UK's Public Cameras Listen For Trouble

You're probably already aware of the United Kingdom's large network of video cameras inspecting public places. News.com now reports that they'll be listening for trouble as well. Based on a model in use in the Netherlands, new cameras will be fitted to 'listen for aggressive tones,' such as those used during an argument. From the article: "The system works by putting microphones in CCTV cameras to continually analyze the sound in the surrounding area. If aggressive tones are picked up, an alarm signal is automatically sent to the police, who can zoom in the camera to the location of the suspect sound and investigate the situation. 'Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression,' Van der Vorst said. 'With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation.'"

Privacy?

doubleplusungood

Re:Privacy?

Seriously Brits, that book wasn't meant to be used as a manual.

When I woke up this morning

I let off some aggressive tones, I would classify the smell as Dutch too. Glad I live on the other side of the planet.

They don't have fire hoses attached... yet

The cameras now have attached megaphones so they can scold you as well.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/new s/news.html?in_article_id=405477&in_page_id=1770 [dailymail.co.uk]

The system allows control room operators who spot any anti-social acts - from dropping litter to late-night brawls - to send out a verbal warning: 'We are watching you'.

Re:They don't have fire hoses attached... yet

You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!

The police will soon learn to ignore the "alarms"

Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression

And at least 90% of verbal aggression ends up leading to nothing that the police can go after. But who knows, maybe they'll have an adjustable tolerance level, or maybe the police will get their kicks out of watching people argue, like a soap opera or watching COPS.

When did aggressive tones become a crime?

People are yelling at each other. We better send the police to haul them away!

Yes

'Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression,' Van der Vorst said. 'With our system, the police can respond a lot quicker to a violent situation.'

Yes, in fact, they can even arrive at the scene before the violent situation errupts! Oh wait, didn't they already do a movie about that?

What would be more accurate and cost-effective...

Mandate that every UK resident pay to have a tracking device and microphone implanted in their body. Since you couldn't trust UK citizens to police themselves, outsource the monitoring of these surveillance devices to India.

Movie Plot

Sounds like a great opportunity for a denial-of-service attack. The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.

Then, when they want to do something nefarious in a place that happens to be in front of some cameras, they just have someone call a bunch of the phones and all the camera monitoring people will focus their attention elsewhere.

Kind of like starting a fire on one side of town right before you go to rob a bank on the other side.

Next: violent thoughts police detectors

Year after year, technology gets abused more and more, intruding lives of people on greater and greater scale. But since these increments are little, only a handful of people talk or do something about it. The rest of the public just don't care. They keep voting for politicians that pass tigher and more privacy-intrusive laws, and send country's soliders to die for no purpose into God-forgotten countries. Shame! Shame to politicians, shame to irrogant public!

cue the typical slashdot indignation

"oh the outrage! it's george orwell's 1984! those who seek security over liberty deserve neither! our privacy is totally gone, might as well install cameras in our toilets!"

hysteria, histrionics, panic, fud... snore...

in every single aspect of life you can imagination, moderation always wins. balance always wins. complexity always trumps simplicity. life is nuanced. it is made of balancing multiple complicated concerns. you can not bludgeon life with an idealistic platitude and expect to make sense or be wise

what are losing attitudes in life? idealism. absolutism. fundamentalism

the absolute adherence to an idea: "privacy above all else" is wrong. as would absolute adherence to ANY ideal be wrong

every single ideal you can imagine, there are scenarios in society where justice and common sense demand that that ideal be broken

so when would absolute adherence to privacy be wrong?

well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis? and guess what? if you lived in such an environment, you would LOVE these cameras

and in fact, that is the case: ask residents of housing projects what they think of these camera systems: they LOVE them. they get a life again. they can go outside again. the thugs get chased out of the public areas

and those who complain about these systems are usually your sort of middle class to upper middle class busy body who is disturbed by the idea of cameras... but not so disturbed about the prevalance of crime, because they don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. in other words, their opinion is formed on a half-truth, formed in a vacuum disconnected from reality that doesn't see all of the factors in play. propaganda is based on half-truths. it's an appeal to emotion, rather than an appeal to reason. "cameras bad! end of story!" the oh-so-wise slashdot crowd falls for it, brainwashed on the topic. a kneejerk, thoughtless reaction

please, slashdotters: try to understand the exact nature of the world you live in. your antithetical, hysterical reaction to these camera systems is an opinion born in a vacuum of any other considerations. sometimes, in life, the choice is between a fuzzy, complex negative, and a slightly worse, also fuzzy and complex negative. not between an obvious negative and an obvious positive. but to register some of your opinions is to see that in your mind, its a no brainer choice between absolute good and absolute evil. uh... no

some of you have opinions about these camera systems that seems to start with the assumption that the british government just likes to put up cameras and spy on its citizens for no good reason. can you possibly imagine a good reason why the government AND its people would want these cameras? or is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains, cheerfully twittering their hairline moustaches, rubbing their hands together, boldly thinking up new negarious plots to remove all of your freedoms for... no good reason at all. just general cartoonish malice. right?

