Globe & Mail
June 6, 2003
By Michael J. Sniffen
Urban Surveillance System Designed to Help U.S. Troops in Cities Overseas
WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track. Record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city.
Dubbed Combat Zones That See, the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.
But police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on everyone.
The project’s centerpiece is ground breaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, colour, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.
According to interviews and contracting documents, the software may also provide instant alerts after detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watch list, or search months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near terrorist activities.
The project is being overseen by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is helping the Pentagon develop new technologies to combat terrorism and fight wars.
Its other projects include developing software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide to predict terrorist attacks and creating a computerized diary that would record and analyze everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches.
Scientists and privacy experts – who already have seen the use of face-recognition technologies at a Super Bowl and monitoring cameras in London – are concerned about the potential impact of the emerging DARPA technologies if they are applied to civilians by commercial or government agencies outside the Pentagon.
“Government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time,” said John Pike, a Global Security.org defense analyst.
DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker dismisses those concerns. She said the Comat Zones That See, or CTS technology, isn’t intended for homeland security or law enforcement and couldn’t be used for “other applications without extensive modifications.”
But scientists envisage non-military uses. “One can easily foresee pressure to adopt a similar approach to crime-ridden areas of American cities or tot the Super Bowl or any site where crowds gather,” said Steven Aftergood of the American Federation of Scientists.
Pike agreed.
“Once DARPA demonstrates that it can be done, a number of companies would like to develop their own version in hope of getting contracts from local police, nuclear plant security, shopping centers, even people looking for deadbeat dads.”
James Fyfe, a deputy New York police commissioner, believes police will be ready customers for such technologies.
“Police executives are saying, ‘shouldn’t we just buy the new technology if there’s a chance it might help us?”’ Fyfe said. “That’s the post-9/11 mentality.”
According to contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press, DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million US by Sept. 1. In the first phase, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.
In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed in 12 hours to support “military operations in an urban terrain.”
The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify “what is normal [behavior], what is not” and discover “links between places, subjects and times of activity,” the contracting documents state.
The program “aspires to build the world’s first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic…analysis of live video” to study vehicle movement “and significant events across an extremely large area,” the documents state.
Both configurations will be tested at Fort Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan or Baghdad, Iraq might be chosen, but says the foreign country’s permission will be obtained.
