Entries Tagged "cameras"

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Man Arrested by Amtrak Police for Taking Photographs for Amtrak Photography Contest

You can’t make this stuff up. Even Stephen Colbert made fun of it.

This isn’t the first time Amtrak police have been idiots.

And in related news, in the U.K. it soon might be illegal to photograph the police.

EDITED TO ADD (2/10): The photographer’s page about the incident has been replaced with the words “No comment!” Anyone have a link to a copy? In the meantime, here’s an entry about the incident on a photo activist’s blog.

EDITED AGAIN: Thanks to Phil M. in comments for finding these Google Cache links from Duane Kerzic’s site:

Phil adds: “The main Amtrak page on his site has since been crawled, so Google now has the ‘no comment’ note cached.”

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 6:19 AM • View Comments

Making Cameras Go Click

There’s a bill in Congress—unlikely to go anywhere—to force digital cameras to go “click.” The idea is that this will make surreptitious photography harder:

The bill’s text says that Congress has found that “children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.”

This is so silly it defies comment.

EDITED TO ADD (2/13): Apparently this is already law in Japan.

Posted on February 3, 2009 at 6:08 AM • View Comments

Two Security Camera Studies

From San Francisco:

San Francisco’s Community Safety Camera Program was launched in late 2005 with the dual goals of fighting crime and providing police investigators with a retroactive investigatory tool. The program placed more than 70 non-monitored cameras in mainly high-crime areas throughout the city. This report released today (January 9, 2009) consists of a multi-disciplinary collaboration examining the program’s technical aspects, management and goals, and policy components, as well as a quasi-experimental statistical evaluation of crime reports in order to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the program’s effectiveness. The results find that while the program did result in a 20% reduction in property crime within the view of the cameras, other forms of crime were not affected, including violent crime, one of the primary targets of the program.

From the UK:

The first study of its kind into the effectiveness of surveillance cameras revealed that almost every Scotland Yard murder inquiry uses their footage as evidence.

In 90 murder cases over a one year period, CCTV was used in 86 investigations, and senior officers said it helped to solve 65 cases by capturing the murder itself on film, or tracking the movements of the suspects before or after an attack.

In a third of the cases a good quality still image was taken from the footage from which witnesses identified the killer.

My own writing on security cameras is here. The question isn’t whether they’re useful or not, but whether their benefits are worth the costs.

Posted on January 13, 2009 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

Trends in Counterfeit Currency

It’s getting worse:

More counterfeiters are using today’s ink-jet printers, computers and copiers to make money that’s just good enough to pass, he said, even though their product is awful.

In the past, he said, the best American counterfeiters were skilled printers who used heavy offset presses to turn out decent 20s, 50s and 100s. Now that kind of work is rare and almost all comes from abroad.

[…]

Green pointed to a picture hanging in his downtown conference room. It’s a photo from a 1980s Lenexa case that involved heavy printing presses and about 2 million fake dollars.

“That’s what we used to see,” he boomed. “That’s the kind of case we used to make.”

Agents discovered then that someone had purchased such equipment and a special kind of paper and it all went to the Lenexa shop. Then the agents secretly went in there with a court order and planted a tiny video camera on a Playboy calendar.

They streamed video 24/7 for days, stormed in with guns drawn and sent bad guys to federal prison.

Green’s voice sank as he described today’s sad-sack counterfeiters.

These people call up pictures of bills on their computers, buy paper at an office supply store and print out a few bills. They cut the bills apart, go into a store or bar and pass one or two.

Many offenders are involved with drugs, he said, often methamphetamine. If they get caught, so little money is involved that federal prosecutors won’t take the case.

It’s interesting. Counterfeits are becoming easier to detect while people are becoming less skilled in detecting it:

Part of the problem, Green said, is that the government has changed the money so much to foil counterfeiting. With all the new bills out there, citizens and even many police officers don’t know what they’re supposed to look like.

Moreover, many people see paper money less because they use credit or debit cards.

The result: Ink-jet counterfeiting accounted for 60 percent of $103 million in fake money removed from circulation from October 2007 to August 2008, the Secret Service reports. In 1995, the figure was less than 1 percent.

Another article on the topic.

Posted on January 5, 2009 at 6:34 AM • View Comments

Keeping America Safe from Terrorism by Monitoring Distillery Webcams

Really:

We had an email recently from an observer “curious as to why the webcam that was inside the shop/bar is no longer there, or at least, functional”. The email was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in the United States.

