Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Security, surveillance and privacy

It is an unfortunate truth that in this day-and-age, pervasive surveillance is nearly as common as a Krispy Kreme store in NorthCarolina. This kind of thing is most especially true in ports, whether land, sea or air. The reasoning is vaguely sound, although the implementation is largely lacking in many cases. Currently, I’m working with a few places on a more intelligent surveillance strategy that offers the potential to reduce false-positives based on racial profiling and other red-herring indicators, and increase the ability to detect and notice behavioral anomalies. It is these anomalies that often are the pre-curors to actual action.

As part of this effort, we recently had a discussion internally about the issue of privacy when doing this sort of thing. It’s critical to understand that the surveillance system is piggy-backed on top of an existing CCTV system that would normally exist. Instead of feeding hundreds of cameras¹ to a huge matrix display and expecting human beings to deal with this data overload, the information is dissected, parsed, analyzed and behavior extracted. Is someone milling about oddly? Are there more cars parked in a lot than is expected at this time of day? Has someone left a bag/package unattended for an extended period? Is someone trying to go “in the out door,” as it were? Questions such as these, which represent the most basic of techniques, allow for a gigantic reduction in noise in the system.

What they also do—more importantly in my mind—is reduce the human factor of racial profiling that so dominates many people’s perspective, whether consciously or not. Instead, it allows the behavior of the individual, or group, to guide interest. As racial profiling will always fail in the end, behavior is the only effective strategy to eluding the next risk, rather than obsessing over the last one. By placing a vast majority of the data under the cold steely eye of the computer, much of the harassment that often results from this kind of omnipresent observation can be removed. In addition, there are techniques to obscure identity for certain users of the system to further protect privacy until real justification exists.

Is it a perfect solution? No. But the reality is that in certain environments this level of observation is unavoidable at this point in history.

¹ An average port may have anywhere from 250-500 cameras deployed. Some have even more.