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Yes, You Are Being Watched

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service

If you're feeling fenced in some day, you may decide to take a trip 
to your favorite gambling mecca, where anything goes.  

Before you leave, you may want to tell your friends, and while you're 
at it, let them know what you've been doing lately. Depending on where 
you are, and whether what you do sounds suspicious, the government 
may read that e-mail.  

If you go to the town square to wave down a taxi to the airport, you 
may also be waving to a camera housed in what looks like a street lamp. 
If you look like a wanted criminal, you may draw the attention of a 
security guard watching a monitor, or the guard across the street.  

You can bypass all that by driving to the airport. But if you keep 
your mobile phone on, the carrier will always know where you are by 
triangulation using the phone's signal.  

At the airport, you may have your face scanned again. This may actually 
speed your rush to freedom, because if you're a frequent flyer who's 
volunteered to be prescreened, you'll probably face less scrutiny 
before you get on the plane.  

Finally, you'll reach the gambling mecca. The management there likes 
people-watching, too. If you've been there before and they suspected 
you were cheating, your face may set off an alarm. Or if you're just a 
high-roller who volunteered to be identified automatically, they'll 
welcome you by name. Then you'll be free.  

If it feels like Big Brother is watching you, it may really be your boss, 
or a big bank... or your own big brother.  

Under Surveillance  

On one hand, you're onto something: Use of surveillance tools is growing, 
and new technology is making them more powerful all the time. On the 
other, there's a big difference between surveillance in George Orwell's 
novel 1984 and in the real world of the 21st century. In Orwell's 
book, the government planted listening devices and two-way televisions 
called "telescreens" in homes, offices, and public places. These days, 
the government doesn't have a monopoly on ways to watch, listen to, or 
find you.  

Some such technologies remain in the hands of a few powerful entities 
and are shrouded in mystery. However, today the spy kits of private 
companies may contain tools that a potential target might not even 
know exist. By the same token, some supposed surveillance 
capabilities are less science than fiction.  

Privacy laws vary widely around the world, but the technology trends 
creating new ways to invade privacy are pretty much universal. Devices 
are getting smaller and cheaper, networks to access the collected data 
are getting faster, the Internet is getting bigger, and software for 
data analysis is getting smarter.  

Although different surveillance technologies may be used together, 
they fit into a few broad categories: tools for watching or listening 
in the physical world, monitoring activity in cyberspace, locating 
people or things, and interpreting the information that's collected.  

Miniature Machines

Cameras and audio recording devices are getting smaller and their 
wireless communication capabilities are growing, warns Richard Hunter, 
a Gartner analyst and author of World Without Secrets: Business, 
Crime, and Privacy in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Combined with 
powerful back-end systems on the other end of those wireless links, 
they are becoming virtual eyes and ears for just about anyone.  

"The miniaturized aware machines... will not only see and hear what's 
going on around them, but they will be able to understand it in ways 
similar to the ways humans understand it," Hunter said.  

Wireless digital cameras with microphones and radios, now about the 
size of a golf ball, within two or three technology generations could 
be the size of a shirt button and cost $25, Hunter said.  

"When you walked down the street, anyone might have multiple such 
devices on their person," Hunter said. Likewise, "If you have a 
surveillance device the size of a button, you could have hundreds 
of them in a room without anyone being aware," he said.  

Meanwhile, wireless network connections at speeds of 5 to 20 gigabits 
per second eventually will allow those devices to constantly send large 
amounts of data, he added.  

Digital video cameras already have slashed the cost of surveillance 
in public spaces and private buildings in the past few years, putting 
unsuspecting people in the gaze of a lot more cameras. Digital cameras 
can be made much smaller than analog ones, said Mihir Kshirsagar, a 
policy analyst at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog 
group in Washington, D.C. They also produce clearer images, which 
can be transmitted over long distances in the same ways as any data.  

Your Face Looks Familiar  

Increasingly, digital surveillance cameras are being used with face- 
recognition software that links what a camera sees with a database of 
pictures and facial measurements, which in turn are linked to criminal 
records or other information.  

When a face appears that matches a suspicious person's to a set 
degree of sensitivity, an alarm goes off in a control center and 
a human operator looks at other factors--height, sex, hair color, 
and so on--to see if they match, according to Joseph Atick, president 
and chief executive officer of Indentix, in Minnetonka, Minnesota, 
a maker of face-recognition systems.  

Set to high sensitivity, a system can identify 90 out of 100 people 
sought, with 2 percent to 3 percent false positives, Atick said. 
A lower setting cuts the number of false positives, but also the 
detection rate. Meanwhile, the systems are getting better: They can 
now identify 40 characteristics of a face in real time, up from 20 
a few years ago, he said.  

The technology poses little danger to most people who walk through 
a public place, Atick said. False positives can be cleared up easily 
by a human operator monitoring the video stream or visiting the site 
in person, he said.  

Public Safety  

Face recognition has been deployed with surveillance cameras in public 
areas of several cities in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in casinos, 
where files are sometimes kept on suspected cheaters, according to 
Gartner's Hunter. It's also beginning to be used at checkpoints, such 
as for airport security.  

Atick and some other experts say face recognition can be used only to 
detect certain people and not to identify everyone. That may be all it 
can ever be used for, because lighting conditions change and pedestrians 
don't always face the camera.  

"Over the next ten years or so, you're not going to be able to build 
a system that would be able to identify every person who walks by a 
camera in a natural outdoor environment," said Larry Davis, a professor 
of computer science at the University of Maryland in College Park.  

At the Office  

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego are developing 
"intelligent rooms" where hidden cameras and microphones are linked 
to software for analyzing someone's face, voice, and walk. The system 
is intended to compare the combination of those characteristics against 
a database of personal characteristics to identify people, said Mohan 
Trivedi, professor of electrical and computer engineering. It could even 
identify a person's mood from facial expressions.  

Trivedi sees the technology as making it easier to hold a 
videoconference. Cameras could focus in on the person talking at any 
given time, and the session could be recorded and later searched by 
subject, speaker, and other factors. His group is now experimenting 
with a new, smaller generation of gear. The team has outfitted a 
laboratory with 50 cameras built into the walls and furniture.  

"We would like to make all the sensors invisible and absolutely 
unobtrusive," he said.  

Watching Over You  

A critical hurdle for such systems is the capability to analyze 
images and spoken conversations, Hunter said. Winston Smith, 
Orwell's protagonist in 1984, never knew whether government 
agents were watching him through the telescreen. He thought 
there weren't enough of them to watch all the time.  

But this kind of data analysis could let software, not humans, filter 
the incoming data. That could mean a lot more monitoring, according 
to Gartner's Hunter. By 2010, large-scale analysis of images and spoken 
words will be possible, but probably only in specialized domains with 
their own key words, such as health care or finance, Hunter predicted.  

Trivedi's team has seen progress in this area.  

"We are further along than what I used to think," he said. In UCSD's 
intelligent room, a computer now can identify two people shaking hands 
in real time.  

/CONT/

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