can you imagine that there is actual reasonable problems these camera systems solve? can you imagine that the people installing these systems are actually well-meaning people? can you imagine that those who like these system are actually thoughtful concerned citizens happy with the cameras? no? yes? well: can you imagine a better realistic solution to the problem these cameras are solving because the privacy implications bother you? you can? good!

because now we're constructively engaged in the subject matter, rather than registering your typical lowest common denominator knee-jerk propagandistic hysterical opinion about these camera systems

it's tired. wake up. you live in a difficult world. to actually help and solve its problems just registering your holier-than-thou

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

So in other words, you would willing give up freedom for security. To be honest as a member of the armed forces it is people like you who honestly scares me. I can deal with bullets flying towards me. I can deal with the possible IEDs on a road. I can even deal with dying if it comes down to it.

What I can not deal with is the loss of freedom. I don't want to be tracked from point A to point B because somebody thinks they need to know about my whereabouts. I don't need my conversations with another individual recorded, no matter how loud or soft my voice gets. Considering I know more than a couple of students, professors, commanders, etc., who's voice gets EXTREMELY LOUD at times when engaged in a conversation.

I don't need sensationalistic politics or politicians who feel to earn their paychecks they need to introduce some outrageous tracking and monitoring scheme, which essentially now makes the citizens feel like criminals. No society is free of crime, because Man has wants and needs and sometimes in some individuals those wants and needs are larger then others (in a negative way).

To close, you may like living in a "Demolition Man" society, where everything is tracked and controlled. But eventually, such a society will foster members who are soft and weak, and unfit to take care of themselves. And then they will be overrun by someone who's utterly ruthless and without fear or respect of rules and laws.

Re:cue the typical slashdot indignation

I have said all this before, so its fairly well rehearsed. Obviously, I am a child of the 1960's :-)

I live in London. There is clearly a group of people somewhere hell bent on stirring up paranoia to justify this stuff. London is at no more risk of violence than at any other time in the last 60 years, according to any credible statistics. The number if people being killed by terrorists (Islamic or otherwise) is massively down on what it was (and sure as hell not because of cameras)*. The number of innocent people being killed by armed police is perhaps a bit higher, but still lower than any big city in the USA.

So what has changed apart from the availability of technology that can route backhanders to people with good connections?)

When my parents were school age, their houses were being bombed and they were regularly machine-gunned by Nazi dive bombers while cycling to school. So when I was young, everyone thought it was perfectly safe to go outside and play on building sites or with farm machinery or wild animals, swim in the river, and in fact: Run along and play, don't hurt anyone, don't break anything, and come back when its meal time. Serious crime was reported in the press, but without salacious details, and sexual crime was reported only using long medical terms that most people could not understand, or be bothered to read.

So we played with snakes, climbed over the rubble of bombed houses, dived into the river despite the abandonned prams and bicycles, made home-made fireworks, leapt of garage roofs and played ball in the road, and experimented with drugs and wierd music. Only a few of my friends were injured severely, and none died, except from cocaine! We knew damn well not to fall off roofs of two story buildings, cos landing carelessly of a gound flor roof hurt badly. We knew to be careful with home made explosives, because a friend nearly lost his hand, and we knew how to make and do things with any old stuff that came to hand.

Todays parents are too old to remember this, and have media that tells them about every murder or rape fifty times a day. Children not exposed to minor risk are unable to comprehend that playing chicken with 125MPH trains is a bad idea, that driving a real car is not like "Grand Theft Auto" (especially as automatics are rare here, and there is nothing like a clutch in a computer game) so they steal cars and kill children by accident.

* Terrorism in England mostly means the IRA - a bunch if Irish criminals funded by misguided Americans, and to some extent, misguided Irish. They killed loads of innocent people, and quite a few innocent animals too! This has declined because coverage of other terrorist groups on TV has shown them that Terrorist incidents are massive own-goals in terms of publicity. If the USA made it possible for all Palestinians and Iraquis to have a TV, then terrorism in the middle East would soon collapse. Why do you think the Taliban imposed a telly-ban? Yes I do have friends from the Middle East (on both sides).

what the hell is this for?

Our lives have become safer than any time in history; what the hell do we need this stuff for? While the occasional murder or terrorist attack is sad and tragic, we could save far more lives by spending this money on public health.

