The Boston Marathon bombings and the march to total video surveillance of Americans.

Boston bombing probe highlights expansion of surveillance:

Surveillance cameras — which have proliferated in London, Chicago and elsewhere — may take on new allure. Informal surveillance by private citizens may proliferate as well; the FBI says it expects the public to be its "eyes and ears" as the investigation continues.

The upside of this expanding surveillance network is clear — a greater potential for law enforcement to solve crimes and, in some instances, to prevent them. David Antar of New York-based IPVideo Corporation says video surveillance can be set up to trigger warnings if bags are left unattended or suspicious activity takes place before or during a large-scale event.
Is there a downside?
Some civil libertarians say yes. While they welcome any tools that can help solve a crime as brutal as the bombings, they worry about an irrevocable loss of privacy for anyone venturing into public places.  
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/world/56183805-68/surveillance-cameras-network-privacy.html.csp

Chicago Mayor Emanuel stresses value of surveillance cameras in probe of Boston bombings:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is talking about how surveillance cameras aided the investigation.

Emanuel noted Chicago has thousands of surveillance cameras, both public and private, that can be accessed through the city’s 911 Center in times of need.

“I will say, as I always have, because we have continued to put cameras throughout the city for security … purposes, they serve an important function for the city in providing the type of safety on a day-to-day basis – not just for big events like a marathon, but day-to-day purposes,” he said.
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/04/17/emanuel-stresses-value-of-surviellance-cameras-in-probe-of-boston-bombings/ 

Security cameras may be key to finding Boston bomber:

Since 9/11, law enforcement agencies have used federal grants to buy surveillance cameras for areas across the country plagued by crime or potentially targeted for terrorism. A surely outdated count  from 2007 said downtown Boston was watched by a network of at least 147 police surveillance cameras. On the marathon route, it’s likely that most businesses have surveillance cameras, along with every ATM and red-light traffic device with a license plate reader. Not to mention every spectator with a camera phone.

Combing through video evidence is the new standard in dealing with crime in public, says Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst who teaches forensic video technique at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, VA.

“Video holds more evidence than any other source: more than DNA, crime-scene analysis or eyewitness testimony,” Fredericks said. “There are people sitting at home with key evidence sitting on their hip. I think the concern going forward is getting to the video before people erase it, and ensuring that the best evidence is recovered.”

The buildup of the police surveillance network has not gone unchallenged. An effort by the Electronic Privacy Information Center thwarted the installation of 5,000 surveillance cameras in Washington, D.C., in 2008 after the D.C. Council refused to appropriate $866,000 to pay for it, citing privacy concerns. Activists in Seattle have for more than a year prevented a surveillance camera system from being installed along the waterfront of Puget Sound. 
http://www.pewstates.org/projects/stateline/headlines/security-cameras-may-be-key-to-finding-boston-bomber-85899469380

Facial recognition and identifying suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing:

“The feasibility of facial recognition is always determined by pose and illumination, so it works best when someone is looking straight at the camera and the illumination is right,” Jim Albers, Senior Vice President of Government Operations for MorphoTrust USA said. “Therefore in surveillance situations where people are not drawn to look at the camera, you have difficulties in using facial recognition,”

MorphoTrust USA, which specializes in hardware and software for the biometric arena, provides its enterprise software – ABIS – to a number of organizations in the federal government, though obvious limitations prevent the company from disclosing specifics.

Dr. Brian Martin, MorphoTrust USA’s Director of Research, who specializes in facial recognition, says the algorithms developed over the last 15 years have been trained to match faces looking at the camera, and at times, require digital compensation.

“When you have poor quality data, face recognition is better used as a tool to generate leads,” Martin said.

The good news is, considering the number of people at the Boston Marathon, there will be a significant body of photo and video to be combed through as investigators hunt for clues and look to identify any potential suspects or persons of interest.

According to Paul Schuepp, CEO and President of Animetrics, a firm which specializes in face recognition and 2D-to-3D visualizations, smartphones have increasingly powerful on-board cameras and can often produce valuable images for facial analysis.

“Cell phones are great because the cameras have very high resolution,” Schuepp said. “The problem does get into the wide angle aspect ratio [of smartphone cameras] which can distort faces a little bit. If they are too close to the face, you see the wide angle effect.”

