Big Brother is not watching you

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1095609/Big-brother-NOT-watching-Cash-strapped-towns-leave-CCTV-cameras-unmonitored.html?ITO=1490

by gaius • 18 years ago

13 14 18 years ago

dailymail.co.uk

Anon84• 18 years ago

That's debatable... if they store the footage and are able to produce it upon a law enforcement/court request then Big Brother is still watching, when it matters.

Might be a good opportunity for a real-time image analysis start up, though...

beza1e1• 18 years ago

Google might be interested ...

sh1mmer• 18 years ago

The cameras can't look everywhere, without operators helping to guide where they should be looking there are lots of things they miss, or potentially incriminating evidence they miss.

For example, if a crime is committed but the criminals face isn't seen, it's the camera operators that track them until they run into another camera on the system that has been angled to see their face. A system running on autopilot is going to miss a lot of that.

axod• 18 years ago

This is not Reddit thankyou.

bprater• 18 years ago

Eventually, computers will be able to do the job of the human, and 4 million cameras won't be a problem to watch.

prospero2• 18 years ago

I work for a company in this space. Our product tracks and describes things of interest (faces, text, moving objects), and allows the user to search for similar items at other times and on other cameras. It doesn't make security guards obsolete by any stretch, but it can make reviewing past footage much less tedious.

The whole "intelligent video" industry is in its infancy. An interesting point, though, is as these analytics improve, so does our ability to limit the scope of video that can be watched. Irrelevant footage can be made off-limits, faces or license plates obscured, etc.

It's not going to happen overnight, but the trend is clear: surveillance video is going to become more structured as time goes on. But this can be used to uphold personal rights as easily as it can be used to bypass them. Laws will just have to adapt in the face of technology.

khafra• 18 years ago

I'm afraid it's much easier to bypass personal rights than to uphold them. Even though the technology for either is there, the panopticon is a design pattern that keeps occurring in political space.

I'm curious, though--does your company do the kind of thing covered by Steve Rambam in his talk at The Last HOPE? ie, recognition of activities as well as of faces, text, etc.?

http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...(Part_1).mp3 http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Featured_Speak...(Part_2).mp3

prospero2• 18 years ago

Activity is an awfully vague term.

I know of one company that's hired professional actors to act out different scenarios, in the hopes that they can distill the essence of suspicious activity, and thereby automatically detect it. I'm not optimistic about their chances.

However, it's relatively straightforward to detect people tailgating at security entrances (using one passcard to let two people in), or walking the wrong way into the exit gate at an airport. In both these situations, though, the environment is controlled, and the difference between proper and improper behavior is well-defined. Neither of these things are true on, say, a street corner.

Human interaction and body language is complicated. I expect we'll have a good way of automatically detecting behavior sometime around when we have general artificial intelligences, and not before.

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

I used to work in automated surveillance.

Studies show a trained operator will miss 90% of events looking at a single feed after just 20 minutes. It's even worse over a longer time and over multiple camera feeds.

No one is really watching.

Once automated surveillance gets better, that won't be the case at all. The systems are only currently useful for after-the-fact forensics.

robertk• 18 years ago

They monitor(ed) the CCTV footage on the spot?

Jesus, that makes it even worse. The only places I've heard that at is high-security corporate and military locations. Certainly not town squares.

inerte• 18 years ago

Why does it make worse? You've said yourself, places where you want the security to be higher, they monitor on the spot. It's not like you're saying it doesn't work, right? Wrong?

ashleyw• 18 years ago

Yep, they definably did in my town — cause they had massive speakers attached, and the people monitoring the cameras could (and did on many occasions which I witnessed) shout at people for littering and causing trouble.

petercooper• 18 years ago

If you mean "on the spot" in its "at the scene of action" definition, then no, almost certainly not. I've not heard of that sort of CCTV monitoring in public.

If you mean "on the spot" as in "at once, with no delay" then yeah, totally. That's really common in the UK and I support it as it's been shown to have positive effects on crime (often by pushing the crime elsewhere, sure).

Stubbs• 18 years ago

I wish the original site was included in the RSS feed then I wouldn't have to read anything from this "news" source any more, I hereby coin the phrase Mailrolled.

Big Brother is not watching you

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