I am quoted in a DC Examiner story about Mayor Fenty’s plan for a city-wide surveillance system, “New rules proposed for spy net.”

The Fenty administration has proposed new standards for a consolidated spy network of more than 5,000 closed-circuit cameras that should take effect in time for the presidential inauguration in January.

The Video Interoperability for Public Safety system, or VIPS, links 5,200 District-owned closed-circuit television cameras within a single monitoring office under the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The goal: Assist Homeland Security “to rapidly identify and respond to emergency circumstances that occur within the District.”

Every camera in a school, in a jail cell, in a government building, outside a public housing project or attached to a traffic light has been integrated into the network. The police department’s crime cameras, which require passive monitoring only, are not included.

As I told the reporter, there are numerous problems with the proposed regulations (pdf) for the city-wide camera surveillance system. The proposed regulations have few changes from the emergency rules that were self-imposed by the Fenty administration in June. Those emergency rules were created without input from the public or the DC Council. After five months and much public and Council review and criticism of the emergency rules, the Fenty administration has not addressed the substantial privacy and civil liberty questions that have been raised.

The emergency regulations (pdf) set out in June were vague as to the purposes of the system, as are these current proposed rules. But notice that in June, the Fenty administration said that one purpose was to “enhance public safety.” The Fenty administration was questioned as to what measurements would be used to evaluate whether the centralized surveillance system could be judged effective at enhancing public safety. The “enhance public safety” purpose is gone from the new proposed rules. Why? Is it because numerous studies (pdf) by law enforcement officials have shown (pdf) that camera surveillance systems do not have a significant effect on crime, and the Fenty administration knew it couldn’t actually prove the massive camera system would actually enhance public safety? (more…)

Here’s an interesting story from the Rockford Register Star. 

Belvidere police will test a wearable surveillance camera that captures video of cops’ actions from the officer’s perspective.

The 3.5-ounce battery-powered camera looks like a pager and can clip to an officer’s uniform or belt. [...]

The camera starts recording once the officer slides the lens open. It can record more than four hours of color video and audio and sells for about $700.

Police in the UK are already testing hats with cameras in them.

“The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has prepared a draft guidance document that sets out good practice rules for private sector organizations that are either contemplating or using covert video surveillance,” said Elizabeth Denham, Assistant Privacy Commissioner, in a press release.

“Through our experience in investigating complaints about covert video surveillance under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), we have identified a need to educate organizations on the obligation to ensure that covert video surveillance is conducted in the most privacy sensitive way possible. Although the use of covert video surveillance may be appropriate in some circumstances, we view the technology as being inherently intrusive,” Denham said.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has previously issued guidelines on video surveillance: Guidelines for Overt Video Surveillance in the Private Sector (in collaboration with Alberta and British Columbia) and Guidelines for surveillance of public places by police and law enforcement authorities.

In the draft guidelines on covert video surveillance, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said that “the decision to undertake covert surveillance should be made at a very senior level of the organization.” The draft guidance sets out a test to determine whether an organization may use covert video surveillance: (more…)

The Washington Post has a story looking into the capabilities of spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as Predators.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

“The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems,” according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month. (more…)

Xinhua News Agency (which is controlled by the Chinese government) reports that China has started photographing and identifying users of Beijing’s Internet cafes. A customer will have her photo taken and then that “photo and a copy of her resident identity card [will be] sent to the Municipal Law Enforcement Agency of Beijing and placed in a file” in a city-wide database, says Xinhua News. The customer then is given a 4-digit identifier to be used whenever she logs into a computer in an Internet cafe.

“Currently, Internet users in most of China are required to simply show an ID card. Li Fei, an agency spokesman, says the new system is intended to keep different people from using the same card, an occasional tactic used by underage Internet surfers,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The new photo, database, and unique identifier system will make it easier to track Chinese citizens’ surfing habits. It will also make it easier to connect a person with his online profile. It is likely that China will expand this registration system beyond Beijing, which would create an enormous database of online users. “There are more than 250 million internet users in China, approximately 10 times more than there were in 2000,” according to the Australian. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal has a story about some creepy software. (See the story here if you can’t read it on the Wall Street Journal site.) A media research company called Integrated Media Measurement (IMMI) has created software for mobile phones that would be able to record and identify every snippet of audio around you.

IMMI embeds its software into the cellphones of the company’s 4,900 panelists. The software picks up audio from an ad or a TV show and converts it into its own digital code that is then uploaded into an IMMI database, which includes codes for media content such as TV shows, commercials, movies and songs.

IMMI’s database then figures out what the cellphone was exposed to by matching the code. Cellphone conversations and background noise are filtered out by the software, IMMI says, since there is no “match” in the IMMI database.

To get a handle on the effectiveness of a given ad, IMMI’s data can show, for example, when a panel member is exposed to a movie trailer on TV and whether that same consumer later goes to see the movie. Similarly, IMMI data can show if a panelist watching a promo for a TV program will later watch the show, either on TV or online. IMMI thinks it can expand that idea from films and TV shows to consumer products like shampoo or toothpaste. It is testing its technology with a national grocery store chain. (more…)