[Nettime-bold] surveillance at play

[Bill Spornitz <spornitz@pangea.ca>]

This would never happen in the Canadian Football League  ;-> Probably 
the result of too many bad *terrorist at the super bowl* movies in 
the '70s...


info on FaceTrac:
http://www.graphcotech.com/facetrac.shtml


>

 From edupage http://www.educause.edu/pub/edupage/edupage.html


WELCOME TO THE SNOOPER BOWL
Unbeknownst to most of the 72,000 football fans that filled
Raymond James Stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, each of their faces
was scanned by the Tampa Bay police department using a high-tech
surveillance system called FaceTrac. The system, created at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, compares photos of faces
with a database of known "troublemakers," from pickpockets to
terrorists. The system cannot be fooled by disguises such as
beards and sunglasses due to its extremely precise and complex
measurements of the human face. The computers used during the
game were attended by humans, and when the software made a match,
a police officer was notified. Police made 19 matches during the
Super Bowl, although there were no arrests. The forces behind the
surveillance insist that the surveillance at the game was simply
a test, not a real effort to catch criminals. However, the
surveillance has raised the ire of the American Civil Liberties
Union and other privacy advocates, including some in Congress,
who see this as the beginning of the end of privacy and civil
liberties. (Time, 12 February 2001)

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Abstracts copyright (c) 2001, Information Inc., Bethesda, MD
Edupage copyright (c) 2001, EDUCAUSE


<


_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold