Slashdot Mirror
Mind How You Walk - Someone is Watching
mrbluze writes "The Telegraph has an opinion article about the future of the extensive CCTV network in the United Kingdom. Automated analysis of how and where people are walking or otherwise moving, and what objects they carry or leave behind, flags the attention of security staff. This is meant to preempt a crime and make suspects identifiable even by gait. The technology is of questionable public benefit since street crime has not decreased despite the presence of CCTV. 'An airport camera can be programmed to know what a departure hall should look like, with thousands of separate movements. A single suitcase left for any length of time would trigger an alarm. This technology was developed for use in hotels to alert staff to a breakfast tray left outside a room. Soon, it will be coming to a street near you. Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?'"
I wonder if it can identify silly walks.
"Maggie call Aquaman!!!"
The first Ministry of silly walks?
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Already done :-( I don't know about sleepwalking into a surveillance society.
I think we're running towards it with open arms at the moment.
http://tinyurl.com/2vbx8g
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
A way of identifying all those people who soil themselves!
I believe it's safe to say that using someone's gait to determine their relative guilt/innocence, ranks right up there with dumping a woman in a river to see if she's a witch.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?
Don't give them ideas.
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
All this does is make it easier for them to peg you as a terrorist for no reason other than because the cameras say so.
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
Perhaps ya'all in the UK need to point a few more of these cameras in the direction of your House Members..
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
As part of efforts to instil a sense of transparency into the CCTV society, a special couple of days were undertaken by the camera operators in the Welsh capital Cardiff. Under the scheme members of the public could come in and watch CCTV operators at work.
I've seen a conference paper based upon the insight this scheme provided. The conclusion? CCTV operators are presently trained to concentrate on those people that aren't moving; standing still is regarded as suspicious.
I don't know what impact this new technology will have on this practice.
If you're part of the Ministry of Silly Walks, you're going to get outed.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?'"
Why go through that kind of expense when cell phones can already be used that way? Cell phones are always in hearing range and can be programmed to be on when they look off. The cameras would increase coverage, but again private "security cameras" will do the job in all the places people care about if access is granted by law to government. Soon enough, people will want cameras in their "smart" houses to turn on and off lights and listen for commands. As long as non free software is used for this, the coverage will be complete.
Quiet, casual voice, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness."
Love,
Big Brother
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?"
Whole hog would be more along the lines of drawing from a page in hitler's book, where we train our children to turn us in as soon as we bitch about the current administration...
"Yes, Lead Teacher, that's right - my Father said the Prime Minister has lemons for testicles and pees sitting down."
I am not a fan of a big brother state (who here is?) but I wonder if CCTV technology has helped catch and prosecute more criminals. If it has been useful after the crime, perhaps this approach may be more helpful in stopping crime.
That said, with the arrival of this kind of technology, we should be concerned and make sure that it is put to the right use.
I never cease to be amazed that a government dominated by technologically illiterate lawyers tries to find a technical fix for every problem. Perhaps I shouldn't be.
Pining for the fjords
Umm obviously my tinfoil hat isnt going to cut it anymore in this arms race and a full body tinfoil suit would just make me stand out.
Can someone please supply me with the plans / specifications for a tinfoil stealth suit?
Where's Graham Cleese when we need him most?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
So is this the first step toward having three pre-cognative kids floating in a milk bath commanding lathes to carve names into wooden balls so Tom Cruise can go make arrests before crimes are committed?
I mean, the right leg isn't silly at all and the left leg merely does a forward aerial half turn every alternate step.
Not terrorism, facecrime... Or in this case, gaitcrime.
Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Tonight on BBC1, a night of Shakespeare. On BBC2, it's comedy night, starting with Hikinks In Welsh. BBC3, Streetwalkers in Exeter. BBC4, pedestrians on The Mall. BBC5, Best of Silly Walks on Picadilly. BBC6, Crimes in Progress.
