DARPA's Automated Video Surveillance Will End Public Anonymity
To be in public is to be on camera, but most video footage is discarded, as only so much can be sorted and analyzed -- until now. DARPA has created a technology that can index and analyze video in real-time, marking the end of anonymity in public places.
In 2008, DARPA, the US military's elite group of pocket protector warriors, began soliciting the tech industry to develop technologies that would allow computers to sort through and index surveillance footage from the military's fleet of drones, satellites, and miscellaneous other super secret spy cameras. This was all part of the Agency's proposed Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) that would be able to describe specific human activities in real-time. This automated index would allow for searchable queries (i.e. "how often did an adult male taller than six-foot get in a car in the early morning between November 1st and December 22nd in this compound in Abbottabad?") or flag behavior such as when someone carries a large package towards a car on the side of a road in Basra, but walked away empty handed.
And it appears that DARPA has had some success to this end. Earlier this week, the military released a mandated contract announcement describing how the VIRAT system will be deployed into various military-intelligence video archives and systems. The contract will be fulfilled by Lockheed Martin for an unspecified amount. We haven't been given any detailed information on how this new technology works or how accurate it is, only that a belt-tightening defense industry is willing to invest in it.
The military has an inherent interest in transferring surveillance duties from human eyeballs to an algorithm that can't be swayed by political pressure. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, human analysts famously misread surveillance footage as proof of Iraqi WMDs. (The problem with relying on flawed human analysis in order to support policy was described in depth in Malcolm Gladwell's essay collection What The Dog Saw). The military already has the tools to capture a torrent of information (and as the truism goes the wars of the future will be won and lost with intelligence) but now it is developing the means to sort through it.
As with many DARPA projects, the technology will eventually filter down into commercial industry and then finally to consumers. If the tech works as promised, we could start to see it implemented in domestic surveillance programs. Much of the Western world has willingly traded privacy for the security of ubiquitous surveillance. Most riders on public transportation feel safer knowing that they are surrounded by cameras that are plugged in directly to some control room. Of course, a dedicated team of human observers could never effectively monitor all those screens covering an entire system, but with this new automated tech, authorities might be alerted to, say, someone walking into the subway wearing a bulky coat in early July. Additional facial-recognition software might compare this individual's face to specific watch lists. Whether this Big Brotherly oversight makes you feel more or less safe is entirely up to you.
Beyond surveillance, this automatic video tech could make all uploaded video searchable, regardless of tags or descriptors. As pocket-sized cell phones surpass the video technology of the camcorders of previous decades, we will all be captured on video and placed on the web on a regular basis. In the not-so-distant future, it may be possible for someone (your friends, potential employers, whatever) to Google your name and find -- in addition to your Tumblr page and that photo of you in your Halloween costume your girlfriend posted on Facebook -- some incidental footage of you at that political protest from last summer that some stranger uploaded to YouTube.
Anything that happens in public will be public record.
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