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- In the East London borough of Newham, a surveillance
network of more than 200 cameras keeps watch on pedestrians and passersby,
employing a facial-recognition system that can automatically pick out
known criminals and alert local authorities to their presence. Not surprisingly,
civil liberties groups oppose the system--Privacy International, a human-rights
group, gave the Newham council a "Big Brother" award last year
on the 50th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's famous novel.
The council, however, claims overwhelming support from citizens who are
more concerned about crime than about government intrusions. It could count
as one of its supporters the U.S. Department of Defense, which is keeping
tabs on the Newham system as well as on other, related technologies. The
department hopes that some combination of "biometrics" will vastly
improve its ability to protect its facilities worldwide.
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- For the military, biometrics usually means technologies
that can identify computer users by recognizing their fingerprints or voices
or by scanning their irises or retinas. But after a terrorist truck bomb
blew up the Khobar Towers U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996,
killing 19, the Pentagon elevated to the top of its priority list the need
for "force protection"--namely, keeping troops abroad safe from
attack. That spurred the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, essentially
a Pentagon hobby shop, to action. Building on some ongoing work with video
surveillance and modeling techniques, as well as on commercial (but still
experimental) technologies such as those used to identify automatic-teller
machine customers by scanning their faces, DARPA set out to investigate
the potential for a network of biometric sensors to monitor the outsides
of military facilities.
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- The result is a program known as Image Understanding
for Force Protection (IUFP), which the agency hopes to get started in 2001.
Described by the Pentagon as "an aggressive research and development
effort," IUFP is supposed to improve site surveillance capabilities
by "creating new technologies for identifying humans at a distance."
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- Biometric systems in use with ATM machines and computers
have two advantages over what DARPA has in mind: proximity and cooperation.
For military purposes, biometric sensors and networks must be able to "see"
and identify subjects from distances of between 100 and 500 feet--subjects
who probably don't want to be identified. In addition, they must be capable
of picking faces out of crowds in urban environments, keeping track of
repeat visitors who, according to DARPA's George Lukes, "might be
casing the joint," and alerting users to the presence of known or
suspected terrorists. Databases could even be shared by different facilities,
informing security officials, for example, that the same person is showing
up repeatedly near different potential targets.
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- The software behind Newham's anticrime system that has
drawn DARPA interest is called FaceIt, from New JerseyÇbased Visionics
Corporation. FaceIt scans the visages of people and searches for matches
in a video library of known criminals. When the system spots one of those
faces, the authorities are contacted. A military version might work the
same way. Over the past year, according to a DARPA document recently sent
to Congress, "several new technical approaches have been identified"
that could provide improved face recognition at longer distances, as well
as extend the range of iris-recognition systems.
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- DARPA believes, however, that combining several types
of technologies could form a network that is more capable than a single
system. New concepts it is exploring include the thermal signature of the
blood vessels in the head, which some researchers suspect is as unique
to a person as his or her fingerprints; the shape of a person's ear; and
even "the kinetics of their gait," in DARPA's words. "There
are some unique characteristics to how people move that allow you to recognize
them," explains DARPA's <http://dtsn.darpa.mil/iso/index2.asp?mode=10David
Gunning. After conducting a "thorough analysis" of existing
technologies, the agency says it is "ready to begin immediately with
the new developments." The Pentagon hopes to spend $11.7 million in
2000 on the IUFP program--a good deal of money for a DARPA effort.
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- The potential for an integrated network of identification
techniques has understandably generated significant interest among defense
and intelligence agencies that are prime targets for terrorists. "There's
a lot of enthusiasm," Gunning says--after all, through the marriage
of recognition systems and surveillance technologies, DARPA thinks it has
a handle on how to keep track of "one of the few detectable precursors"
to terrorist attacks.
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- --Daniel G. Dupont
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- DANIEL G. DUPONT is the editor of Inside the Pentagon
in Washington, D.C. He described unmanned aerial vehicles in the September
issue.
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