-Caveat Lector- LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACHTUNG! <http://www.e-venthorizon.net/antimatter/surveillance.html> by Brian Onley, antiMatter columnist July 15, 2001 "Take our cameras away and only twits will have cameras..." --National Covert Surveillance Association For a long time now, surveillance imaging has been a multi-billion dollar industry. Everyone from the Defense Department all the way down to the convenience store on your local street corner has gobs of cameras in plain sight. In most cases this surveillance gear has primarily been used for protection from possible theft, robbery, or my personal favorite "other criminal activity." Currently though, a disturbing trend towards the use of surveillance equipment for outright spying on common people going about normal daily activities in the public community has become equivalent to a dictatorial police state something akin to what Russia and Nazi Germany experienced for so many years. The increasing use of so-called speed-trap-cameras and facial recognition systems recently in the news has a more insidious ring to it than anyone is willing to talk much about. Since this technology has been staring the general public in the face for quite awhile, it appears some feel there is not a problem using it for what borders on questionable issues of constitutionality. Further, at what point do the machinations of "duly elected" officials' decisions to implement public safety measures using such technology perform anything but governmental safety measures and ultimately total control? After all, paranoia in both government and the private sector has reared its ugly head in other ways, each time chipping away the gray areas around our fundamental rights and freedoms. These attempts at "chipping" are coming dangerously close to the ultimate removal of any personal rights for what they deem to be the greater good. This in turn leads to the question the greater good for whom and why? Legalese The form of law under which the use of these cameras falls is Search & Seizure, or S&S. The cameras search for your car tags or face in a crowd and then they seize your money or your freedom, or both. The pure essence of S&S can be summed up as clearly warrantless and as we have seen in the past, does not legally fall under the U.S. Constitution in this particular form: Most searches occur without warrants being issued. Over the years, the courts have defined a number of situations in which a search warrant is not necessary, either because the search is per se reasonable under the circumstances or because, due to a lack of a reasonable expectation of privacy, the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply at all.1 It is the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' at issue here and what exactly defines 'reasonable expectation.' Seated within the confines of your privately owned vehicle, you are no longer within the private domain. Since you are now in public, on a public street in full view of the authorities at all times, you now have lost the constitutional rights based solely on privacy. Decisions to expand the S&S process parameters were simple. What if someone was in their car on their way to commit a crime, and had a firearm in clear view on the front seat? Obviously if they were stopped by a police officer in a routine manner, the sight of the gun on the seat would allow the officer to conduct a further search of the driver and/or the vehicle without first obtaining a warrant, based solely upon the officer's judgment of the circumstances at the time. This indefinable judgment is another tidy little piece of law referred to as Probable Cause, which defines the grounds for S&S: The Fourth Amendment doesn't define "probable cause." Its meaning remains fuzzy. What is clear is that after 200 years of court interpretations, the affidavits submitted by police officers to judges have to identify objectively suspicious activities rather than simply recite the officer's subjective beliefs. The affidavits also have to establish more than a "suspicion" that criminal activity is afoot, but do not have to show "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." The information in the affidavit need not be in a form that would make it admissible at trial. However, the circumstances set forth in the affidavit as a whole should demonstrate the reliability of the information.2 Of course, our patrol officers are only following guidelines passed down to them by their superiors, the result of decisions ultimately made elsewhere. In essence, the officers are only doing their job. Though both S&S and probable cause have become formal policy and are designed to aid the enforcement of law, the issue which comes dangerously close to a state dictatorial power is the gradual inclusion of what constitutes the basis for Probable Cause, and hence S&S. Public safety has always been the calling card for new and improved restrictions on personal liberties. Let's face it; society has changed somewhat in over 200 years. Advances in 'probable cause' legislation have widened the gray areas of legal enforcement to the point that there can be almost no clear-cut method to determine what in fact constitutes probable cause. Cars may be searched without a warrant whenever the car has been validly stopped and the police have probable cause to believe the car contains contraband or evidence…While a police officer cannot search a car simply because the car was stopped for a traffic infraction since routine traffic stops are not arrests that would justify a "search incident to an arrest" the police can order the driver and any passengers out of the car for safety considerations, even though there is no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing other than the traffic infraction. The police also can "frisk" the occupants for weapons so long as they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the occupants are involved in criminal activity beyond the traffic violation and are reasonably concerned for their safety. 