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Silent Method
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Ahh, being developed for combat zones and foreign ONLY huh? Any bets as to when this becomes a federaly implemented program in the US?
Pentagon system would track a city's vehicles
Pentagon system would track a city's vehicles
Pentagon system would track a city's vehicles
Aim is to help troops; critics fear civilian use
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.
Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.
Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.
The project's centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.
According to interviews and contracting documents, the software may also provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watchlist, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist activities.
The project is being overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping the Pentagon develop new technologies for combating terrorism and fighting wars.
Scientists and privacy experts -- who already have seen the use of face-recognition technologies at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London -- are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon.
"Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time," said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency spokeswoman Jan Walker dismissed those concerns.
She said the Combat Zones That See technology isn't intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn't be used for "other applications without extensive modifications."
But others envisioned nonmilitary uses.
"Once DARPA demonstrates that it can be done," Pike said, "a number of companies would likely develop their own version in hope of getting contracts from local police, nuclear plant security, shopping centers, even people looking for deadbeat dads."
James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, said police will be ready customers for such technologies.
"Police executives are saying, 'Shouldn't we just buy new technology if there's a chance it might help us?' " Fyfe said. "That's the post-9/11 mentality."
According to contracting documents, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1.
Heavy use of cameras
In one configuration, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.
In another configuration, at least 100 cameras would be installed. The software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify "what is normal [behavior], what is not" and discover "links between places, subjects and times of activity."
The program "aspires to build the world's first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic . . . analysis of live video" to study vehicle movement "and significant events across an extremely large area," the contracting documents state.
Both configurations will be tested at Fort Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker said the country's permission will be obtained.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency outlined project goals March 27 for more than 100 executives of potential contractors, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab.
U.S. police use cameras to monitor bridges, tunnels, airports and border crossings and regularly access security cameras in banks, stores and garages for investigative leads. Great Britain has an estimated 2.5 million closed-circuit television cameras, more than half operated by government agencies, and the average Londoner is thought to be photographed 300 times a day.
Privacy concerns
But officers have to monitor the closed-circuit TV and struggle with boredom and loss of attention. By automating the monitoring and analysis, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency "is attempting to create technology that does not exist today," Walker explained.
Though insisting Combat Zones That See isn't intended for homeland security, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military.
The agency described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco. Combat Zones That See should be able to track the day's movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, the agency said.
Joseph Onek of the Open Society Institute, a human rights group, said current law that permits the use of cameras in public areas may have to be revised to address the privacy implications of these new technologies.
"It's one thing to say that if someone is in the street he knows that at any single moment someone can see him," Onek said. "It's another thing to record a whole life so you can see anywhere someone has been in public for 10 years."