Please pay your video tax promptly, thank you.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This technology has been around for some time now and has been tested successfully in many instances. Contrary to the impression this article gives, the technology came from US and Israel, where it was successfully used for border surveillance and also for protecting airports and railways, infrastructure crtical for teh working of a company. This is reflected in the companies working on this technology, namely Object Video, IoImage etc. But lately UK has become very active in this and like with most surveillance technologies, it has surpassed the rest of the world but the applications that UK is looking at are not all 1984ish. One of the biggest applications which is being looked in UK is to alart the CCTV operators when a car parks in the hard shoulder for more than say 5 minutes and automatically alert highway patrols. This is potentially very useful. I am not sure about the rest of the people here but I have spent hours on the roadside with a punctured tire in really cold weather on more than one occasion (on for those are wondering why I didn't use the spare, try changing a driver's side tyre with all the big trucks passing within a feet or so of you and you will know) and I think it would have been great if help had come sooner. So like all technology, the technology itself is not bad. But you can use in both constructive and destructive way.
What's under yellowstone?
Really.
I'm not sure why this is an issue now. Stuff like this has been around for at least a decade.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
aye, aye, hrumphh, call!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This is one of the biggest problems I see with current governments' agendas to implement mass surveilance and other technology security measures - an almost total lack of cost-benefit analysis that demonstrate a clear need to implement the technology. For many of these cases there are clear privacy concerns, the potential for abuse of the system, and encroachment of liberties, and in addition there are the projected costs of implementing the systems - costs for hardware, software, infrastructure, agencies, staffing, etc. Most of the time the monetary estimates run into the billions, and that's before the usual reality of budget and schedule overruns, unforeseen implementation problems, contractor cost inflating, etc etc. And yet to balance all these costs, projected and real, there is usually not much more supporting argument than "it fights terrorism/crime/think of the children". Rarely with any sort of hard data backing up the plans, rarely with in-depth studies of test cases, or even analysis of how similar systems are working in other countries where they have already been implemented. This whole idea of "trust us, it's for the better" is infuriating coming from our chosen leaders.
And what about if the system doesn't provide the expected benefits? When was the last time a huge security program was dismantled when shown to not deliver what was promised, or even evaluated for success? (programs like Carnivore and Total Information Awareness continue on in other guises even now) Too often there are earmarks, kickbacks (monetary and political) and whatnot tied into the whole process so supporters are even less likely to admit failure when a program is still personally lucrative in some way. None of the funding for these mass surveilance and automated security measures seem to have any sort of merit-based budgeting built in. It ends up being a huge political fight to close useless programs, meanwhile the costs - monetary and liberty - continue to pile up, restricting freedoms and draining our public coffers (or in the case of the US continuing to pile onto a mountain of debt that cannot possibly be repaid without massive negative consequences). Our representatives in government need to be held accountable to hold these programs accountable! There need to be provisions, milestones, evaluations and hard-set sunset clauses that force these programs to deliver or die. And there needs to be more scepticism upfront with regard to the promised benefits that have little to no factual backing, and more than that, the coefficient placed in front of the value of infractions of liberty needs to be increased! The practice of implementing Security Theater programs with no accountability to success has got to stop. We're stepping on freedoms and spending like a drunk with no proven returns, how is that good public policy?
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
England prevails!
Really, if the Bad People (TM) want to make modern society grind to a halt, all they have to do now is start to leave shopping bags and other, random containers lying around in public places. It would be pretty effective in making this kind of technology useless, and quite a drain on the system, if you get enough volume of bags being left behind in random public places.
Sometimes the most simple things can bring to a halt the most complex of systems. No need for anything dangerous, society will bankrupt itself trying to oversee and purify itself.
There are already microphones attached to telephone poles in high crime areas of Chicago to detect gunshots and alert police: wired.com
Some people do need looking over though...
Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl.
I have an epistemological question. How do the security officials in your fantasy know that the people they are looking for are criminals or terrorists?
In your fantasy, have they been convicted by due process in any open and public court of law, in which they have been allowed to see and answer the evidence against them and question witnesses against them and show evidence and call witnesses in their own defence?
Because if that is what your fantasy is like, I feel impelled to point out that it is quite unlike the world we are actually living in.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
This solution uses image recognition, which is a poor way to identify the movements of people and objects because of the inherent difficulty of recognising something on a grainy CCTV image. A better solution is to tag almost every object with RFID chips, which are now so small that they can easily be concealed in purchased items or scattered on a crowd.
Imagine a Google Earth hack that plots the last known position of a person, according to the last place their RFID tags were seen. It draws a trail to show where they have been, complete with flags marking the places where they made purchases, withdrew cash or talked to other people (stood close to them for some time). There are icons to play back relevant segments of CCTV of each event. You can listen to their phone conversations and look at the text messages they sent. The system would include a search engine to allow a person to be found by name, number, association or address.