In addition to not giving us much bang for the buck, there is a grave risk that all this surveillance technology will be used by people to undermine our democracy.

Overkill

We have setup a system similar to this that monitors gun shots in my city. I think anything further than that is too extreme and will waste police attention.

Oh, this'll cure all societal ills...

"Despite having three leeches attached for the past two weeks, the patient has shown no signs of improvement and is, in fact, becoming weaker. Increasing to four ..."

KeS

They Dutch model is working different

The Dutch system, and I could not determine from the article if this is valid for the UK system as well, is continuesly filming but does not store the data.

Once a certain sound is detected, the camera starts to record, including a previous time span (30 or 60 seconds) from the past. People are even advised to shout when being attacked or witnessing a crime!!

This means, normal day privacy is protected and crime can be fought very efficient. The people living in that concerned district love the system.

So how will then handle accents?

Not very well, I suspect..

And it will stop what?

Once you are in a shouting match, a little speaker 20 feet behind you won't be able to calm you down. Short of having some new content for youtube, this will do little. But as a backtracking system it will be scary...

Shweet

Next time I'm in London and I'm about to pop a cap in some ManU cracker at a pub I'll say "prepare yourself for the afterlife, dear" in a very soft voice. It sure beats "YOU"RE GOING DOWN MOTHAFUCKER!!!"

$DEITY bless technology.

Help, Mimes!

This will just encourage crooks to become mimes. It is one thing to be mugged, another to be mugged by a mime, for godsakes!

Fair enough

As long as there are going to be cops monitoring public places by camera, this sounds like as good a way as any to tell them where to be looking at any given time. I think this has far more to do with narrowing down the information overload than actual additional surveillance. It would be almost physically imposable for any organization to monitor an entire city, regardless of how many cameras are in place. This is nothing more than a way to narrow that down into something manageable.

great idea

That's a great idea!

Here's an extention of it - modern cable tuner boxes have to send some information back to the cable company, so why not just put a little microphone in the tuner boxes? Then the special police software can be fed the sounds from inside your house, and if there is any sound of violent disturbance, they can respond. It's commonly known that rape and murder often occur in the home, and we're finding out more and more that in this new age of terrorism, violent crimes against society often begin in the home as well.

Since not everyone has cable tv, the government can put one of these boxes in everyone's house using the same infrastructure that tracks and enforces the TV tax. They have the customer records and housing database, so it's stupid to let such a volume of government collected personal information go unused.

Think of all the crime we could stop before it's committed! If crime can be stopped at the point when it's still just griping about the government or your boss, then we'll all be safer.

For those who don't THINK about what you read, reference "sarcasm" and "satire", along with "Orwell: 1984".

The British police are ineffective

To those people who think this is a good idea, let me tell you a few things about the British police as someone who lives in Britain.

Our police only care about meeting targets on senior management graphs, they do not give a damn about solving crimes.

This is why a motorist can be caught on camera and fined for going 6mph over the speed limit, yet someone in London who has their car set on fire by vandals has to wait *FOUR DAYS* for any sort of police response.

I'm not saying this is just a police problem, it has much to do with Blair's government forcing paperwork on the police meaning that their in police stations filling out forms rather than patrolling the streets.

But this voice camera idea is there to counteract the fact that we do NOT have enough police patrolling the streets and are therefore not controlling crime.

Seriously..

Now verbal argument... whats next ? Thought crime? Somehow that does not seem so ridiculous now.

They just need to listen out for one thing:

They just need to listen out for the sound of happy hardcore eminating from a cheap_but_loud car stereos and then swoop in Minority Report style and arrest everyone under 25 wearing a hoody or baseball cap. ;-)

Why this might be a good idea

There's some fairly suggestive evidence out there, from medical types, that the police can save NHS resources by being more proactive in environments known to be associated with violent crime (e.g. where there's a high density of pubs and clubs). Basically, if they get to an incident before it kicks off then injury can be avoided. In turn, drunk casualties don't clog up A&E time and resources. Now you can argue that these cameras with microphones are just another invasion of privacy. But there is an equally compelling case that taking a more proactive stance saves us tax payers money, prevents injury and means the poor people who turn up at A&E with non-alcohol related problems aren't sharing space with rowdy aggressive drunks. I'm all for protecting privacy - but I'm also for reducing harm and, on balance, these cameras benefits might outweigh their costs.

oh the irony of it...

... I love how the people who say that they don't want police cameras watching and listening for trouble are often the same people complaining that there aren't enough police officers on the streets watching and listening for trouble.

telling everyone a good idea??

NOT!!!

Now that the world knows, guess trouble makers can get the cameras to turn a blind eye, what happens when a noisy argument is just a diversion to get the cameras to look the other way?