“Pose is one thing and because of our technology, we can mitigate the pose, but to make the three-dimensional model of the face for accurate comparison, you need the information of the face that is useful,” Schuepp said. “You really need to get upwards of 65 pixels between the eye centers, for enough resolution to give you a good statistical comparison.”
 http://www.biometricupdate.com/201304/facial-recognition-and-identifying-suspects-in-the-boston-marathon-bombing/

Boston police chief: Facial recognition tech didn’t help find bombing suspects:
While the whole country is relieved that this past week’s Boston Marathon bombing ordeal and subsequent lockdown of the city is finally over, Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Washington Post that the department’s facial recognition system “did not identify” the two bombing suspects.

“The technology came up empty even though both Tsarnaevs’ images exist in official databases: Dzhokhar had a Massachusetts driver’s license; the brothers had legally immigrated; and Tamerlan had been the subject of some FBI investigation,” the Post reported on Saturday.
Facial recognition systems can have limited utility when a grainy, low-resolution image captured at a distance from a cellphone camera or surveillance video is compared with a known, high-quality image. Meanwhile, the FBI is expected to release a large-scale facial recognition apparatus “next year for members of the Western Identification Network, a consortium of police agencies in California and eight other Western states,” according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Still, video surveillance did prove extremely useful in pinpointing the suspects.
“The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times,” the Post added. “The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras. It took a couple of days, but analysts began to focus on two men in baseball caps who had brought heavy black bags into the crowd near the marathon’s finish line but left without those bags.”

The Post also cited unnamed “law enforcement officials” who lambasted the use of Reddit and other social media sites that were attempting to work in parallel to the authorities.
“In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials,” the Post reported. “Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/boston-police-chief-facial-recognition-tech-didnt-help-find-bombing-suspects/
   MBTA to install more cameras on city buses:
The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which operates all public bus and train transit in the metropolitan Boston region, has announced that it plans to install more cameras on its fleet of buses. The MBTA has been busy installing brand new surveillance cameras in train stations for the past decade.
From State House News:

As part of its ongoing safety measures, the MBTA is equipping 200 buses with cameras, according to spokesman Joe Pesaturo. Pesaturo also clarified that when MBTA General Manager Bev Scott responded “absolutely not” to the idea of putting police officers on buses, she was referring to the idea of placing police officers on all the buses to prevent driver assaults. Currently 370 of the roughly 1,000 buses have cameras.

No matter that numerous studies have shown that cameras don’t reduce crime. No matter that the MBTA is drowning in debt and jacking up fares while cutting service. The MBTA doesn’t seem to let facts or budgetary concerns get in the way of its plans to blanket our buses, trains and platforms with surveillance equipment. The better to monitor our commutes with.
http://privacysos.org/node/1025 

In Boston, our bloated surveillance state didn’t work:

There was nearly no element of the recently reinforced surveillance state that contributed to the capture or killing these two suspects. As an example, let’s assume every detail of the attack is the same except that it occurred in 1977 (to pick a random date prior to our ubiquitous Counter-Terrorism surveillance state; remember how we used to have “bad guys” before September 11?). If the “bad guys” had put together such a plan in 1977, would events have unfolded any differently?  Would there have been a lot of photography at the finish line of such a prominent public event? Yes, although in the pre-digital age, it would have taken a little longer to gather and sort through the pictures. Hence, this aspect of this past week’s outcome can’t be ascribed to the massive expenditures and “federalization” of “homeland security,” but rather to a change in consumer electronics.

Where is the added value? In what way have the massive expenditures, intrusive surveillance practices, and stripping away of our liberties been vindicated by the events of this past week? In fact, no one can truthfully say “Aha!  This is where these new practices have made a difference! Thank goodness George W. Bush and Barack Obama have so little regard for the American Constitution or everything would have really gone badly at that particular point in these events.”

