Remember To Use Your 'Inside Voice'

Just caught this article by New Scientist writer, Paul Marks, on an emerging surveillance analysis area seeing some light across the pond. A new group, the Center for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), has set its sights on improving Britain's existing CCTV infrastructure by monitoring and predicting violent behavior exhibited on the streets and public transportation.

Paul quotes CSIT director Paul Miller in the article:

"Despite massive investment in CCTV, the impact on antisocial and criminal behavior is negligible because very little video is ever analyzed...we're trying to find a set of behavioral events that will allow CCTV to become active and alert operators to potential trouble."

Marks notes different instances -- including people shouting drivers and loitering on the stairs of double decker buses -- that could trigger an alert to notify authorities. Not sure a disgruntled passenger complaining over the $0.50 increase in fares warrants a police alert, but for more threatening and dangerous situations, I can see this being a worthwhile addition to the existing CCTV capabilities.

Another CSIT project of note includes an initiative to try and conceal metal detectors in the bus door frame. I should probably leave my samurai sword at home before hopping on next time.

Check out the article in full here.

Daily Headers: May 22, 2009

Report: CCTV Schemes in City and Town Centers Have Little Effect on Crime
The Guardian
Alan Travis

• The use of closed-circuit television in cities, town centers and public housing estates does not have a significant effect on crime, according to Home Office-funded research to be distributed to all police forces in England and Wales this summer.
  
• The review of 44 research studies on CCTV schemes by the Campbell Collaboration found that they do have a modest impact on crime overall, but are at their most effective in cutting vehicle crime in car parks, especially when used alongside improved lighting and the introduction of security guards.
  
• The Campbell Collaboration report says that CCTV is now the single most heavily-funded crime prevention measure operating outside the criminal justice system and its rapid growth has come with a huge price tag. It adds that £170m was spent on CCTV schemes in town and city centerse, car parks and residential areas between 1999 and 2001 alone. "Over the last decade, CCTV accounted for more than three-quarters of total spending on crime prevention by the British Home Office," the report says.
  
• Am going to look into this one a bit further. Definitely some additional factors involved in the effectiveness of CCTV grids, including camera placement and image quality. Interested to dig a bit deeper and read the actual report. I'll report back.

Swiss Narrowly Accept Biometric Passport
Associated Press
Eliane Engeler

• By a narrow margin, Swiss voters accepted an overhaul of the country's passport system to include travel documents equipped with biometric data -- a change needed for Switzerland to stay on the United States' visa waiver program.
  
• The biometric passport was approved by 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent margin, reflecting widespread concern over government intrusion into people's privacy in a country that does not belong to the European Union and has long valued its independence.
  
• Switzerland joined Europe's control-free travel zone last year, which requires countries to register citizens' facial and fingerprint images on an electronic chip in the passport.
  
• Most of the 27 European Union members have issued biometric passports since 2006. But Switzerland has until March 2010 to put in place the new travel document, according to European law.
  
• Great to see this widespread deployment continue. DHS recently announced initiatives to improve current passport technology -- it looks like it's taking off worldwide.
  

Some People Really 'Never Forget A Face'
California Science & Technology News

• A new study suggests that skill in facial recognition might vary widely among humans. Previous research has identified as much as 2 percent of the population as having "face-blindness," or prosopagnosia, a condition characterized by great difficulty in recognizing faces. For the first time, this new research shows that others excel in face recognition, indicating that the trait could be on a spectrum, with prosopagnosics on the low end and super-recognizers at the high end.
  
• The research involved administering standardized facial recognition tests. The super-recognizers scored far above average on these tests—higher than any of the normal control subjects.
  
• One woman in the study said she had identified another woman on the street who served as her as a waitress five years earlier in a different city. Critically, she was able to confirm that the other woman had in fact been a waitress in the different city. Often, super-recognizers are able to recognize another person despite significant changes in appearance, such as aging or a different hair color.
  
• The human mind never fails to amaze me -- and disappoint at the same time.

More British Airports to get Face Rec

In a proclaimed effort to “put British workers first,” ten more airports will be getting the same facial recognition system currently in use at Heathrow. The technology is aimed to crack down on individuals attempting to enter the country using fake passports. Though controlling the use of forged or false documents has obvious national security implications, it seems odd to me that the case for the systems would be made with such an immigration labor focus.

Said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith:

"Even in a downturn, we still need migrants - but we should be more selective about their skills levels, and we should do more to put British workers first."

Well, whatever the rationale, at least they will avoid Japan’s recent problems with their own airport passport checks.

Race Rec Face Rec

In most research and law enforcement circles, the prospect of using advanced facial recognition technology to determine an individual’s sex or race is an understandable gray area. Though census takers, demographers, and police reports have always concerned themselves with these details, the idea that a computer might reliably judge the racial background of each and every city passerby is more than a little creepy to some and raises the specter of racial profiling.

Recently Benjamin Wales, a graduating student at the Royale College of Art, set out to test peoples sensitivities on the subject by deploying his own "race detection" camera apperatuses [Spy Blog via Rajiv Shah] on the streets of London. And though he published no scientific data about the accuracy of his systems, it was clear that many who came across his art project shared Mr. Wales' mixed feelings on the technology.

Had scientific results actually been published in this project, however, I doubt they would have been terribly good. It turns out that this kind of image classification is awfully difficult to accomplish. To understand why, take a look at this research project at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).




In this research project, MERL succeeds in getting what you might consider "pretty good" results using two different image classification routines, Male vs. Female & Asian vs. Non-Asian, on excellent video footage of various faces. On thier own, these overly simple binary classifiers work well enough to justify further research, not well enough for any real world real-time law enforcement or profiling function.