The system would be very handy for checking up on your children or finding your lost cat. And I'm sure you can think of other applications which might be of interest to policemen and secret services. And it's all possible, now. Enough data can be stored to do this, and computers are powerful enough to search it. It's just waiting for someone to build it, a politician to buy it, and a population to accept it.
Pervasive surveillance - coming soon to a "democracy" near you.
*STOP*
HAMMER TIME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JomHWt7p6-c
^_^
In an airport situation, I could see the cameras tracking you from the checkin counter to your gate. As soon as you identified yourself to a person or kiosk it would know where you should be going and watch you if you strayed. It would also notice things like people who meet and talk but did not arrive together or leave together. On city streets it would look for cars and people, and start to build correlation databases (i.e. Mrs. X's son always visits on Sundays).
Get used to it. The technology is only going to get smarter, and eventually the street lights will know where you are going and change accordingly. When you deviate it will issue and alert and require you to file a report.
I personally have no problem being watched as long as I can watch back. It would be interesting to know where the politicians are at 2 AM.
Why stop at every streetlight? Lets just mandate implants for everyone, and a worldwide sensor network, and get it over with.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
With the steady increase of surveillance technology it reminds me I must make an EMP device one day, you never know when you're going to need an EMP...
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I've long realized that I recognize people I know well from a _distance_ more by how they move than by the shape of their face or other more 'normal' visual cues. It probably comes from evolving in an area where predators moved differently from prey.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
"The technology is of questionable public benefit since street crime has not decreased despite the presence of CCTV."
Appreciate the causal judgement, but:
1) In a number of European countries, violent street crime is significantly up. The number of reported cases of violent sexual assault in my home country has something like tripled in the past ten years (of which a portion could be attributed to higher reporting rates, but could also not be). This in a city with very few CCTV cameras. That street crime rates stay as they are in Britain could be due to CCTV cameras having no effect, but it could also be that other factors (such as those in my country) contribute to a rise while CCTV acts to decrease it.
2) CCTVs could be effective at detecting crimes and identifying criminals, but unless these are removed from the streets and/or given effective and working rehabilitation programs that they otherwise would not be, then CCTV cameras would not decrease crime, as everyone caught would be let out again shortly. Are such arrangements for removal/reform in place?
3) There are many types of street crime. Public littering could have been a nonexistant offense before CCTV cameras were placed, and the number then exploding. Does the assertion sum all types of crime?
Certain conditions (neurological) can be diagnosed via abnormal gait. So maybe this could be useful, maybe they could have the police go up to an old person crossing the street and let him know the system shows he may have parkinson's.
It's a good thing, one step in the road towards in home diagnostics in the toilet and in-home/shower MRI scanners.
-Johan
There are (at least) two separate technologies being discussed in the article summary. This being Slashdot, they're all muddled together.
The "gait recognition" is fairly new, and I'd agree it's a tad creepy.
However, the non-moving-object detection isn't that new, and is a pretty good idea IMO. It's one of the things that actually makes cameras effective rather than just a tool to help the police sort out what the hell happened after a crime or act of terrorism has already been committed.
Basically, you can tell a computer what the view from a camera should look like when it's totally empty (say, an airport lobby when the airport is closed). Then, it can constantly analyze the frame and look for any new objects that aren't transient. This way it ignores people standing about, but can flag stuff that's not furniture or permanent objects, but which hasn't moved in a while. It's an obnoxious job for a human being to try and do this, and people are easily distracted, but it's easy for a computer.
And the computer can bring it to the attention of human staff, who can then look at the camera and determine subjectively if there's something there worth checking out, or if it's just somebody who's flight got delayed and is sleeping on a bench.
It can also spot vehicles in parking lots/garages that haven't moved, over some period of time (which could be minutes/hours/days), which is handy. It saves police some work if you can automatically flag cars that are parking or standing where they're not supposed to be, and let someone come on a PA system and ask them to move along, rather than having officers constantly patrol and spend their time directing traffic when they should be doing more important functions (like looking for folks who look suspicious or "not right" in some way; as a lot of experience in Israel has shown, it's people looking at other people for the guy who just doesn't look right, that's actually far more effective than equipment at picking out would-be terrorists).