When we replied that it was simply a short term technical problem, we asked why on earth they could be interested in the comings and goings of a small Distillery off the West Coast of Scotland. Were there secret manoeuvres taking place in Loch Indaal, or even a threat of terrorists infiltrating the mainland via Islay?

The answer we received was even more surreal. Evidently the mission of the DTRA is to safeguard the US and its allies from weapons of mass destruction -chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and high explosives. The department which contacted the Distillery deals with the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, going to sites to verify treaty compliance. Funnily enough chemical weapon processes look very similar to the distilling process and as part of training there is a visit to a brewery for familiarization with reactors, batch processors and evaporators. As they said, it just goes to show how “tweaks” to the process flow or equipment, can create something very pleasant (whisky) or deadly (chemical weapons).

As they say: “In the post-Cold War environment, a unified, consistent approach to deterring, reducing and countering weapons of mass destruction is essential to maintaining our national security. Under DTRA, Department of Defense resources, expertise and capabilities are combined to ensure the United States remains ready and able to address the present and future WMD threat. We perform four essential functions to accomplish our mission: combat support, technology development, threat control and threat reduction. These functions form the basis for how we are organized and our daily activities. Together, they enable us to reduce the physical and psychological terror of weapons of mass destruction, thereby enhancing the security of the world’s citizens. At the dawn of the 21st century, no other task is as challenging or demanding”.

EDITED TO ADD (11/7): This story seems mostly bogus. See “The Story Continues…” on this page.

Posted on October 31, 2008 at 11:15 AM • View Comments

MI6 Camera—Including Secrets—Sold on eBay

I wish I’d known:

A 28-year-old delivery man from the UK who bought a Nikon Coolpix camera for about $31 on eBay got more than he bargained for when the camera arrived with top secret information from the UK’s MI6 organization.

Allegedly sold by one of the clandestine organization’s agents, the camera contained named al-Qaeda cells, names, images of suspected terrorists and weapons, fingerprint information, and log-in details for the Secret Service’s computer network, containing a “Top Secret” marking.

He turned the camera in to the police.

Posted on October 1, 2008 at 1:59 PM • View Comments

$20M Cameras at New York's Freedom Tower are Pretty Sophisticated

They’re trying to detect anomalies:

If you have ever wondered how security guards can possibly keep an unfailingly vigilant watch on every single one of dozens of television monitors, each depicting a different scene, the answer seems to be (as you suspected): they can’t.

Instead, they can now rely on computers to constantly analyze the patterns, sizes, speeds, angles and motion picked up by the camera and determine—based on how they have been programmed—whether this constitutes a possible threat. In which case, the computer alerts the security guard whose own eyes may have been momentarily diverted. Or shut.

An alarm can be raised, for instance, if the computer discerns a vehicle that has been standing still for too long (say, a van in the drop-off lane of an airport terminal) or a person who is loitering while everyone else is in motion. By the same token, it will spot the individual who is moving rapidly while everyone else is shuffling along. It can spot a package that has been left behind and identify which figure in the crowd abandoned it. Or pinpoint the individual who is moving the wrong way down a one-way corridor.

Because one person’s “abnormal situation” is another person’s “hot dog vendor attracting a small crowd,” the computers can be programmed to discern between times of the day and days of the week.

Certainly interesting.

Posted on September 25, 2008 at 6:32 AM • View Comments

Gait Analysis from Satellite

Ignoring the sensationalist headline, this is interesting:

By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk—a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise.

Video taken from above shows only people’s heads and shoulders, which makes measuring the characteristic length and rhythm of a person’s stride impossible. That’s not true of shadows, though, Stoica told a security conference in Edinburgh, UK, last month. Shadows, he says, provide enough gait data to deduce a positive ID. To prove it, he has written software that recognises human movement in aerial and satellite video footage. It isolates moving shadows and uses data on the time of day and the camera angle to correct shadows if they are elongated or foreshortened. Regular gait analysis is then applied to identify people. In tests on footage shot from the sixth floor of a building, Stoica says his software was indeed able to extract useful gait data.

The article goes on to say that using satellite images would be harder, but that the basic idea is the same.

Of course, this is less useful for finding individuals and more useful for tracking a population as it moves about its day. But some individuals will have more distinctive gaits than others, and will be easier to track. Soon we may all need to walk with rocks in our shoes.

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 12:22 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.