-Caveat Lector- Florida city's high-tech police surveillance draws criticism Copyright � 2001 Nando Media Copyright � 2001 Scripps Howard News Service By MURIEL DOBBIN, McClatchy Newspapers TAMPA, Fla. (September 9, 2001 12:08 p.m. EDT) - Stroll down the streets of Ybor City, a national historic landmark district where wrought-iron balconies curve around old brick buildings, and you may not notice the little cream-colored cameras taping your every move. Or even the street-corner signs that announce, "This area under video monitoring." You are in the midst of the nation's first experiment with facial surveillance cameras, which search the crowds for suspected criminals. Use of the new technology has aroused indignation among civil libertarians and conservatives who see it as constitutionally questionable as well as a police invasion of privacy. Concern about the possibility of lawsuits has been voiced by at least one city leader. The 8-week-old Florida pilot project, with its 36 tiny cameras suspended above the streets of Tampa's high-crime entertainment enclave, has allied ideological opposites such as Richard Armey, the conservative Republican leader of the House of Representatives, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Armey charged that such cameras risk putting the innocent beside the guilty in what he considers a police lineup, thus "eroding privacy and freedom." "The trend of government using technology to track citizens is disturbing," he warned. Advocates argue that the cameras "see what the police can't." Congressional hearings are expected this month on the cameras and other police uses of high technology. Armey is equally critical of so-called red-light cameras, which 50 cities have installed at intersections to ticket drivers who run red lights. Armey hailed San Diego Superior Court Judge Ronald Styn, who suspended that city's program in response to 400 lawsuits, for refusing recently to accept evidence from the cameras, saying they were manipulated to reap profits for the city and its contractors. The city collected $3.7 million in fines last year after cameras recorded 44,000 violations at 19 intersections. Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Armey, said a rash of lawsuits was anticipated in other cities where the red-light cameras were being used. He said it was Armey's position that motorists receiving tickets as a result of red- light cameras had more trouble arguing their case, since there was no police officer involved, and may not even have been the driver the car at the time of the alleged offense. Jeffrey Runge, recently named head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said he approves using red-light cameras at intersections. "There aren't enough police out there to catch red light runners," he said. But the prime focus of the furor about remote-control police surveillance is on 36 tiny cameras suspended on poles above the 16 square blocks of Ybor City, (pronounced EE-bore) where on weekends streets are so crammed with revelers that they have to be closed to traffic. The cameras, linked by fiber-optic cable to monitors and software in a police substation a few blocks away, can alert the 45 police officers on patrol to the presence of a suspect in the crowd. The software maps and measures the planes of the full face, starting with the eyes, even estimating the dimensions of the sockets. The results are then compared with a data base of offenders. The cameras don't bother Doug Horton, a Tampa taxi driver. "If you've got nothing to hide, why would they bother you?" he said. Yet Jim Garris, operations manager of Columbia, the oldest restaurant in Ybor City, recalled that two customers had made a point of calling him to say they would not come back to a place where they were being spied on. Loss of tourism is only one of the worries of Rose Ferlita, the only member of the Tampa City Council who is an outspoken critic of the facial recognition cameras. The city council recently approved a year's free trial of the pilot surveillance project. Ferlita emphasized that she was all for law and order. "I'm a conservative Republican in the midst of a bunch of liberal Democrats, but I think this is the wrong tool to hand police," she said. "We have become guinea pigs for a plan that in my opinion has constitutional problems," she said. The other side of the story was offered in a cramped police office in Ybor City that houses a bank of 10 monitors. "What critics are leaving out of this is the fact that there is human intervention," said Detective Bill Todd, an 18-year-veteran who coordinates the surveillance program. Jiggling camera images with a joystick, Todd said that if a camera zoomed in on a face that seemed to match one of the 1,000 "wanted" images in a data bank, it was immediately checked by the officer operating the cameras. If it was a match, a siren would sound, he said, and the police on patrol would be alerted to check the suspect out. Todd admitted that so far there had been no face matches and no arrests as a result of what he described as "a test with great expectations." Joseph Atick, founder of Visionics, the company providing surveillance cameras in Ybor City for a year as a free test, said that crime dropped 40 percent in a London suburb where it was first tried. Yet he too acknowledged the need for regulation. At a recent press conference in Washington, Atick stressed that there should be visible signs indicating where surveillance cameras were located, as well as guidelines for police sharing of photographic images and automatic deletion of pictures without specific connection to criminals. Atick acknowledged in an interview that he wanted to avoid legal problems that could arise from abuse of camera surveillance techniques. "This industry has to make sure there is legislation in place penalizing misuse," he said. <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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