of assault, walking along with his fiancee. Via the CCTV footage, police determined that the guy, Stephen McAleer, was carrying a knife, and a few weeks later, the police showed up at his house in order to arrest him, tossing him in jail for three months. The only problem? It turns out that the "knife" was really a rose that he had bought for his fiancee. Apparently, it took three months and then a trial to get this all sorted out. Don't you feel safer now?

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UK Wants Surveillance Cameras To Watch 20,000 Worst Families?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 3 Aug 2009 07:31:34 PDT

Slashdot points us to a story that sounds like it has to be a joke/satire, concerning a plan by the UK's Children's Secretary, Ed Balls, to spend £400 million to put 20,000 families (the worst families) under constant surveillance including 24-hour CCTV cameras in their homes, and private security guards checking on them from time to time. The cameras will supposedly be used to make sure kids go to bed on time and eat proper meals. Even in the UK, where surveillance cameras are even more popular than in the US, this seems quite extreme. Balls apparently explained:

"This is pretty tough and non-negotiable support for families to get to the root of the problem. There should be Family Intervention Projects in every local authority area because every area has families that need support."

I'm hopeful that someone in the UK can let us know if this is somehow an exaggeration of what's going on or if this is accurate, because it honestly seems difficult to believe.

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British Cops Creating Nationwide License-Plate Surveillance System

Carlo Longino — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:40:00 PDT

Britain is working hard to maintain its place as a leading surveillance society. Building on the massive "success" of its widespread use of CCTV cameras, police are now installing a system that will use the cameras to track and log car journeys. CCTV cameras across the UK are being added to the system, which automatically recognizes and stores license plate numbers, then adds them, and the location in which they were spotted, to a central database. Police, of course, say the system's great at reducing and solving crime, and one police bigwig says that arrests are up 40% in his area since cops started using the system. But just because arrests have increased, it doesn't necessarily mean crime has been reduced. He further defends the system by saying "innocent people have nothing to fear from the way we use it" -- which all too often is used as an attempt to justify pretty nasty governmental intrusions on privacy and liberty. This system sounds like another part of Britain's attempt to record the lives of its subjects in databases, alongside its database of info on every child in the country, and details of all the internet and phone traffic there. Will people there get up in arms over all this government surveillance, or are they saving their ire only for the likes of Google Street View?

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British Cops Try To Force CCTV On Pub Owner

Carlo Longino — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:37:00 PST

The use of CCTV continues to grow in the UK as police and intelligence agencies seek to cover ever-larger areas of the country with security cameras in an attempt to prevent and solve crime. In many cases, the cameras are covering public areas, but one pub owner in London says that police are trying to force him to install CCTV cameras in his business -- and turn footage over to them upon demand -- as a condition of his operating license. The man bought an existing pub, and the change of ownership required him to apply for a new license. He alleges local police said they wouldn't oppose the new license, as long as he installed a CCTV system that captured images of every person that came into his pub, and made that footage freely available to them as part of a new blanket policy covering particular parts of London. The office of the British Information Commissioner took exception to the plan, saying this sort of blanket policy for new license holders raised serious privacy concerns, and could fall foul of data protection rules. It finally looks like there's some significant pushback against the UK's growing surveillance society, both from the Information Commissioner, but also in the form of a recent report from the House of Lords, saying the country's 4 million and counting CCTV cameras were undermining personal freedom and privacy, which are vital to democracy.

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'Smart' CCTV Supposedly Recognizes Crime

Carlo Longino — Tue, 2 Dec 2008 20:52:40 PST

A city in England has installed a "smart CCTV" system, which is claimed to be able to detect certain behavior or incidents (via The Register) and to alert camera operators to follow up. The system is supposed to give operators the ability to monitor large numbers of cameras at once, more than they can do just by watching TV screens. This type of technology has been around for a little while, but doesn't seem to have set the world alight just yet. It's doubtful that these devices will actually make any significant reduction in crime (perhaps predicting and preventing crime comes in version 2.0), and will serve merely as an excuse to blanket more and more areas with CCTV coverage, putting wider and wider swathes of people's lives under surveillance.

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