We now have a “War on Terror” that permeates every public news event and action. The immediate leap to the familiar “Terrorists In Our Midst” narrative is facilitated and amplified by a bovine mainstream media amped up by endless alerts issued by a Department of Homeland Security and two Presidential Administrations about insane foreigners here, there, and everywhere. In other words, what’s changed is the presence of a fear-mongering narrative of the War on Terror, along with the billions in expenditures that are used to justify it, that reframe a centuries old story about crime.
The events of the past week in Boston do not vindicate the rise of the Homeland Security bureaucracy and certainly do not vindicate the stripping of our liberties, the shutting down of a major city, or the instantiation of a police state. But they certainly affirm the future as it was perceived by Orwell.
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/22/in_boston_our_bloated_surveillance_state_didnt_work/ 

Boston Marathon bombing creates renewed debate over increased surveillance measures:

“Metro Boston is among the U.S. regions participating federal grant programs to increase video technology in mass transit and port systems,” writes Dan Harr for the Hartford Courant. “And Boston is one of the cities moving cameras (and the software that can sort out all that data) from their traditional perch in transit systems, into the streets,” Harr writes, citing Gerulski.

Some, like Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, say that it seems the U.S. is already under a significant amount of surveillance.

“Maybe we could have more cameras. I would have a hard time believing there’s another space to put one,” Landrieu said. “Maybe there is, but we have cameras everywhere, it seems to me.”

“What we don’t want to happen is for millions of innocent Americans to have to be surveilled constantly anytime they go out in public and for the government to maintain databases of those public movements. That doesn’t necessarily improve security,” said Michael German, a senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
http://endthelie.com/2013/04/22/boston-marathon-bombing-creates-renewed-debate-over-increased-surveillance-measures/#axzz2RHu6ipoH

War on terror money funding drones, surveillance in the San Francisco bay area:

Increasingly, critics say, money for the war on terror is blurring the line between local law enforcement focused on crime fighting and soldiers combating an enemy in a war zone.

As early as 2006, former San Jose police Chief Joseph McNamara voiced concern over the issue.
"Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed," he wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006. "An emphasis on 'officer safety' and paramilitary training pervades today's policing," he continued, "in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed."

In March, the American Civil Liberties Union launched an investigation into police use of military technology and tactics.

"We want the police to keep up with the latest technology. That's critical," ACLU Senior Counsel Kara Dansky said. "But policing should be about protection, not combat."

San Mateo's AirCover drone was one of dozens of items approved March 14 by members of the Bay Area's UASI, which since 2003 has channeled $359 million in Homeland Security funds to agencies from a dozen Northern California counties. Local working groups took months to finalize the list, which was split into high- and low-priority items. San Mateo's drone request, for example, was put "below the line," even though Mark Wyss of the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office called drones efficient and cost-saving.

San Mateo's requests also included a license plate reader to be mounted along U.S. 101 to feed information to a massive database at the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, commonly known as a fusion center. San Mateo County also requested a system to destroy improvised explosive devices, better known as IEDs, from their use by insurgents in Iraq.

Fremont put in for a BearCat armored vehicle, even though the city already has a similar one and its nearest neighbors, Newark, Union City and Hayward, each operate one. Oakland police wanted a portable surveillance camera to obtain information and intelligence on potential terrorists and their activities during critical incidents and crowd control.

Responding to the criticism, Ahern said, yes, local law enforcement officers are adopting the equipment and tactics of the military. He was referring specifically to Urban Shield training, which puts Northern California police through drills that resemble military operations.

The alarm comes from a lack of familiarity with the nonmilitary elements of UASI, Ahern said. The program allocates the largest share -- 32 percent -- of money to communications, including the East Bay radio system that allows agencies to communicate seamlessly during emergencies. UASI approved $180,000 left over from the previous year to develop SF72, an app that helps communities organize before and after a disaster.

UASI gives small agencies equipment they would never be able to purchase because of their budget shortfalls, Ahern said. Law enforcement and the communities they serve are safer for having it, too, he said.

That thinking distorts decision-making on the local level about perceived threats, said Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank.

The subsidies bring a military mind-set to policing, he said. And the military deals with an enemy, Lynch added, "not someone with constitutional rights."
 http://www.contracostatimes.com/portal/rss/ci_22971060?source=rss&_loopback=1

Under the watchful eye (ACLU) - The proliferation of video surveillance systems in California:

https://www.aclunc.org/docs/criminal_justice/police_practices/under_the_watchful_eye_the_proliferation_of_video_surveillance_systems_in_california.pdf 

Expansion of surveillance cameras:

Virginia - Surveillance cameras played a large part in identifying the Boston bombing suspects and finding them. Cameras are also changing how local police officers investigate crimes, but privacy advocates worry that the expansion of cameras is crossing a line.

