A British firm is hawking software that will allow surveillance cameras to listen in, analyze the pitch, tone and intonation of noises and determine whether they reveal some type of threat. The idea is that the monitors will be able to tell if you're being aggressive or attacked and then alert authorities.
Not only is Big Brother going to be constantly watching you, now he'll be listening to boot. Who knows just how far this fledgling listening technology can and will evolve? From BBC News:
"A lot of incidents just can't be picked up by video only systems," said Chris Mitchell, Audio Analytic's boss, on BBC World Service's Digital Planet.
"For example in a hospital where somebody, or a nurse, is being threatened early hours in the morning - that's a very difficult thing for CCTV guards who monitor hundreds of channels worth of video signals on 20 screens or so to pick up."
The software goes beyond simply placing microphones onto cameras and listening in. By feeding hundreds of sample sounds into the system, the software can distinguish different threats from various sounds - and not just based on volume.
As always it's not the technology that's really the problem but rather the manner in which it can be abused, the improper ends to which it can be turned. I'm sure it would be great, say at hospital parking lots where nurses coming off shift in the middle of the night can be at increased risk. But, as always, quis custodiet ipsos custodes, who watches the watchers?
No matter what the proponents of these systems claim they are always abused. I have no problems with it being used privately, by wholesale use by the government is not acceptable.
ReplyDeleteMarry CCTV with face recognition software and robotic eavesdropping of this sort and that's game, set and match. With a public growing increasingly apathetic to this sort of thing, it's bound to be exploited. Few people grasp that privacy is the bedrock freedom on which all others are founded. Yet we seem to be surrendering it without a thought much less angry protest.
ReplyDelete"Think of the children and the terrorist"....
ReplyDeleteFacial recognition software works spottily so now we have to not smile, remove eyeglasses just to help... We are all sheeple...
I'm just getting through Chalmers Johnson's "Dismantling the Empire, America's Last Best Hope," in which he talks about the wholesale outsourcing or privatization of the U.S. government's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.
ReplyDeleteWhen Bush/Cheney sought to appoint Adm. Poindexter to run the "Office of Total Information Awareness" to, in effect, maintain dossiers on all 300+ million citizens, it was publicly killed off in Congress. No problem. Contract it out to private firms that operate on untendered contracts beyond Congressional oversight.
Likewise, sovereign governments are supposed to have a monopoly on violence but, for the United States, that notion was discarded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today they're called "contractors" but back before we took leave of our senses we knew them as mercenaries.
Chalmers thinks America is at the fork in the road faced by Britain at the end of WWII - empire or democracy. He argues quite effectively that you cannot have both yet America seems to be willing to sacrifice its democracy for the sake of corporatism and empire. Few things facilitate that transformation better than maintaining a citizenry under surveillance.
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