Cities wasting taxpayer dollars on software they claim can detect suspicious behavior.

San Francisco is set to become the latest U.S. city to invest in software, created by Texas-based BRS Labs, that monitors and memorizes movements as they are captured on security cameras. The software, AISight, watches footage in real-time and—like a human would—learns to understand, detect, and report “suspicious or abnormal behavior.”

What exactly is defined as suspicious or abnormal behavior? That appears to depend on the environment in which AISight is operating. Its creators say it can be used to flag everything from “unusual loitering” to activity occurring in restricted areas. It could issue an alert after spotting a person leaving a bag unattended in a crowded airport, for instance, or raise alarm if a person is seen trying to cross a perimeter.

San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Authority believes AISight will give it the capacity to track more than 150 “objects and activities” continuously at 12 MTA train stations in San Francisco, according to public procurement documents. BRS Labs has also reportedly struck a deal to monitor the new World Trade Center site in New York. And late last year it was announcedthat Houston had purchased AISight to be deployed as part of a “citywide surveillance initiative” to “identify potential criminal or terroristic behavioral activity.” It has also been installed in Louisiana for port security, and authorities in El Paso want to use it to monitor water treatment plants near the Mexico border.

The pioneering product has unsurprisingly been laudedby counter-terrorism industry aficionados, but it has caused alarm among privacy and civil liberties advocates. Like surveillance drones, biometric databases, and bomb-proof trash cans, opponents argue, AISight and similar technologies transform citizens into suspects. Because AISight is used to monitor and detect not just acts of crime but potential acts of crime, based purely on a set of algorithms, it is considered part of the push towards pre-emptive—or “pre-crime”—policing, which treats everyone as a potential criminal and targets people for crimes they have not yet committed (and may never commit).

The Department of Homeland Security has even been building a program called Future Attribute Screening Technology that it hopes will "detect cues indicative of mal-intent" based on factors including ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate.

Now that the technology is beginning to hit the marketplace, there is likely to be a sales boom. San Francisco alone plans to spend $2 million on AISight. A reportlast year by the Homeland Security Research Corp., predicted that this decade will see a fusion of CCTV with biometrics and “behavioral suspect detection”—a market it estimates will experience growth from $750 million in 2011 to a massive $3.2 billion by 2016. So when BRS Labs boldly boasts that AISight is “a revolutionary product that has changed the security industry forever,” it’s hard to disagree.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/06/11/aisight_from_brs_labs_and_other_technologies_to_detect_suspicious_behavior_.html

Charleston tests predictive analytics for crime prevention.

The police department of Charleston, S.C., is testing predictive analytics software from IBM as a way of predetermining where robberies and other crimes are likely to occur, then dispatching officers to those locations as a preventative measure.

The city's police department already uses a crime analysis system, holds weekly meetings to identify hot spots of activity, and has invested in technology to improve the "situational awareness" of its force. The predictive analysis software will take those efforts a step further by analyzing past and present crime records and evaluating incident and arrest patterns around the city.

Predictive analytics work for crime prevention, in theory, because crimes such as burglaries tend to occur in patterns--such as a cluster in the same neighborhood or during a certain time period. The goal of the pilot program is to station more officers where crimes are likely to occur.

The kind of information used in a crime-fighting predictive analytics system include the types of criminal offenses that are trending, time of day, day of week, and weather conditions. While the Charleston Police Department's pilot program is focused on robberies, the department hopes to expand the program to address other types of crime. Charleston PD is using IBM's SPSS predictive analytics technology in the pilot program; it already uses IBM's i2 Coplink technology for law enforcement.

Other cities using IBM's predictive analytics for crime prevention include Las Vegas, Memphis, and Rochester, Minn. In 2010, Memphis attributed a 31% decline in serious crime over several years largely to its "Blue Crush" preventative analytics system.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/240001949