Who or What Is Watching You?

By John Ballard

A story in today's NY Times reminded me of a couple others in recent memory. Follow me.

?Satellite-based software has been around for several years capable of monitoring weather details, sending emergency alerts to lifeguards when swimmers might be in trouble or sharks and riptides are in the neighborhood.

?Technology for covertly making cell phones into listening devices is also nothing new. Everyday folks don't worry about their phones becoming "hot mikes" when not in use, but well-informed businessmen have known for years. If they expect conversations they wish to keep private they don't just turn their phones off, they remove the batteries as well. Another "hot mike" application can be used too eavesdrop when the phone is in use.

Put all that together with this Times piece and see what you get.

Hundreds of correctional officers from prisons across America descended last spring on a shuttered penitentiary in West Virginia for annual training exercises.

Some officers played the role of prisoners, acting like gang members and stirring up trouble, including a mock riot. The latest in prison gear got a workout � body armor, shields, riot helmets, smoke bombs, gas masks. And, at this year�s drill, computers that could see the action.

Perched above the prison yard, five cameras tracked the play-acting prisoners, and artificial-intelligence software analyzed the images to recognize faces, gestures and patterns of group behavior. When two groups of inmates moved toward each other, the experimental computer system sent an alert � a text message � to a corrections officer that warned of a potential incident and gave the location.

The computers cannot do anything more than officers who constantly watch surveillance monitors under ideal conditions. But in practice, officers are often distracted. When shifts change, an observation that is worth passing along may be forgotten. But machines do not blink or forget. They are tireless assistants.

The enthusiasm for such systems extends well beyond the nation�s prisons. High-resolution, low-cost cameras are proliferating, found in products like smart-phones and laptop computers. The cost of storing images is dropping, and new software algorithms for mining, matching and scrutinizing the flood of visual data are progressing swiftly.

Imaginative variations on this technology are endless. Hospital rooms can be equipped with cameras which watch for patients getting out of bed when they shouldn't or medical personnel who fail to wash their hands and receive a recorded message as a reminder. Law enforcement applications have been well-known from the start of surveillance cameras, but facial recognition software is becoming more reliable than ever before. Those button-pushing investigators on CSI, Law & Order and Criminal Minds are not science fiction.

I don't know if we should thank key players at Google for not putting face-recognition software into the public domain or be suspicious that by restricting the new toys to government markets Google can get a higher price?

Google has also introduced an application called Goggles, which allows people to take a picture with a smart-phone and search the Internet for matching images. The company�s executives decided to exclude a facial-recognition feature, which they feared might be used to find personal information on people who did not know that they were being photographed.

[...]   Often, a technology that is benign in one setting can cause harm in a different context. Google confronted that problem this year with its face-recognition software. In its Picasa photo-storing and sharing service, face recognition helps people find and organize pictures of family and friends.

But the company took a different approach with Goggles, which lets a person snap a photograph with a smart-phone, setting off an Internet search. Take a picture of the Eiffel Tower and links to Web pages with background information and articles about it appear on the phone�s screen. Take a picture of a wine bottle and up come links to reviews of that vintage.

Google could have put face recognition into the Goggles application; indeed, many users have asked for it. But Google decided against it because smart-phones can be used to take pictures of individuals without their knowledge, and a face match could retrieve all kinds of personal information � name, occupation, address, workplace.

�It was just too sensitive, and we didn�t want to go there,� said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. �You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.�

Stalking.
Riiiight.
Am I the only person alive who sees the value of this for government surveillance?
Does anyone imagine this technology is not already in everyday use by the Department of Homeland Security?

Yo, whistleblowers... Here's your chance to put something into a Wikileaks or Open Leaks drop-box.

Oops. Now I just became part of a conspiracy. I better put up a Hat Tip to my Twitter source. I don't want to be alone in this matter.

~~~�~~~

(And a lot of people still worry about having a national ID card. Oddly enough, many in the same crowd are exactly the same ones who want to make all immigrants carry proof of their citizenship on their person at all times. Is this a mad, mad world or what?)