Now, I'm not sure what the utility would be of a system like this on a random city street -- parking enforcement would be about it, unless you're going to call the bomb squad every time somebody leaves some trash next to a can -- but for airports, train stations, subways, etc., it's not bad.
The more complex system that attempt to do "fingerprinting," e.g. facial recognition or gait recognition, I'm a lot more skeptical of. But the simpler object-detection systems are fairly benign.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
As you may know, part of your tax dollars go towards various intelligence gathering. Imagine for example, that the US suspected that Timothy McVeigh was up to something, but didnt have proof for conviction. His profile might be added to a list of profiles to verify to check in public events so that they keep a closer eye.
Now you might be afraid that the fact that the authorities suspects something means that they are gonna shoot the person immediately on sight. But I assure, it's not the case (only exception that comes to mind is the brazilian in the UK). Without a doubt, governments world wide have lists of people that need to be checked, but they dont go on killing people just for the fun of it.
It seems that you are the one doing the fear mongering here. Unless you think you're on a goverment list because you've been spouting your support for Bin Laden too many times in public?
-T_A
Sorry, your license has expired. If you would like to spy on your fellow citizens in the future, please contact Microsoft for an updated license. Error 04-2007-225-EFE0
technical writing / development
I'd like to follow this up further:
If those criminals have been duly convicted, WHY ARE THEY AT THE SUPERBOWL INSTEAD OF IN JAIL?
Reminds me of the movie V for Vendetta.
A reason to buy a Segway
It's sounding more and more like the world of V for Vendetta is going to be here before we realize it. Time to break out your Guy Fawkes mask and black cape.
Sigh. Yet again, for the 437th time:
(1) Some people are able to leave the house only due to the presence of cameras. Without the cameras they would be too frightened, despite the real statistics that show that in fact little old ladies are almost never the victims of street crime. So, stick up some cameras and give some people a vast improvement in their quality of life.
(2) When shown the movie perps tend to put their hands up, thus saving vast amounts of time and hassle, and saving the victims a court appearance.
(3) Sometimes the pictures do actually show that the suspected perp who was nicked at the scene was in fact innocent.
All these are wins. Concentrating on the fact that someone who is too drunk to notice the cameras is still going to commit the crime is only one part of the picture.
This smells of another expensive techno-solution begging for a problem to solve. The fact that someone put it in place before they have a need just points towards ineptitude at a high level.
/dev/null just to get it out of the way.
By this time next year the people operating the equipment will be reassigned and whatever data is collected will be shunted to
But it will appear on Slashdot again and again.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Surely this is an actual, real world example of thought crime being punished? No longer do you actually have to comit a crime - simply acting like you might comit some, thinging about it, planning it in some way, or suggesting it to others is now a crime.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There's no way they have realtime video motion analysis running an airport hallway, much less the whole city. That's an intense computational problem with the barebones image analysis algorithms to solve it. There's just no way they can make sense of that data. Panopticism, however, is powerful.
street crime has not decreased despite the presence of CCTV
So where/why/how do they justify additional funding for something that doesn't work ? Installing cameras is one thing, paying watchmen is another, but being the laughing stock of the whole damn planet is priceless! They're proof that government surveillance is a joke, meanwhile huge casinos can track gamblers from entry to exit, with facial recognition and voice-printing at some locations. The difference is the casino has a choke point: the door. CCTV or not, a city can't do squat because by the time they see a crime on the cameras, it's too late to react. The cops are too slow to do any good, given the area they need to cover.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Have you ever seen the odd gate that the Ts have on CounterStrike? They'd be easy to identify with this system.
Thank God! Another fine technological breakthrough!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I have social anxiety, whenever I go to a store (rarely) I get all jumpy and paranoid. Sales people are always watching me, probably thinking I'm going to steal something
This is one reason I'm sure I'll never fly, I'd be way freaked out at an airport.
Oh well, if this ever comes to the states I guess I can become a complete hermit.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
"Boss, what's that guy doing?"
"Hmm. According to the system he's trying to avoid calling the attention of the worms."
These cameras won't stop crime and will most likely not deter crime, but they will help in identifying the criminal and help in securing a conviction against some criminals. They say justice is blind, but this will be a plus for the victims of crime. Lastly, criminals have always had better options of getting out of a crime than the victims advocates had to secure the conviction. One can only hope this helps the balance against the criminals.
