-Caveat Lector- Video surveillance, digital style http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20010724wo61.htm By John Jerney In George Orwell's "1984," Big Brother maintained video and sound surveillance of practically all citizens within Oceania. Oceania, as you will recall, was one of the three large powers within Orwell's imagined totalitarian world of the future. Video surveillance in 2001 is hardly a new idea. In fact, we've been living with some form of video surveillance for over 20 years, with cameras becoming familiar fixtures in banks, stores, office buildings, and more. So it was hardly a big deal earlier this year when the city of Tampa, Fla., used a sophisticated form of digital video surveillance for Super Bowl XXXV. Following this, who could object to the police installing 36 new cameras in Ybor City, Tampa's nightlife district, on a permanent basis? I mean, who is against the idea of police catching more bad guys? It turns out that the video system used by the Tampa Police, developed by Visionics Corp., uses sophisticated software to match the face of every person walking down the street against a database of known criminals. The system, known as Smart CCTV, forwards any potential matches to a police officer who then performs a conventional match between the "suspect" and the photo in the database. Of course, Tampa isn't the first city to do this. A similar system has been operating in England for years. But it is the first time that it has been publicly deployed in a permanent fashion in a U.S. city, raising serious concerns about potential abuse and privacy infringements. Some have argued that this system is not unlike placing a policeman on the corner and having him or her watch out for known troublemakers. Others have added that computer software is perhaps even less likely to discriminate, offering a dispassionate evaluation of the potential criminality of passersby. So, is there anything wrong with digital video surveillance? Most everyone wants to live in a world with less crime, especially violent offenses. But the trade-off almost always means a more pervasive state and, in the digital world of the Internet, a potentially much more intrusive state. The most obvious problem with a system such as the one in Tampa and else where is the question of where does this stop? For example, the current system in Tampa focuses on catching individual outlaws. But what if the system was "upgraded" to monitor people walking or otherwise communicating with suspects? In other words, what if you could become a suspect just by accidentally being associated with one? More directly, would you want all your associations, even casual ones, to be viewed and recorded? In the United States there is a right to free association. Part of the implied nature of this right is a certain degree of privacy. What would the value of this right be in a society where all public associations are digitally recorded? Furthermore, we hope that the surveillance system does not discriminate in selecting individuals to check against the database. But how can we know that this particular system, or any other system, is programmed in such a fashion? For example, what if the system was programmed to more closely examine individuals with a certain racial profile, or from a certain region of the world? As we have seen with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Carnivore system, which checks e-mail passing through Internet service providers, law enforcement agencies are not exactly thrilled about having their systems examined through external, independent audit. In other words, there is no telling whether digital video surveillance is just the high-tech version of racial profiling. There is yet another concern with the notion of widespread digital video surveillance. The Tampa system is currently concentrated around a single entertainment district. However, what happens when the system is spread throughout a community? Would anyone reasonably want the state to have a digital record of their travels throughout an entire day? Think of it this way. What if you had to be fingerprinted every time you walked down a street, entered a shop, or got on a train? Would this be reasonable in a free society? Digital video surveillance is however, in effect, a form of virtual fingerprinting. I fear that these first seemingly natural steps in digital video surveillance may be the precursor to the acceptance of a more broadly based system of automated surveillance, and not all organized by the state. Web cams and home-based video security systems are likely to continue to increase in popularity. Likewise, I recently met with a company that is working on sending compressed video signals over wireless communication links. One of the potential markets they are targeting is the rental car business, as these companies have expressed interest in placing small video cameras in the cars they rent to enable them to monitor how their cars are being driven. Sound farfetched? Perhaps. But one can easily imagine digital video surveillance popping up in a number of unexpected places. With video-enabled third-generation phones and beyond, it's easy to imagine a world where just about everything is captured and transmitted in one form or another. Come to think of it, with such a widely distributed and highly ubiquitous network of video capture going on all around us, one could imagine the state wanting to get out of the digital video surveillance business, with the goal of avoiding the controversy altogether. Much better to just pull the transmissions quietly from the air and let the software do its magic, much like the reported Echelon system. After all, who could object to a safer society with fewer criminals running around on the loose? Big Brother never had it so good. (Jerney is president of Volksware, Inc., a Silicon Valley-based publishing, consulting and professional services firm specializing in e-commerce, mobile computing, the Internet and Web publishing. If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about Silicon Valley, please send them along to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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