Albemarle County Police say the use of surveillance cameras has increased dramatically in the past decade.

"It's really one of the first places that we look," said Carter Johnson with Albemarle County Police. "It's amazing how many cameras are out in the community."

The owner of Brown's in Charlottesville says the cameras in his store are keeping away crime.
"I think it's a good deterrent," said Mike Brown. "They know they're being watched. They'll think twice before shoplifting."

Brown says he has not had any criminal problems since he opened two years ago.

But privacy advocates say too many cameras, especially those along public streets, are crossing a line.

"Before the government can touch you or conduct surveillance on you they have to have some reasonable evidence that you're committing a crime or participating in some kind of illegal activity," said the Rutherford Institute's John Whitehead. "In America you're innocent until you're proven guilty. But if you're being watched all the time by the police or the government you are a suspect."
http://www.newsplex.com/home/headlines/Expansion-of-Surveillance-Cameras-203842191.html

GOP congressman: ‘Increase surveillance’ of Muslim community:

Peter King sees the attacks in Massachusetts this week as a wake-up call to local law-enforcement authorities to increase their surveillance and awareness of potential terrorists.

“Police have to be in the community, they have to build up as many sources as they can, and they have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there,” the New York Republican congressman tells National Review.

“We can’t be bound by political correctness,” adds King, who chairs the House subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from, whether it’s the Irish community with the Westies [an Irish-American gang in New York City], or the Italian community with the mafia, or the Muslim community with the Islamic terrorists.”

King says he’d like to see local businesses alert police when anyone makes a suspicious purchase, such as buying significant quantities of items that could be used to make explosives. In New York City, if “anything unusual, any potential component part of an explosive device is purchased under any suspicious circumstances,” the businesses alert the police.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/346125/gop-congressman-%E2%80%98increase-surveillance%E2%80%99-muslim-community

Central Florida security camera business sees sales boom:

A Central Florida security camera business has seen a boom in business in the last few years, both in private and public places.

Chad Casassa and Shannon Runion opened Security Pro of Florida four years ago and they said they've seen the use of cameras explode, not only in homes and businesses but also on public streets.

"The cost is coming down, and the quality is going up," Casassa said. "And what that does is opens up our target market."

Orlando police have 138 cameras scattered throughout the city with more on the way. Police said in the last year the cameras were used in nearly 800 criminal investigations, leading to more than 100 arrests.

Likewise, many residents are installing cameras outside their homes hoping to catch suspicious people in their neighborhoods, just as the the cameras in the Boston Marathon bombings did.
 http://www.clickorlando.com/news/Central-Florida-security-camera-business-sees-sales-boom/-/1637132/19818930/-/to911f/-/index.html

“Before we plunge ahead In creating a fishbowl society of surveillance, we might want to ask whether such new measures or devices will actually make us safer”...

Americans are already the most spied upon people in history.

Yet spying didn’t stop the Newtown massacre, the Boston terror attacks or 9/11.

(Indeed, the FBI interviewed one of the Boston terrorist suspects 2 years ago at the request of the Russian government … and somehow dropped the ball.)

But D.C. politicians are already using the tragedy of the Boston attacks to shred Internet privacy and increase spying on Americans.

Professor Jonathan Turley is one of the nation’s top constitutional and military law experts.
Turley writes:

For civil libertarians, all terrorist attacks come in two equally predictable parts.  First, there is the terrorist attack itself — a sad reality of our modern life. Second, comes the inevitable explosion of politicians calling for new security measures and surveillance. We brace ourselves for this secondary blow, which generally comes before we even fully know what occurred in an attack or how it was allowed to occur.

 Politicians need to be seen as actively protecting public safety and the easiest way is to add surveillance, reduce privacy and expand the security state. What they are not willing to discuss is the impossibility of detecting and deterring all attacks. The suggestion is that more security measures translate to more public safety. The fact is that even the most repressive nations with the most abusive security services, places such as China and Iran, have not been able to stop terrorist acts.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/04/before-we-plunge-ahead-in-creating-a-fishbowl-society-of-surveillance-we-might-want-to-ask-whether-such-new-measures-or-devices-will-actually-make-us-safer.html