American Civil Liberties Union

Recently I wrote about an ACLU of Michigan report that highlighted the problem of police cameras being installed outside of people’s private homes. Last week I learned from my colleague Doug Bonney of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri about an even more egregious incident involving video surveillance of a private home in Missouri. Bonney described the situation to me:

One of the central elements in last week's Trapwire story involves the application of “behavioral recognition,” also known as “video analytics,” to camera feeds. What are we to make of this technology?

In essence, video analytics is a form of artificial intelligence that tries to automatically derive meaning from a video feed. Face recognition, license plate recognition, and red light cameras are each examples of the automated extraction of meaning from a video feed, but what I’m focused on here are technologies that aim to offer more general analysis of behaviors that are taking place in a camera’s field of view. Examples include the tracking of people throughout an area, zone or perimeter protection, determination of (and detection of deviations from) “normal” patterns of movement in an area, and the detection of abandoned objects. (This article at EE Times offers an extensive introduction to the technology.) 

Here are some links that have caught our eye recently:

The FBI’s “Next Generation Identification” biometrics database is starting to plan for the inclusion of iris scans. Iris scans raise more issues than some other biometrics (such as fingerprints) because they can be used at a distance without a subject’s participation, permission, or even knowledge. Hand-held iris scanners are being sold to police around the country for identification uses. We were assured in a meeting with the FBI last year that biometric scans in situations such as traffic stops would not be used to enroll individuals into the database, just to check their identity.