George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, painted a picture of a world without privacy, in
which government authorities, using a wide array of technologies, continuously monitored human
activity. The loss of privacy shaped society, enabling government to control all aspects of
people’s lives. — ACLU: Under a Watchful Eye
Video surveillance has doubled in the last five years: It is now a $9.2-billion industry, and J. P. Freeman, a security industry consultant, estimates that it will grow to $21 billion by 2010. He
predicts that “pretty soon, cameras will be like smoke detectors: They’ll be everywhere.”
Bay Area Rapid Transit will spend $5.4 million to upgrade and expand its security camera system in stations, on the trains, along tracks, in the Transbay Tube, in parking lots and at other facilities. Software automatically alert authorities of suspicious activity as an unattended backpack or trespassers in areas off limits to the public.
The BART camera program is endorsed by California’s director of homeland security.
“One of the things we know in terms of threat is that our mass transit systems are very much at risk. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out when you look at the history of some of the attacks that al Qaeda has engaged in,” said Matthew Bettenhausen, the governor’s homeland security chief.
The money is part of a $19.9 billion transportation bond California voters approved last fall – $1 billion of which is earmarked for security enhancements.
The state bond money covers just a sliver of the $50 million camera project. The agency will implement the upgrades in phases when funding becomes available. Officials declined to offer more specifics on where the new cameras will be deployed or how many there will be.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have criticized the growing use of public cameras – mounted on patrol cars, traffic signals, freeway overpasses and utility poles and in buses, trains and airports – as an invasion of personal privacy. But advocates say that in an era of heightened awareness of terrorist threats, the security that cameras offer is worth the loss of privacy.
More than four million cameras being used and operated throughout Great Britain —- one for every 14 people. In London the average person is now captured on video camera 300 times a day.
By combining video footage with face recognition software, the government could quickly identify individuals walking down a street, participating in a political rally, or entering a doctor’s office, says the ACLU.
The State Department has already embedded RFID tags in all new U.S. passports and the Department of Homeland Security is considering its use in other travel documents and identification cards. With RF ID tags embedded in identity cards and machines to read them integrated into public surveillance cameras, government would be able to collect and compile an immense amount of information about individuals and their private lives.
The federal Real ID Act will establish such files—a nationwide database of information on every U.S. citizen—in the next few years. It will establish national standards for state-issued driver’s licenses and non-driver’s identification cards.
There is disagreement about whether the Real ID Act institutes a “national identification card” system, says Wikipedia. The new law only sets forth national standards, but leaves the issuance of cards and the maintenance of databases in state hands; therefore, the Department of Homeland Security claims it is not a true “national ID” system. Organizations such as NO2REALID.org, UNREALID.com, and REALNIGHTMARE.org argue that this is a trivial distinction.
Super RFID technology uses long-range radar responsive (RR) tags.
Originally, the active 430 MHz tags were designed using technology derived from a radar device requiring line-of-sight for reading. Since then, Sandia has modified the technology to its current form, which employs RFID to transmit ID numbers instead of radar.
New images of the NRO’s Lacrosse satellite, acquired by British amateur observer John Locker, reportedly show the secret craft in unprecedented detail. Whether space radar like Lacrosse could interrogate an RF-ID card is unknown.
DARPA’s ISIS program puts a radar antenna as big as a football field on an stratospheric airship. Raytheon plans to bond the largest X-band antenna ever built — 1000 feet long — to the hull of an unmanned airship. But it needs batteries ten times lighter than today’s cells.
Last year, a prototype airship was positioned over Akron, Ohio. It will become part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System Test Bed following the successful demonstration in 2007. Sky Sentry (below) has contracts with the NRO, Ballistic Missile Defense and other agencies.
Northrop Grumman’s new operations center in Maryland utilizes their airborne multifunction sensor expertise to develop high-power, large-aperture, multi-function applications involving very large active electronically scanned array (AESA) systems.
Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) sensors will be bonded directly to the hull material of the airship. Actively scanned arrays use many “active” transmit/receive elements.
UCSD engineers have developed the world’s most complex “phased array” integrated circuit, reports SpaceDaily today. The new UCSD chip packs 16 channels onto the tiny chip. The phase and gain of each of the 16 channels is controlled electronically to direct the antenna pattern (beam) into a specific direction. This DARPA-funded advance is expected to find its way into U.S. defense satellite communication and radar systems.
The architecture of a Big Brother state now seems clear. The semantic web will flag questionable call records, business transactions or behavior. Commercial databases and surveillance archives will be searched for incriminating evidence, and 24/7 surveillance will be enabled by RF-ID tracking and literally millions of government (and commercial) cameras. Image recognition handles automatic handoff between cameras. “Gunshot mikes“, with larger arrays, will filter out background noise, to enable eavesdropping at a distance.
