FC: Jeff Rosen in NYT mag on police cameras and U.K. experience

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

********

Date: Sun, 07 Oct 2001 11:43:42 -0700
From: Lorraine King <l.p.king () home com>
To: declan () well com
Subject: Jeffrey Rosen NYT on CCTV - theoretical & practical

The New York Times  |  Magazine
October 7, 2001

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html

BEING WATCHED

A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance
By JEFFREY ROSEN

[excerpts below the dashes]

Wonder if there are some technical responses to Rosen's assertions about
the reliability of the technology? Also some estimates of how soon it
_will_ become reliable - before North Americans are lulled into a false
sense of security because "auntie or uncle" (per Rosen's description of the
feel-good advertising campaign to popularise cameras in Britain) is keeping
a benevolent eye on them.

Orwell was right.

(And Rosen thinks so, too. He quotes Orwell in his article: "Exaggerated
class distinctions have been diminishing, [but] 'the great majority of the
people can still be 'placed' in an instant by their manners, clothes and
general appearance...")

-L

-----------------------------------
[...]

It's the license-plate technology that the London police have found most
attractive, because it tends to be more reliable. (A test of the best
face-recognition systems last year by the U.S. Department of Defense found
that they failed to identify matches a third of the time.)

Soon after arriving in London, I visited the CCTV monitoring room in the
City of London police station, where the British war against terrorism
began. I was met by the press officer, Tim Parsons, and led up to the
control station, a modest-size installation that looks like an
air-traffic-control room, with uniformed officers manning two rows of
monitors. Although installed to catch terrorists, the cameras in the City
of London spend most of their time following car thieves and traffic
offenders. ''The technology here is geared up to terrorism,'' Parsons told
me. ''The fact that we're getting ordinary people -- burglars stealing cars
-- as a result of it is sort of a bonus.''

Have you caught any terrorists? I asked. ''No, not using this technology,
no,'' he replied.

[...]

Because the cameras on the ring of steel take clear pictures of each
driver's face, I asked whether the City used the biometric facial
recognition technology that American airports are now being urged to adopt.
''We're experimenting with it to see if we could pick faces out of the
crowd, but the technology is not sufficiently good enough,'' Parsons said.
''The system that I saw demonstrated two or three years ago, a lot of the
time it couldn't differentiate between a man and a woman.'' (In a recent
documentary about CCTV, Monty Python's John Cleese foiled a Visionics
face-recognition system that had been set up in the London borough of
Newham by wearing earrings and a beard.) Nevertheless, Parsons insisted
that the technology will become more accurate. ''It's just a matter of
time. Then we can use it to detect the presence of criminals on foot in the
city,'' he said.

In the future, as face-recognition technology becomes more accurate, it
will become even more intrusive, because of pressures to expand the
biometric database. I mentioned to Joseph Atick of Visionics that the City
of London was thinking about using his technology to establish a database
that would include not only terrorists but also all British citizens whose
faces were registered with the national driver's license bureau. If that
occurs, every citizen who walks the streets of the City could be instantly
identified by the police and evaluated in light of his past misdeeds, no
matter how trivial. With the impatience of a rationalist, Atick dismissed
the possibility. ''Technically, they won't be able to do it without coming
back to me,'' he said. ''They will have to justify it to me.'' Atick struck
me as a refined and thoughtful man (he is the former director of the
computational neuroscience laboratory at Rockefeller University), but it
seems odd to put the liberties of a democracy in the hands of one unelected
scientist.

[...]

...the surveillance systems for the London underground and the British
police feed into separate control rooms, but Sergio Velastin, a
computer-vision scientist, says he believes the two systems will eventually
be linked, using digital technology.

Velastin is working on behavioral-recognition technology for the London
underground that can look for unusual movements in crowds, setting off an
alarm, for example, when people appear to be fighting or trying to jump on
the tracks. (Because human CCTV operators are easily bored and distracted,
automatic alarms are viewed as the wave of the future.)

[See article for great black humour about what the CCTV operators focus on.
:-)]

[...]

''I actually don't think the cameras have had much effect on crime rates,''
says Jason Ditton, the criminologist, whose evaluation of the effect of the
cameras in Glasgow found no clear reduction in violent crime. ''We've had a
fall in crime in the last 10 years, and CCTV proponents say it's because of
the cameras. I'd say it's because we had a boom economy in the last seven
years and a fall in unemployment.'' Ditton notes that the cameras can
sometimes be useful in investigating terrorist attacks -- like the Brixton
nail-bomber case in 1999 -- but there is no evidence that they prevent
terrorism or other serious crime.

[...]

--
Lorraine P. King                            Telephone: (604) 936-6150
                                            Cellular:  (604) 723-6051




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