Caught Before the Act

bgp4 writes "New Scientist has a report on advances in video surveillance. Researchers in the UK have determined ways to pick out a criminal before he has actually committed the crime." Surveillance systems sound the alarm if you deviate from the routines expected of "law-abiding" citizens and track people from one camera to the next.

Comments

Lovely.

[Chemical Serenity]

This puts an entirely new spin on "Guilty until proven innocent". I can see a typical court case in an unpleasant future where the proceedings will go something like this:

Prosecution: According to our hueristic surveilance system, you were engaging in actions consistant with that of someone who planned on assassinating the High Commander. We know this because we've caught other people who've confessed to this selfsame crime that had the EXACT same movement patterns as you.

Defendant: Look, I was just hung over and heading off for my morning coffee...

Prosecution: Can you PROVE you were hung over? This sounds like a flimsy cover story to mask your true, murderous intensions! Where were you drinking the night before?

Defendant: Uhhh... I don't remember. I was drinking.

Prosecution: Your honor, we'd like to recommend the ultimate penalty... death by forcing the accused to listen to endless hours of Celine Dion albums until his brain leaks out his ears. Unless, of course, the defendant wishes to reveal the number and nature of his co-conspirators and thereby win himself favor in the eyes of the court...

Defendant: No! No! Anything but Celene Dion! I was gonna do it! All the guys I went drinking with were in on it, here... lemme write down the names...

Prosecution: Another triumph for justice...

Okay, this may be a little over the top, but it's not unheard of... the salem witch trials were conducted over little more than people's testimonial and a "known pattern of behavior" in which a witch was believed to engage. Should a system like this ever exist in a fully functional form, where it could be used as a tool directly to indict some poor schmoe, I'd say we'd slipped fully into an Orwellian nightmare and it's time for armed uprising.

Whoop, I better watch out. Maybe they can tell if I'm a potential threat by things I type. I'd better hide my black trenchcoat while I'm at it...

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

Thieves'll fool it, and we'll suffer

[Zigg]

A system like this is probably worth far less than the time invested in creating it. Yeah, sure, right now they can't fool it. But give them credit -- while your common criminal's pretty stupid, thieves are thieves because they are good at what they do. They'll relearn how to sneak and new ones will learn as they enter the ``trade''.

In the meantime, I imagine I'll be setting off lots of alarms. (Poor George, his donuts will go stale.) I suffer from ADD and it's not uncommon that I'll be striding purposefully somewhere one moment and forget what I was doing the next. That's got to look an awful lot like suspicious behavior to a computer.

Just a tool

[davie]

As the article points out--the point of the software is just to alert a security droid that someone is doing something "out of the ordinary." It's up to the droid to stare at the screen for a few seconds to see if mischief is afoot. Having been a security guard when I was a young man, I can tell you that it will probably take more then a blinking red light on a panel to get most guards off their asses.

No doubt, there will be poor implementations and poorly trained security personnel and this will lead to a few circumstances where folks will be collared "because the computer says you're a criminal!" Picky shoppers who like to take time browsing, picking things up and looking them over, etc. will probably be among the first victims. Nevertheless, used properly, this could be a useful tool.

I'm waiting for a handheld implementation--this system, coupled with a voice stress analyzer and an integrated cattle prod would come in very handy when dealing with salesmen. Hmm...I think I just had a great idea for a Springboard module.

Annoyance Suppression

[Effugas]

An interesting article--suprisingly well thought out, particularly on the part of the doubting inventors. I particularly like the quote, "This is like justifying road accidents because they provide hospital beds." I'm going to end up using that quite a bit.

Alot of the sins that people are about to complain about aren't really ascribable to this automated system--yes, you can track many more people, but the bottom line is that if you accept surveilance at all--video, armed guard, or whatnot--everything from doing cartwheels to loitering with some friends is being monitored.

But as long as a human's watching, it's not truly annoying anyone.

Therein lies the rub. The real problem with these systems is that the "George's"(dumb+cheap security guards, think Half-Life) of the world won't be happy being interrupted by false positives. No matter how tuned these systems get, there will always be perfectly innocuous activities that will trigger the alarms. There will end up being innocuous classes of behavior which cannot be trained *out* of the system, since to do so would be to cause the system to miss too many postive events.

A security shift supervisor can tell a rookie to not bug him about some stupid kid smoking a cigarette instead of catching the bus, but these guy's system will be forced to blare every time someone lights up.

Suddenly, all the human ugliness of sexism, racism, and agism comes into play, and entire swaths of society will be deemed worthwhile to forcibly teach not to trigger the dumb(by human standards) sensor arrays. Suddenly, the limits of the technology drive the law, first unwritten, then made official.

Don't flirt in a certain manner--it causes the sensors to think you're a rapist. Don't laugh too loud while raising your hands--the sensors might think you have a gun. Don't miss your train too many times, or you'll no longer be welcome at the station.

I actually find this tragic--this is a very cool technology that has uses all over the place, from security analysis to environmental monitoring. I think these are the first inventors I've seen who have a grasp on just where their technology might go, and immediately express hope that society as a whole will grapple with what they've done. Is this the model of technological ethics? Honest scientists creating what they can, hoping not that all will be right but that the good will outweigh the misuse, and the abuse will be suppressed by legal means?

Interesting to think about. After reading about the gait analysis technology, perhaps good posture will once again be mandatory...

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Put those cameras to better use...

[Greyfox]

I spent $%!# 2 hours wandering around London one night trying to get a !%#% taxi. If they can detect suspecious behavior, I'm sure they could detect taxi-getting behavior and dispatch one.