Further, if MERL had added additional race classification outcomes, like black, or Korean, or Latino, etc., the level of accuracy they might be expected to achieve would decline considerably. And if they added enough racial classifications to approximate the actual diversity found in major cities, the algorithm would likely cease to provide any meaningful data at all.

One area where racial classification does show some promise, however, is in the the area of video search. The day is not very far away when a police official might be able to query a city surveillance system for an "Asian women with a red purse" when attempting to track down a suspected kidnaper and her victim. There would be a number of false matches, of course, and a human might still need to review a lot of video to ultimately close in on their intended suspect, but the search would be faster, more focused and sweep up fewer innocent bystanders if some face/person search algorithm was used.

I think this is a more realistic and reasonable use case for face classification...and one that might actually do some good, as well.

Too Much Information Makes Us Less Secure

How many cameras do you need to have before you can't see anything? How much video do you need to store before you can't find what you were looking for? Whatever that level is, the Brits passed it a long time ago when, as the author of this piece quips, the answer to the needle in the haystack problem became to "collect more haystacks."

"The answer in both America and Britain has been to collect more haystacks: useless, indiscriminately acquired information on people who've done nothing to arouse suspicion," he writes. "We even inveigle our citizens to become amateur curtain-twitchers and pecksniffs, demanding that they report "suspicious" activity to the authorities. Between DNA databases, mandatory fingerprinting for visa seekers, CCTV carpet-bombing, and Oyster card data, we've never collected more "security" information than we do today. But does this really make us secure? Is it possible to know too much?"

I think the question is not "Is it possible to know too much?", but rather "Is it possible for too much information to overwhelm our ability to know anything at all?". In which case the answer is a resounding yes! The delta between what security professionals can collect today and what they can process is called the "Security Gap" and it's getting bigger every day.

But, I'm not sure it's time to hoist the white flag just yet, however. A few years ago, after the bombing in London, closing the Security Gap meant assigning over one thousand MI-5 agents to manually review surveillance video. The process took over 6 weeks. Today, using new search and video analysis technology, just a handful of those agents could have probably completed much of the same work in a few days. Search technology in particular is rapidly closing the gap between the data we can collect and store and what we can "know". It's not unlike what happened with the Internet when tools like Google have made sifting through billions of images and pages as simple as typing a few key words. Suddenly this huge heap of information that had been sitting there unused by most became hugely useful when we could quickly and easily sift through it.

The prospect of these same advances in video search being applied to security is likely to greatly tame America and Britain's current jumble of haystacks, but such technology will of course bring with it a new set of problems. For those who have spent years working to close the Security Gap, I am reminded of another question about a dog chasing a firetruck.

"What's he going to do if he catches it?"

Surveillance Rocks

This is a pretty clever idea and sort of cool, but on a more serious note, it brings up some interesting aspects of the freedom of information act. I think I'd rather that surveillance just be more targeted, rather than something that rock bands and divorce lawyers can use to get footage.

The Road to Southend Pier

In his new book, subtitled “One Man’s Struggle Against a Surveillance Society,” Ross Clark chronicles an attempt to walk from his East Anglia home to a Pier in Southend…all the while avoiding surveillance cameras and the other various instruments of Britian’s so-called police state. In London, sometimes called the most surveilled city in the world, it is said an average pedestrian might find him or herself photographed more than 300 times per day. Along his way, Clark thoughtfully discusses some of the inconsistencies, inefficiencies, and absurdities of his country’s security policies.

Mick Hume of the London Times makes the point that Clark’s funny and insightful critique is hardly that of an extremist, however.

His book is less a militant's pamphlet than a protest on behalf of respectable Brits about the absurdities of the surveillance society. He is appalled that while millions are herded on to a DNA register, police cannot take samples from terrorist suspects on control orders. “It is bizarre to think,” he writes, “that the Government is planning to let credit agencies advertise the contents of our bank accounts — yet will not allow police forces to name convicted criminals.” Clark is most dismissive of the bureaucratic pointlessness of the “virtual” police state, with cameras that nobody watches taking pictures that nobody can use. He observes that the “peculiar effect of surveillance, both on us and our leaders” is that “it gives the impression that everything is under control, when in fact it isn't”.

So, if not a “virtual” police state, does Clark seek a “real” one… none at all…or none-of-the-above. His views, like those of most, are decidedly more interesting and complex. And of course it's true, when it comes to our security and privacy, we can do better…and should.

MI5 Tracks 2000 Terrorists

Via Security Managment Weekly & Washington Post:

Around 2,000 terrorism suspects are being monitored by British authorities,
and an equal number of individuals are suspected of also being involved in
insurgent or malicious activity, according to remarks from MI5 Director General
Jonathan Evans in a rare public address. Britain's Security Service has recorded
a rise in the number of terrorism-related arrests, including foiled plots to
bomb international jets and detonate car bombs in public places, but attributes
this growth in part to heightened security efforts. Evans and Prime Minister
Gordon Brown both underscore the threat of Islamic terrorist activity in the
country, and Evans has named al-Qaeda as one group with a "clear determination
to mount terrorist attacks against the United Kingdom." The MI5 head says while
the attacks are mainly carried out by Britons, citizens are being influenced and
trained by militant groups in Pakistan and Somalia. Evans adds, however, that
non-extremist agents from Russia and China also pose a threat to the country by
attempting to steal civilian and military technology, and by placing undercover
operatives within Britain.