Sound The Trumpet : Hollywood - Style Surveillance Technology Inches Closer to Reality

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“Hollywood - Style Surveillance Technology Inches Closer to Reality”
by Prophecy New Watch
June 20th, 2014

In one city, law enforcement officials don’t need to see your identification: They just need your face. Police officers in Chula Vista, near San Diego, already have used mobile facial recognition technology to confirm the identities of people they suspect of crimes. After using a tablet to capture the person’s image, an answer is delivered in eight seconds. (About 1 percent of the time, the system retrieves the wrong name, according to the manufacturer, FaceFirst.)

Chula Vista is now part of a larger trend in law enforcement to use unique biological markers like faces, palm prints, skin abnormalities and the iris of eyes to identify people.

“You can lie about your name, you can lie about your date of birth, you can lie about your address,” said Officer Rob Halverson. “But tattoos, birthmarks, scars don’t lie.”

The FBI, meanwhile, is finalizing plans this year to make 130 million fingerprints digital and searchable.

Many of the fingerprints belong to people who have not been arrested but simply submitted their prints for background checks while seeking jobs. Civil libertarians worry that facial images for these individuals could be next. The FBI already maintains a collection of some 17 million mug shots.

This personal information is now housed in a West Virginia-based storage facility the size of two football fields containing row after row of blinking and buzzing server stacks. These machines are the heart of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification program, which seeks to make it easier for police officers and investigators around the nation to distinguish one human being from another based on biological traits.

“What it potentially means is that we’re able to catch bad guys faster, and we’re able to get them off the streets a lot faster with the technologies we have so they don’t commit another crime,” said Jeremy Wiltz, acting assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division.

Such technology, he said, also could exonerate innocent people and keep them from being held in a jail cell for days or longer. Audits have been conducted to ensure Next Generation Identification isn’t accessed by local police for conducting inappropriate searches, Wiltz added.

The potential for misuse nonetheless troubles civil libertarians.

Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she’s concerned the government will eventually collect and store face images like it does now with the tens of millions of fingerprints submitted by people seeking certain jobs. She’s worried such data will be merged with criminal records that are currently kept separate – resulting in innocent people being placed under suspicion.

“Once the nation has a facial recognition database, and once facial recognition capabilities improve to the point that we can identify faces in a crowd, it will become possible for authorities to identify people as they move through society,” Lynch said.

Elsewhere in the Los Angeles area, police are facing similar challenges at a command center near downtown where law enforcement analysts observe a video surveillance feed aimed at the iconic Hollywood sign, which police say is sometimes targeted by vandals and is vulnerable to fires.

Policing the Hollywood sign is one of many tasks of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division – looking not unlike other high-tech law enforcement centers that have sprung up around the country as part of a post-9/11 trend known as predictive or intelligence-led policing. The goal: speed up reaction times or, better yet, intercede before new crimes, including potential precursors to terrorism, occur.

The center has access to 1,000 surveillance cameras spread across the city. Also available, through a feed to the center, are social media sites, news broadcasts and data captured by license-plate recognition devices.

There’s also a wall-mounted digital map of real-time reported crimes around Los Angeles that could provide analysts with valuable insight into when and where crimes are most likely to occur, where trends are emerging and where officers should be patrolling.

Like many cities around the country, Los Angeles is grappling with unease from residents over thousands of networked cameras that can peer into many corners of our lives, often without us being fully aware of it.

The center’s commanding officer, Capt. John Romero, recognizes the concerns but equates them with public resistance to street lights in America’s earliest days.

“People thought that this is the government trying to see what we’re doing at night, to spy on us,” Romero said. “And so over time, things shifted, and now if you try to take down street lights in Los Angeles or Boston or anywhere else, people will say no.”

Looking for His glorious appearing! Titus 2:13