I wonder how this will affect Geocaching in the UK...
"Imagine for instance that security officials are looking to see if there are any of 10,000 known criminal/terrorists at the superbowl. That's not gonna be done by looking at everybody's faces. But automated walk recognition might be a really nice option."
OK, and let's say the technology is just fabulously better than it seems like it will ever get, and matches people correctly 99.99% of the time. Using such a fictionally wonderful system to search for your proposed 10,000 profiles of criminals/terrorists, every single person you check will be a match.
Scanning for a large number of profiles by any error-prone mechanism is utterly worthless.
My undergraduate project talked about the exact same idea... tracking moving objects and people and associating crossed paths (which could be used to indicate if they knew each other etc).. my project information can be found at http://www.geekpursuit.com/ .
I never thought the govt would be so crazy to implement such an idea on large scale, except that it would be an interesting project for geeks.
When you find a camera installed tell all of your friends. Have different people walk by looking and acting suspicious. Maybe put up a google map site with all of the camera locations identified.
http://nwbagpipes.com/
I don't remember the exact words, but it went something like this:
Majority of civilizations are based on cowardice. They can easily evolve by teaching cowardice. They need to lower those standards, that develop courage, manliness. They limit the free will. They regulate the appetites. They limit the horizons. Every step within them must be predetermined by the law. They deny the existance of chaos. They teach the children to breath quietly. They tame.
You can't handle the truth.
It has long been known that certain racial and ethnic groups have a certain gait, as a matter of simple conformance with their culture. It shouldn't surprise anyone that a child grows up imitating their parents, including their manner of walking.
So, by teaching computers to recognize a person's gait, and single out people based on their gait, we have, in essence, taught computers to give greater scrutiny to individuals of a particular ethnic or racial group.
In other words, we've programmed computers to be racist.
While it is arguable whether this was the intent or not, the fact is the effect is the same. It was bad enough when a person was racist, but at least there was the hope of a defense in exposing the racism of an officer. How do you expose racism in a computer program, when computers are presumably incapable of racial bias or personal feelings?
Score one for racism.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Ha ha! The same strategy I employ to avoid attracting worms with also throw these devices off.
This many posts and no references to Ministry of Silly Walks by Monty Python.
Not only that, but even a known criminal or known terrorist might go to the Super Bowl solely because he loves football. He might go to the opera because he loves music. He might go to the park to feed the ducks.
If you assume every move made by any known perp is for the commission of yet another crime -- anyone with so much as a speeding ticket is in trouble, because every time you get in your car, it will be assumed that you intend to speed again!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?" ...have patience. 1984 wasnt built in a day!
"No, ossi... ossi... sir, I'm not drunk: I was just trying to poison their filtering software!"
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
[quote]
0 406nypdflips.htm
NEW YORK - Along a gritty stretch of street in Brooklyn, police this month quietly launched an ambitious plan to combat street crime and terrorism.
But instead of cops on the beat, wireless video cameras peer down from lamp posts about 30 feet above the sidewalk.
They were the first installment of a program to place 500 cameras throughout the city at a cost of $9 million. Hundreds of additional cameras could follow if the city receives $81.5 million in federal grants it has requested to safeguard Lower Manhattan and parts of midtown with a surveillance "ring of steel" modeled after security measures in London's financial district.
[blockquote]
For more read: http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/16
Then watch as the lack of police presence attracts criminals to the open:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqNfXg1nE3k
But of course, if this system where to be fool proof, crime would have be enforced.
Or rather, the job they are doing isn't the one that your average victim in the street wants them to be doing. Instead, they're doing the job that the politicians want them to do.
So... If the police and courts aren't doing the job, who will?
Deleted
It's never been about reducing crime. It's always been about maintaining/increasing control. This is true of surveillance; it is true of gun control. Remove the rights of the citizenry, or restrict them to the point where it becomes a nuisance to exercise them, and you can reap the benefits of governing a nation of sheeple.
Constitutionally Correct
I'm sure some of you will *gently* enlighten me, but what's the big deal here? If a government camera films me walking down the street, why should I care? Unless I'm doing something wrong, I've got nothing to worry about. Even if I am tagged as a possible perpetrator because of my walk, all they will have is some wonderful footage of me walking along. The worst they will see is me occasionally picking my nose or scratching my ass. Big deal.
