Are the Cameras in Baltimore invading our privacy, even helping? personally I DO NOT like having big brother all up in my face.

personally I DO NOT like having big brother all up in my face.


Andy Bucholz of G2 Tactics has suggested that mobile license plate reading (LPR) or ANPR (Automated Number Plate Recognition) will go mainstream. (More background on G2 Tactics). He is of course hoping that he can mass market his company's technology. This lead him to make the following statements which appeared in Wired News:

a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Giant data-tracking firms such as ChoicePoint, Accurint and Acxiom already collect detailed personal and financial information on millions of Americans. Once they discover how lucrative it is to know where a person goes between the supermarket, for example, and the strip club, the LPR industry could explode, says Bucholz.

Private detectives would want the information. So would repo men or bail bondsmen. And the government, which often contracts out personal data collection -- in part, so it doesn't have to deal with Freedom of Information Act requests -- might encourage it.

Not surprisingly, this hyperbole has resulted in a great deal of attention, such as a Slashdot article. I think this vision is unrealistic and really leads people to wonder why we don't have regulation. I think any steps towards wholesale use of smart cameras by insurance companies and data-tracking firms will lead to strong support for regulation relating to privacy and surveillance.


From The Detroit News Online:
An article about the smart cameras at San Francisco International Airport. It points out the basic uses for cameras such as "two airport workers scooting through a security door at the same time, when they should enter one at a time, or a vehicle parked too long at a place where it shouldn't be."

But for much more detail on the smart cameras at the airport, see the webinar by Vidient. It has lots of great information. The airport evaluated 18 cameras for 7 different behaviors. The final results were a > 91% accuracy rate with over 700 staged events and a 1% false detection rate.

The tested behaviors included:
Exit Lane Detection
Baggage Jam Detection
Baggage Inspection Table
Access Controlled doors
Vehicle Access Control
Large Stationary Vehicle
Stationary Vehicle

This was sponsored by Homeland Security and a sanitized version of the report will be available at some point.


From Copley New Service via SecurityInfoWatch.com:
A general overview article on smart cameras that focuses on implementations in San Diego. It discusses how they are used, the growing market, and some of the vendors.

It points out some installations of smart cameras:
San Diego's Metropolitan Wastewater Department (Perceptrak)
San Diego Metropolitan Transit System
SeaWorld
San Diego State University

It mentions a few key players:
Mark Denari - San Diego's Airport (formerly helped San Francisco with smart cameras)
David Reed - San Diego security company - Electro Specialty Systems
Jason Halverson - Frost and Sullivan research firm
Baltimore Experience

From Philadelphia Daily News:
A story that discusses Philadelphia's move towards widespread video surveillance. The best part of the article discusses the Baltimore surveillance experience. Couple of key points:

* Drug-forfeiture money and contributions from the Department of Homeland Security paid for Baltimore's $10-million camera program, officials said. But taxpayers will have to pick up the estimated $600,000 annual tab to keep the cameras rolling.
* About 170 fixed cameras, known as "hardwires," are permanently mounted atop light poles in six of the nine Baltimore police districts. The hardwires cost $25,000 apiece. Patrol cops are stationed near the cameras, and the recorded images are monitored inside police stations across the city, usually by retired police officers. The images are stored for 30 days on computer hard drives.
* The portable blue-lit cameras are nicknamed "the pod" and cost $20,000. Officers view the pod's images from a screen enclosed in a black briefcase inside their squad cars. One briefcase can link to many nearby pods. Only pods, and not fixed cameras, feature the flashing blue light. Police said the pod's main goal is to quickly quell crime.
* Baltimore police said they have seen an average 17 percent drop in crime in the areas where the cameras were installed.
* More than 1,400 arrests based on camera images have been made since January, Cassella said. The majority of the arrests have been for minor crimes (carrying marijuana, littering, etc.), according to Baltimore prosecutors. Margaret Burns, spokeswoman for the Baltimore prosecutor's office, calculated that from December through May, only one of every six arrests made through use of the cameras resulted in a guilty verdict. She blamed the low number of convictions on the "grainy" images the cameras usually produce. Burns said prosecutors have a hard time telling the difference between a "cigarette and a blunt" when watching a recording.


Poseidon Systems offers smart camera technology for drowning detection. It relies on underwater cameras and a processor that analyzes/tracks swimmers in real-time. They have press releases stating that their system helped detect near drownings. Here is a screen shot from their web site:

Screen Alert Big


Arms Race over Speed Cameras

A Press Release in Directions Magazine:

NAVTEQ is offering a Camera Alert feature in their vehicle navigation system. It has data (which is updated monthly) on the location of speed cameras. This allows drivers:

to get from A to B while being told via clear, concise voice alerts to avoid potential hazards such as speed cameras, speed limits and many officially designated accident blackspots. From the NAVTEQ newsletter

I am sure this will go over big in the UK, which has lots of speed cameras. But it highlights a potential arms race between navigational systems that cater to drivers and governments that don't want to publicize the location of cameras.


Criminals simply avoid cameras

Inspired by the Cincinnati Post:
Its something sociologists have long recognized, but its talked about very little. When cameras go up in one area, some crime may just move to another area. The term for this is displacement.

"We've never really gotten anything useful from them," said Cincinnati Police Capt. Kimberly Frey. With hopes that they would be a boon for crime-fighting, the city first installed video cameras in 1998. By 2000, their utility was already in doubt. A review by the University of Cincinnati that year found the devices accomplished little beyond shifting criminals out of areas under the lens into unwatched spots, where they resumed their illegal activities.

While the police captain is shaking his head, the academic review provides some key insights. Some of results of the study were published in Security Journal by Mazerolle, Hurley, and Chamlin (I believe the Cincinnati study was done for David Hurley's dissertation):

Our study of CCTV in Cincinnati found that surveillance cameras create somewhat of an initial deterrent effect in the month, perhaps two months, following implementation. We conclude that erecting signs to notify people about the cameras could possibly increase the level of deterrence of CCTV. Signs about CCTV cameras in operation would also address some of the fairness issues raised by civil libertarians. We also suggest that shifting CCTV cameras around on a frequent basis could solve two dilemmas: first, it would increase the number of hotspots under surveillance, and hence remove some of the inequities observed in CCTV deployment; second, short and periodic, as opposed to permanent, deployment of CCTV cameras would capitalize upon some of the initial deterrent effects of the cameras that are observed in our data.