| Montréal,
le 9 janvier 1999 |
Numéro
28
|
(page 6) |
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MUSINGS BY MADDOCKS
HAVE ORWELL'S
PREDICTIONS COME TRUE?
by Ralph Maddocks
A few weeks ago, I took a trip to Britain. From the moment I walked down
the aircraft ramp into Heathrow's Terminal 4, I had an uncanny feeling
that I was being watched by unseen eyes. My instincts were right, I was. |
Throughout the terminal there are hidden cameras; in duty-free shops (which
though duty-free are certainly not profit free), alongside the people movers,
in the stairwells, in the bars and eating places, in elevators, in the
airport buses and even in the toilets; in fact everywhere you could think
of, and probably some places that would never occur to you. Missing, was
much evidence of physical security in the form of policemen. Of course
there were some « bobbies » around, but compared
to other European airports relatively few security guards.
I assumed that this plethora of cameras was due to the various European
security problems, the IRA, Iraq, Iran etc. What I wasn't prepared for
were the thousands of cameras on the roads, in individual stores, in the
shopping malls, in parking lots, at railway stations, at gasoline stations
etc. In fact they are everywhere, the whole of Britain seems to have turned
into one huge monitoring station; even George Orwell would be surprised
if he were to return.
I am a camera
In fact, I learned that there are some 150 000 cameras in
Britain, which amounts to one for every 1.5 square kilometers or one for
every 390 inhabitants. If one assumes that they don't place cameras in
the uninhabited areas of the Welsh mountains or the Scottish Highlands
then these ratios are even greater. The presence of cameras on the roads
to monitor speeders, at stop signs and merges are in the main announced
and some even display your present speed as you drive by. The sad thing
seems to be that the population has simply become so immune to this and
other invasions of its privacy that the average man in the street has got
used to them and no longer notices them; it is only the stranger who comments
about them.
While I was there an announcement was made by a company called Cambridge
Neurodynamics to the effect that an « unnamed »
airport would be installing a new camera system. The company says that
its facial-recognition project, the alternative to which is to rely on
trained officers to remember the faces of people on the wanted list, will
enable security officers at Britain's ports and airports to concentrate
on people the computer indicates bear a good likeness to known criminals
and terrorists.
The CN system works by taking pictures of a person as he approaches a video
camera. The resulting handful of frames give several two-dimensional pictures.
To add depth to the face, two low-power lasers scan its contours from either
side. A computer then combines the contour information with the images
it has of the front of the face and builds a virtual model of each traveller's
face, which is then checked against the database of wanted people. The
system can be fooled only if a suspect has surgery to change the shape
of his face. Criminals or terrorists who realise they are about to be scanned
and who look away or pull a funny face will not deceive the computer. The
device seeks similarities around the eyes, features which humans use to
pick out one another and that do not change with expression and age as
much as the rest of the face.
It's looking at you kid
Just prior to my visit, an intelligent computer system, using closed circuit
television which matches faces in the crowd to mug shots of known criminals,
went into operation in a poor district of London. The local council of
Newham in London's East End aided by Scotland Yard have installed a $150
000 computer system, called Mandrake, which is linked to 140 stationary
cameras and 11 mobile cameras. They will scan the district's shopping centres,
car parks and railway stations. The system which can scan up to 150 faces
at a time compares them to a data base of known criminals stored in the
council's headquarters computer. When a known villain's face is matched
by the computer the monitoring team is alerted and they in turn call the
police.
A local paper quoted a police spokesman as saying « The
only people entered into the system will be convicted criminals who, through
our intelligence, we believe are habitually committing crimes in the area.
» He then added the usual remark made by those defending yet
another incursion into people's privacy, « If people
are not committing crimes they have nothing to fear, but if they are among
the small minority who are, the message is, “We are watching out for you.”
» The paper reported that police initially will use the system
to concentrate on catching robbery suspects. In the future, however, it
could be used to search crowds for hooligans who make trouble at soccer
matches. The system's developer, Software and Systems International, said
that the system is accurate enough to discern people hiding behind make-up
or eye glasses and growing a beard won't help either. A reduction in the
crime rate in Newham over the next six months will likely persuade the
Labour Party-dominated council to continue with the system.
Civil liberties groups said they were quite alarmed by the new system,
« The accuracy of facial mapping like this is limited.
You only need a handful of photographs of celebrities to see how different
the same people can look in different pictures, » said
a spokeswoman for Liberty, a civil rights group, adding « Even
if you did have a system which worked, it would have to be regulated very
carefully to protect people's privacy. » The spokesperson
also added that, « The claim that those who have nothing
to hide have nothing to fear is rubbish. What the police call an 80% success
rate is what we would call a one in five chance of a mistake. »
Mandrake is the first identification system to be able to work from moving
pictures. Less technologically advanced systems are already in operation
at our southern neighbour's Mexican border, a system which compares pictures
of criminals with individuals crossing it. At least one state in the US
is said to be using a database of millions of pictures to check on people
who may be entering into more than one marriage, and another state is using
a passive system to check for duplicate drivers' licence applications in
the same way.
Mandrake, by the way, is the name of a thick, fleshy, rooted plant yielding
a narcotic poison. Its root was believed in ancient times to be like the
human form and to shriek when pulled up! Big Brother is thus alive and
well in « Cool » Britannia and it would be naive
in the extreme to believe that he isn't lurking around here as well.
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