Tag Archives: surveillance

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Potential outcomes of pervasive surveillance

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CCTV camerasSometimes it really feels like science-fictional thinking is becoming a much more mainstream thing to do. Following on from yesterday’s mention of CCTV control software that can learn to recognise suspicious behaviour (as defined by operator feedback, natch), out-bound BoingBoing guest blogger Paul Spinrad decided to think out loud about what might happen in a society where you were always under surveillance in public. Granted, BoingBoing isn’t exactly aloof from the sf-nal mindset, but even so…

Teenage girls become statistically less fearful about body image, and anorexia rates drop. Rifts develop between groups with different attitudes towards concealment. A tipping point is reached, and in the Prisoner’s Dilemma of female modesty, power is taken back by the unionized-sisterhood strength of concealment over the winner-take-all competition of the freer playing field. Male attitudes toward women change as a result.

Meanwhile, law enforcement and the intelligence community don’t want faces covered, with all their face-recognition and tracking software. So anti-concealment laws are put in place. The cool rebel kids (along with true criminals) also push in the direction of concealment. A mini industry springs up of wearable concealing devices, analogous to radar jammers and license plate concealers, with a similar “arms race” between laws and the innovations designed to circumvent them. Welcome to the see-easy; check your headcover at the door.

The comment thread quickly knocks down the female modesty theory, but I think we can see the beginnings of that cold-war-ish escalation of technological advancement from the second paragraph happening right now… certainly in my RSS feeds, anyway.

I’m reminded again of David Brin’s Transparent Society, and remain convinced that sousveillance would be of great social benefit in the longer run. Private and gubernatorial surveillance, on the other hand, is terrifying me more and more as the months go by; the only upside I can see is that I’ll get my naive teenaged wish of living in a Gibsonian cyberpunk dystopia… [image by Caveman 92223]

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Merry Christmas; I got you a panopticon

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Two quick links; I’ll leave you to do the math yourself. First up – ‘smart’ CCTV system learns to spot suspicious behaviour with a little help from its human operators:

… a next-generation CCTV system, called Samurai, which is capable of identifying and tracking individuals that act suspiciously in crowded public spaces. It uses algorithms to profile people’s behaviour, learning about how people usually behave in the environments where it is deployed. It can also take changes in lighting conditions into account, enabling it to track people as they move from one camera’s viewing field to another.

[…]

Samurai is designed to issue alerts when it detects behaviour that differs from the norm, and adjusts its reasoning based on feedback. So an operator might reassure the system that the person with a mop appearing to loiter in a busy thoroughfare is no threat. When another person with a mop exhibits similar behaviour, it will remember that this is not a situation that needs flagging up.

And secondly – a facial recognition door lock system retailing for under UK£300.

… can store and register up to 500 faces thanks to an internal dual sensor and two cameras. This, claims the manufacturer, “allows it to establish an incredible facial recognition algorithm in a fraction of a second”. Importantly, the system also works at night. A 3.5 inch screen and touch keypad are also included.

The system can also be used to record attendance in an office. There’s a USB and Ethernet port so that managers can download or keep track of who arrives and leaves the office when.

I have the sudden urge to talk at length to people about the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

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Software that learns to recognise faces and voices like a child

camera-head stencilsA computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania has decided to mimic the way children learn to recognise faces and voices in order to speed up the artificial learning curve of intelligent systems:

Using novel learning algorithms that combine audio, video, and text streams, Taskar and his research team are teaching computers to recognize faces and voices in videos. Their system recognizes when someone in the video or audio mentions a name, whether he or she is talking about himself or herself, or whether he or she is talking about someone in the third person. It then maps that correspondence between names and faces and names and voices.

“An intelligent system needs to understand more than just visual input, and more than just language input or audio or speech. It needs to integrate everything in order to really make any progress,” Taskar says.

The information Taskar’s team feeds into the system is free training data harvested from the Internet. Attempts to teach computers visual recognition in the pre-Internet age were hampered in large part by a lack of training content. Today, Taskar says, the Internet provides a “massive digitization of knowledge.” People post videos, comments, blogs, music, and critiques about their favorite things and interests.

Hah! And they said YouTube would never do any real good! Taskar’s computer seems destined for a life of increasing frustration with irresolvable plot lines, though, as they’re training it by showing it episodes of Lost:

As Tasker’s team feeds more data about Lost into the computer—such as video clips, scripts, or blogs—the system improves at identifying people in the video. If, for example, a clip contains footage of characters Kate and Anna Lucia, after being taught, the computer will recognize their faces.

“The alogorithm is learning this from what people say, or from screenplays as well,” Taskar adds. “The screenplay doesn’t tell you who is who, but it tells you there’s a scene with [two characters] talking to each other.”

Taskar says the information the research has produced can be helpful in many ways, particularly in searching videos for content. Currently, if a father is searching for a photo of his daughter playing with the family dog in his gigabytes of photos and videos on his hard drive, unless the photo is tagged “daughter playing with dog,” chances are he isn’t going to be able to find it.

Well, that’s your consumer-level pitch, sure, but the system will be too large and ungainly (and expensive) for Joe Average for a long time. Tasker should probably talk to the UK government… that panoply of CCTV cameras keeps growing, and it costs big money to hire people to watch their output. And what could possibly go wrong with putting an automated recognition system in charge of crime prevention? [image by bixentro]

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Wi-fi makes walls see-through

wi-fi routerRemember me mentioning the special paint for making wi-fi cold-spots?

Well, here’s a reason you might want to invest in some – via Bruce Schneier we discover that some folk at the University of Utah have found a way to surveil the inside of a building using wireless signals:

The surveillance technique is called variance-based radio tomographic imaging and works by visualizing variations in radio waves as they travel to nodes in a wireless network. A person moving inside a building will cause the waves to vary in that location, the researchers found, allowing an observer to map their position.

The researchers, electrical engineering graduate student Joey Wilson and his faculty advisor Neil Patwari, have tested the technique with a 34-node wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol, according to the MIT Technology Review. By “interrogating” the space with signals and multiple receivers, the researchers found they were able to read the waves to detect the location of a moving object within a meter of accuracy.

OK, so it’s not quite kit you can buy from the local Electronics Barn… but you can pretty much guarantee that now the proof-of-concept has been done, all sorts of smart types will be looking at making affordable homebrew versions. [image by delta_avi_delta]

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Crime may not pay, but perhaps watching for it might

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"one nation under cctv" by BanksyAs much as things may be tough in the States right now, at least you can all get a good laugh watching the UK slide towards becoming a pseudo-totalitarian panopticon state. [image by JapanBlack]

Via Cheryl Morgan comes news of the latest iteration of our enthusiastically participatory society of snoops and spies – crowdsourced CCTV crimespotting, with fabulous monetary prizes to be won!

The cameras’ owners will pay a fee to have users watch the footage. The scheme, Internet Eyes, is being promoted as a game and is expected to go “live” next month with a test run in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Subscribers will be able to register free and will be given up to four cameras to monitor.

Eventually the consortium behind the idea hopes to have internet users around the world focused on Britain’s 4.2 million security cameras, waiting to see and report a crime in return for cash prizes.

[…]

Subscribers will try to collect points by monitoring cameras in real time. If they see anything suspicious, they will click a button to send a still picture and text message to the camera’s owner.

The owner will then send a feedback e-mail to the person reporting the incident, indicating whether there has been a crime or suspected crime.

Users will be awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three if they see an actual crime. They can also lose points if the camera operator decides that the alert was not a crime.

Good grief… it’s much like the crowdsourced surveillance of the US border with Mexico, only with cash incentives. And the thing is, recent research suggests that cash incentives are actually counterproductive in situations where our ethical stance plays a part [via TechDirt]:

… incentives affect what our actions signal, whether we’re being self-interested or civic-minded, manipulated or trusted, and they can imply—sometimes wrongly—what motivates us. Fines or public rebukes that appeal to our moral sentiments by signaling social disapproval (think of littering) can be highly effective. But incentives go wrong when they offend or diminish our ethical sensibilities.

This does not mean it’s impossible to appeal to self-interested and ethical motivations at the same time—just that efforts to do so often fail. Ideally, policies support socially valued ends not only by harnessing self-interest but also by encouraging public-spiritedness. The small tax on plastic grocery bags enacted in Ireland in 2002 that resulted in their virtual elimination appears to have had such an effect. It punished offenders monetarily while conveying a moral message. Carrying a plastic bag joined wearing a fur coat in the gallery of antisocial anachronisms.

However, no one in the upper echelons of the business and gubernatorial spheres seems to have taken any notice of this, or of any of the other psychological research of the last few decades that has continually flagged up the same problem… I guess that a clear conscience is no suitable incentive for removing one’s own pre-existing incentives package. Go figure.