3 It is the inexactness of the wording here that some find worrisome; words such as "...'reasonable suspicion' that the occupants are involved in criminal activity beyond the traffic violation." Obviously if the suspect appears intoxicated, psychotic, angry, and waving weapons, it would be natural to any sensible person that this would constitute 'reasonable suspicion.' But what if you are simply on your way home from work? The police are sometimes accused of using technical traffic violations as a pretext for stopping the car for the real reason of conducting a further investigation that often includes a frisk and possible search of the vehicle. Sometimes these types of stops are allegedly based on racial profiling. Whatever the police officer's motives, however, if the officer had a valid reason to stop the vehicle, even a ticky-tack one like a broken rear taillight, the stop is legal. And, if the initial stop is valid, any lawful frisk, search or arrest that follows the stop is also valid.4 The use of probable cause decisions at the street level can have far-flung ramifications. Since the definition of probable cause is solely based on one person's opinion and without further qualifications, it would only be a matter of time before those opinions could move further from actual defined criminal activity to something that appears on the surface as "...activity that might be criminal". Real crime is in fact a serious problem and should not be taken lightly. But at what point does the definition of "criminal activity" stop? Short of pushing that topic to the nth degree, it would not take much to foresee inclusion of personal habits deemed illegal, activity unbecoming a citizen, and mere suspicion of either of those. Not unlike the Salem Witch Hunts in America's illustrious past whereby the ignorance and fears of a few led to the destruction of many, all based on mere suspicion, conjecture, and no real foundation. The use of remote cameras to widen probable cause and further S&S enforcements on the surface may not actually appear quite so threatening. In point of fact, lives may actually be saved through the use of such stoplight intersection cameras. But it is the ultimate evolution of definition-of-use further down the road that must be carefully weighed here make a buck for the coffers today but define all new criminal activity for tomorrow. Technology There is much more involved with these types of systems than one would think. We're not talking about simple closed-circuit television anymore. The days of some guy sitting in front of a monitor watching your activities are over. In the past, security personnel had to watch banks of individual camera monitors. Because in some cases as the shear volume in the proportion of cameras-to-monitors grew, it became increasingly more difficult for one or more people to keep up with it. Along came a change in policy as well as new technology based on an old one, the VCR. Instead of trying to stop crime as it happened, it became the policy to simply record the process for later reference, if needed. Special VCRs were constructed which primarily used multiple tracks on videotape to accommodate multiple cameras. In many cases, certain security personnel simply became tape changers. As in all cases in our society, once someone figures out the costs and benefits needed to supply such a security force far outweigh profitability and convenience, automation steps in. Currently these automated processes are growing exponentially. Research and development into cost-efficient methods of data processing have pushed covert surveillance to unprecedented levels bordering on science fiction, if not surpassing it. The following comes from Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Sciences: Keeping track of people, vehicles and their interactions in a complex environment is a difficult task. The first step of VSAM (Video Surveillance And Monitoring) video understanding technology is to automatically "parse" people and vehicles from raw video. We have developed robust routines for detecting moving objects and tracking them through a video sequence using a combination of temporal differencing and template tracking. Detected objects are classified into semantic categories such as human, human group, car, and truck using shape and color analysis, and these labels are used to improve tracking using temporal consistency constraints. Further classification of human activity, such as walking and running, has also been achieved.5 The development of this type of object detection goes on to include combinational aspects of the objects and their relationship to one another: We have developed a prototype activity recognition method that estimates activities of multiple objects from attributes computed by low-level detection and tracking subsystems. The activity label chosen by the system is the one that maximizes the probability of observing the given attribute sequence. To obtain this, a Markov model is introduced that describes the probabilistic relations between attributes and activities. We tested the functionality of our method with synthetic scenes which have human-vehicle interaction. In our test system, continuous feature vector output from the low-level detection and tracking algorithms is quantized into a discrete set of attributes and values for each tracked blob: - object class: Human, Vehicle, HumanGroup - object action: Appearing, Moving, Stopped, Disappearing - interaction: Near, MovingAwayFrom, MovingTowards, NoInteraction These features were quantized into symbols and used as the input of the system. The