Re: UK police chase crooks on CCTV (fwd)

[bill.stewart@pobox.com]

At 08:22 AM 10/21/98 -0500, Suspect Jim Choate wrote:
>> ``The only people entered on to the system will be convicted criminals
>> who, through our intelligence, we believe are habitually committing
>> crimes in the area,'' The Daily Mail quoted police Chief Superintendent
>> Dave Armond as saying. ``If people are not committing crime they have
>> nothing to fear, but if they are among the small minority who are, the
>> message is, 'We are watching out for you.'''
>> The newspaper reported that police initially will use the system to
>> concentrate on catching robbery suspects. In the future, however, it
>
>Excuse me....
>
>Since when does 'suspected of' equate to 'convicted criminal'?
>Also, in order to wath you (sic) they have to watch everyone - in effect
>guilty until proven innocent by the computer software.

The policeman's statement, if honest, implies that the 
system needs a real mugshot or more detailed set of pictures to work from, 
so they're going to start with feeding it the Usual Suspects,
for whom they can get good data for the system to search.
It probably also has capacity limitations, so they won't be searching
for everybody they have pictures of, just the most likely.

However, looking for more people doesn't take more cameras,
just more backend computers analyzing the video feeds,
so Moore's Law will increase analysis capacity rapidly,
though it will also make it cheap to put more cameras out there.

>What sort of civil recovery are provided for the inevitable software errors?
>I bet nadda, and that's wrong too.

Software errors don't seem to be a major problem here - 
false negatives just mean they miss an opportunity to catch somebody, and
false positives mean the system says "Looks like Joe Suspect on Camera 3!" or
"Looks like Joe Suspect on Videotape 32674 at 23:10 entering the bank" - 
in either case, the police can then look at the picture and see if it is.
Of course, if you're Jack Suspect, misidentified as Joe Suspect,
the police _can_ break down your door at 6am, haul you in,
and later apologize by saying "Sorry, honest mistake, it was dark and
all you <ethnic>s look alike, but your Public Defender says it's
not you in the video so we'll let you go this time, even though you 
missed your parole office meeting because we had you in jail."

>We need a law or court ruling pretty quickly in the US that sets the
>standard that a group of people have no more or less rights than an
>individual. This will required LEA's to provide probable cause prior to any
>actions against groups of people (such as this).

Ain't gonna happen - are you kidding?  If there is a ruling like that,
it'll be done in some way that restricts citizen rights rather than
expanding them, or expands police powers rather than restricting them.
It's already legal for cops to hang around street corners watching for 
suspicious activities or suspicious people, and all video recognition
technology does is increase their effectiveness and speed at doing things
they already are allowed to do.

Unfortunately, I'm being increasingly forced to take the David Brin position of
"Cameras are cheap, get used to it, just make sure we have more cameras
pointing at the cops than they have pointing at us, and make sure
the cameras the government has are citizen-accessible as well."

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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