TV vs. terror

Posted: Monday, July 02, 2007 8:12 PM by Alan Boyle

AP

Two police officers view screens in the Central Communications Command Center for London's Metropolitan Police, where CCTV footage is recorded for use.

The rapid advance of the investigation into the latest wave of terror attacks in Britain illustrates how video surveillance has become an increasingly important part of the anti-terror toolkit, even if the process still depends primarily on investigators sifting through piles of videotape.

Experts say the next wave of analytical tools - ranging from license-plate identification to facial recognition to psychological profiling - is well on its way from mere science fiction to reality.

Britain is considered the world leader in video surveillance, with an estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit TV cameras trained on people as they go about their daily business. In the course of a day, the typical Londoner is said to be caught on tape more than 300 times.

Although investigators are keeping mum about many of the details surrounding this week's anti-terror investigation, they have said some suspects were spotted on video as they parked two cars that were wired up to explode. Evidence recovered from the cars - and the cellular phones found within - quickly led to a crackdown, even as yet another attack was mounted in Glasgow.

The role that video surveillance played in the investigation led to calls for similar systems to be expanded in Germany, the United States and other locales. "I think it's just common sense to do that here much more widely," Sen. Joe Liebermann, I-Conn., said on ABC.

AP

CCTV cameras are mounted on a pole near Westminster Palace in London.

Britain started putting in its video surveillance systems well before 9/11, in response to infamous street crimes as well as IRA bombings. But the upswing in the anti-terrorism applications of CCTV really took off after the 2005 London bombings, when video grabs of suspects were distributed soon after the attacks, said Peter Fry, director of the British-based CCTV User Group.

"Since the London bombings, there have been all sorts of research projects going on ... looking at how the system can speed up the search," Fry told me.

In those days, investigators had to gather up somewhere on the order of 100,000 tapes, which could represent millions of hours of viewing if you were to look at each one, Fry said. "It's a case of being selective," he explained.

Things haven't changed much since then. "There are some systems that can search for particular characteristics from the digital system, but for the vast majority of them, it's a matter of going through all the images and looking for the ones you want," Fry said.

But the current case is likely to be somewhat easier than the 2005 investigation, in that authorities will be tracing events backward from the cars that were spotted on London streets. "They knew exactly what they wanted to begin with, which was someone running away from the car," Fry said.

An additional quirk of London's traffic-monitoring system may be of help: The city uses an automatic license-plate number recognition system to trace every car entering a central congestion zone - so that the motorists can be charged a usage tax. "I imagine that the police, and certainly the security services, have access to that," Fry told me.

Making the search for video imagery speedier is just one focus of surveillance research, said Fry, whose organization represents 600 public and private CCTV-using organizations in Britain. Scientists are also working on ways to make "Big Brother" smarter.

"In the future, you will be able to say, let me look at all the red cars parked in such-and-such an area at such-and-such a time," Fry said.

One research group at Loughborough University is even trying to figure out a way to stop gun crimes before they start - which summons up visions of the pre-crime analytical wing from "Minority Report," Philip K. Dick's sci-fi classic.

Loughborough's Project MEDUSA is looking for the visual and behavioral cues that distinguish people who carry guns - and trying to figure out whether human analysts, or even computers, can be trained to recognize those cues on surveillance video in advance of a crime. That could lead to a kind of before-the-fact psychological profiling.

"That's probably going to be a long way off, but the way CCTV is developing, there's a tremendous amount of work going on in the field of video analytics," Fry said.

It's the ability to sift through mounds of image data quickly that gives video surveillance systems their real power. William Daly, a former FBI investigator who is now senior vice president of Control Risks Group, said video systems become particularly good investigative tools "if you couple them with things like facial recognition, or if you're looking for particular license plates."

All this raises an obvious question about privacy, particularly as the surveillance systems get smarter. "There are going to be issues of personal liberty," NBC terrorism analyst Evan Kohlmann acknowledged.

Daly said the concerns should be minimal as long as the cameras were merely watching public spaces. "I don't have any expectation [of privacy] as I walk down the streets of New York," he said. And Kohlmann said further limitations on liberty might just have to come with the anti-terror territory.

"The benefits here are huge," he said on MSNBC. "One picture is worth a thousand words, and if you look at the 7/21 bombing investigation in London [in 2005], that investigation would have been nearly impossible without the use of CCTV camera footage. I think it's just a reality we have to live with: E-mail gets monitored, phone calls sometimes get monitored. Unfortunately, if you walk down the street in a major city, there's a chance you might be recorded on video."

For a replay of the discussion on MSNBC, watch this video, then read this commentary from NBC military analyst Jack Jacobs. To get the perspective from privacy advocates, check out these resources from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. And to weigh in on whether it's right (or even practical) to put ourselves under closer surveillance, feel free to leave your comments below.

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