activities to be labeled are 1) A Human entered a Vehicle, 2) A Human got out of a Vehicle, 3) A Human exited a Building, 4) A Human entered a Building, 5) A Vehicle parked, and 6) Human Rendezvous. To train the activity classifier, conditional and joint probabilities of attributes and actions are obtained by generating many synthetic activity occurrences in simulation, and measuring low-level feature vectors such as distance and velocity between objects, similarity of the object to each class category, and a noise-corrupted sequence of object action classifications.6 The Forest of Sensors project to specify 'object and activity classification' in imaging determination comes from the MIT AI (Artificial Intelligence) Lab and has been running for close to four years: The most interesting aspect of our work is that it is almost completely automated. Once the cameras are placed and tracking begins, all the work performed by the system is done with minimal human intervention. This includes maintaining a tracking database, relative calibration of the cameras, and object and activity classification.7 The End? It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that these closed circuit versions of uberspook are scaring the bejesus out of some of the very people responsible for its introduction. In recent articles on Tampa's use of facial recognition systems, some members of the city council responded in questionable denial: Now, council members Linda Saul-Selina, Gwen Miller and Rose Ferlita say they had no idea they had voted to approve the Ybor City camera software and claim the resolution was buried within pages of other city business and the associative language "was confusing." The members, some of whom have appeared on national television shows to express their displeasure with the system say they're outraged and think the cameras and the digital databases are a blatant invasion of privacy. Tampa Councilman Bob Buckhorn, who sponsored the legislation behind the face-recognition technology, said he didn't call for "full-blown public hearings on the matter" because the system didn't immediately involve the expenditure of taxpayer money. Now, Rose Ferlita is demanding that the city council take up a vote to terminate the contract with the software manufacturer.8 If elected officials don't know what they are signing, it makes you wonder what else was "buried within pages of other city business." As a small side note, not everyone who has their picture taken is in fact a criminal and we may need to definitely change to more formal definitions: It's no surprise that the program causes controversy, (Sgt. Ernest) Adams says. No one likes getting a traffic citation, and cameras are indiscriminate. At least 10 police officers, he says, have been snapped running lights and have gone to court to challenge the tickets.9 I do have a small suggestion for anyone considering adding their fair city to this new technological wastebin let us aim and monitor those very same cameras on the council chambers, in their cars, at their homes, and every place they go. That way we can see what fine, upstanding work they're doing and whether or not we wish to continue the menage-a-twits. ---------------------- Notes: 1-4 Search Warrants: What They Are and When They're Necessary; www.nolo.com 5-6 VSAM IFD Single Camera Surveillance Technologies; www.cs.cmu.edu 7 A Forest of Sensors; MIT AI Lab; www.ai.mit.edu 8 Fell Through The Cracks" Say Council Members; Bay News; www.baynews9.com 9 Motorists race to court to challenge red-light cameras Photos called privacy threat; USA Today; www.usatoday.com ---------------------- For more info: The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America; Jeffrey Rosen; ISBN: 0679445463 Ben Franklin's Web Site: Privacy and Curiosity from Plymouth Rock to the Internet; Robert Ellis Smith, Sangram Majumdar; ISBN: 0930072146 The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality; Reginald Whitaker; ISBN: 1565845692 The End of Privacy;Charles J. Sykes; ISBN: 0312203500 The Limits of Privacy; Amitai Etzioni; ISBN: 046504090X Understanding Surveillance Technologies: Spy Devices, Their Origins and Applications; Julie K. Petersen, Saba Zamir; ISBN: 0849322987 Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards : U.S. Covert Action & Counterintelligence; Roy Godson; ISBN: 0765806991 Who Elected the Bankers: Surveillance and Control in World Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy); Louis W. Pauly ; ISBN: 0801483751 Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Issues in Society); David Lyon; ISBN: 0335205461 Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover's FBI Surveillance of American Sociology (Contributions in Sociology, No. 126); Mike Forrest Keen; ISBN: 0313298130 The Basement Bugger's Bible: The Professional's Guide to; Shifty Bugman; ISBN: 1581600224 ---------------------- usenet groups alt.law-enforcement alt.privacy alt.privacy.spyware alt.private.investigator comp.society.privacy dejanews.com/surveillance soc.rights.human ---------------------- websites [see website for embedded links] Search & Seizure: Fourth Amendment Issues (about.com) Understanding Search & Seizure Law (nolo.com) Search & Seizure (lawinfo.com) Effective Search & Seizure (Florida State University) Search & Seizure Bulletin (policecenter.com) Federal Guidelines for Searching and Seizing Computers (US Dept of Justice) George Orwell's "1984" (complete text online) Privacy International Electronic Privacy Information Center Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Privacy Initiatives; (Federal Trade Commission) privacy.org Online Privacy Alliance Washington DC: Police Surveillance Police Surveillance (British Home Office) <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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