... for Operation Nightmare Green...
ps: caps filter can suck a large phallus.
Man
Is the united kingdom becoming it's own worse ennemy like in the 1984 novel? I mean where are they going to stop? That's worse than the U.S
'An airport camera can be programmed to know what a departure hall should look like, with thousands of separate movements. A single suitcase left for any length of time would trigger an alarm.'
This reminds me of the famous story of the neural net that learned to identify tanks in pictures with 100% accuracy... right up until someone realized all the pictures of tanks were taken on sunny days and those without were taken on cloudy days and all the system could really do was tell if the weather was nice out.
(source).
A system that can identify a suitcase left in the same spot for too long at Heathrow isn't detecting terrorism, it's detecting that Spanish air traffic control is on strike yet a gain and passengers have been stranded at the airport for three days.
I look forward to the chance of life immitating stupid when it identifies the air traffic controller strike's symptoms (luggage in the same place for days) as a terrorist attack, delays flights by several more days as a terror lockdown starts up, then identifies the luggage held up by its own terror lock down as a terrorist attack - getting in to an endless feedback loop of stupid.
With a known system, it's simple for terrorists to defeat it (put a small set of powered wheels on the bottom of your bomb so it moves itself too slowly for people to spot but enough that the system doesn't see it as stationary over time). There are just two crimes I can see it spotting: the state of the passenger airline industry and government willingness to believe that automating things is a solution. Sadly, though they both probably should be classified as crimes, neither has shown any signs of being acted on yet.
This should be tagged westwing too. They had a bit with The Man From DARPA, Dr. Milkman, enthused about C.J. Cregg's, err.. kinematics.
Um, folks here do watch political fiction, right?
Lip reading is an art, so computers should be able to do it if anyone bothers..
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Does anyone see any resemblance to V for Vendetta? I do! And when I read this article I thought of
...His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot.
Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.
Then... I found the quote...
do it all together - do it at once. FIGHT THEM BACK.
DO IT NOW. If not NOW, WHEN? When the next gov't puts a telescreen in your livingroom to make sure you do your morning exercises, or in the bathroom to make sure you brush your teeth every fucking day? Or, a la THX!!#*, you take your proper medications to keep you dull and compliant?
RISE UP NOW!!!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"'Smith!' screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. '6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.'"
And.....
"Behind Winston's back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
----- -1984. Geroge Orwell.
What's *REALLY* creepy is how 1984 takes place in London, and now this "Telescreen"/Talking/Thinking camera technology is being developed AND widely implemented there (just like the fictional Telescreens in 1984). It's horrifying how much the U.K. is beginning to parallel 1984.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
With all those "though controls computer" experiments out there http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/16/g-tecs-thought- control-hat/, you should soon be able to monitor BadPeople thoughts. No need to wait until they walk funny, just nail them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
So long as the camera network will be avalible to the masses, and every public building (police, jail, court, fire, prime minister's office, etc) also have one. Then I would be less parinoid. In fact it would be a good thing... I could plan my walk by looking at the route before hand, and when I get bored I could watch the police to make sure they are kept in line. It would be perfection... Hell, America should do it, then when the goverment "detains" people without cause or notice one can turn to the TIVO to prove it...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
All the chicks who are "sore" from the night before ;-)
Libertas in infinitum
This could lead to all sorts of new fun with Flash mobs. "Regardless of where you are, everyone start walking like a criminal at 14:00 for 10 minutes". That'd keep big brother busy for a little while or atleast scratching their collective head and then outlaw FlashMobs.
I worked on gait recognition a little a few years ago. It's not about spotting people's attitudes or thought by their walk. It's based on the theory that gait is a biometric, like a fingerprint. This has yet to be conclusively proven.
You then measure the gait of an individual comitting a crime (in the case where footage does not reveal the face clearly) and use it, fingerprint like, to identify suspects.
This is not 1984. This is not big brother.
What IS big brother like is the proliferation of cameras, regardless of the recognition techniques behind it.
Actually in the center of town in Groningen (The Netherlands, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_(city) ), we have microphones attached to cameras. However the data of these microphones are automatically processed to monitor for aggressive sounds. ( http://www.soundintel.com/bbc1clip-nl.html )