Statistics.

So, how many verbal arguments do not lead to violence ? Did they consider that too ? They better had, or they might be dealing with lots and lots of false alarms.

"Yes, you, comrade #454325. Get off Slashdot!"

I live in the UK, and without sinking into the realms of denial, I think if I was to take seriously every recent /. story about the UK's new police state, I'd be wearing a tinfoil hat and locked in my basement to avoid the thought police.

I'm not suggesting that the UK is in reality some perfect utopia where everybody can do what they wish and we all get along, but on the other hand, these stories about police with 360-degree cameras, or big brother-esque cameras listening out for public disturbances - they all seem to be like an assault on the UK to try to distract a US audience from the fact that they're even deeper in that we are. Even if our cameras are watching us, at least there's no Patriot Act here ... yet.

Poor Statistical Justification

'Ninety percent of violent cases start with verbal aggression,' Van der Vorst said.

But what percent of verbal aggression leads to violence? That would be the important statistic.

For example, it is wet every time it rains, but that doesn't mean that every time it is wet it has rained. Or, to maintain crime statistics in the analogy, Every time there is a drunk driving accident, someone has gotten in a car. Therefore, should we monitor every home's garage for warning about drunk driving?

I don't have a specific opinion about police monitoring public areas with cameras, but I worry that these cameras (police-controlled cameras) will make their way into restaurants and other semi-public places, and then make their way into private homes to "prevent domestic abuse."

Remember, remember the fifth of November.

Same reason for this as all tech advances

Guys, the real reason for this is obvious... The guys watching the cameras want audio as well when they are watching people make out/have sex in public. The loudspeakers are just there for them to give instructions as well. "Hey, can you move that leg left, please? I can't see anything from this angle." It'll also sell better on the internet this way.

This rings a bell...

"As the name implies, you must also be watchful. Peace can be made or broken with a gun, a word, an idea, even a thought. Now, those who work against peace sow the seeds of discontent. They plant false stories, they undermine the public good. It's not because they are necessarily evil. It's because they don't know any better. They're rejected, they're unhappy, and they lash out in the only way they can. So, If we could be made aware of these problems as they occur, then we can find these people, we can talk to these people, we can embrace them again in the arms of society, while, at the same time, protecting society from misinformation and harmful ideas. We're less interested in actions than we are in attitudes. We must help protect society against its own worst instincts. And by taking these bold steps, we will help to ensure a better future for everyone.

I'm proud to be a part of it, and I hope you'll all join me in becoming part of the Night Watch."

Heh.

cool. now people will take out the knives silently

The cops will spend time looking after "regular" people having arguments, and ignore those pros who, silently, will take out the knives.
Well they could solve that by assigning a police agent to every single webcam out there.
Well this sounds *so* 1984..

Cameras an expensive way to solve a cheap problem

You want a way to prevent "aggresive tones"?

Well that's easy. Allow any law abiding citizen to carry a handgun. Create laws that allow any law abiding citizen to use deadly force in self defense. Prohibit civil law suits by criminals when law abiding citizens defend themselves. Prohibit any civil suit by anyone with criminal convictions.

Bonus: Allow deadly force to protect property, not just people. Your home invasion rate will fall to near zero. Your Yobs will be reformed or dead (and good riddance too!)

Crimes are never commited at the following locations: Gun shows; Police stations; NRA convetions; etc. Crimes are commited at: Disarmed victim zones (schools; post office; your home if you live in a non-free country like the UK; etc.)

Who will oppose this: People who like to hurt and rob others; and... ?

UK's Public Cameras *Might* Listen For Trouble

I've read TFA, and nowhere does it say the UK is actually using, or even actually planning to use, these systems. The lead paragraph states that the cameras are in use in the UK, but the body has the suit being quoted as saying "In the U.K., London police also are considering installing the system".

I can't find any mention besides this article of this technology being used anywhere here in the UK (which, granted, might be poor google-fu on my part).

What I see is the CEO of the company that manufactures the tech talking up the fact that the UK police didn't laugh him off the premises.

Instead of cameras that listen for trouble...

How about the UK government invests in cameras that monitor /. for dupes. Whenever an "editor" green lights an "article" that is a duplicate, a voice could come on a loudspeaker that says, "Oy! We already 'eard about that a few weeks ago!"

Some arguments for such a system

I live in Groningen and have a neighboring research interest so I might be a bit biased, but here it goes:

1. In holland all inner cities are watched over by police with camera's. These camera's are actually watched, so if the operator want to monitor you he can. This system increases the number of camera feeds a operator can handle by prioritizing the camera feeds (thus less operators, more people on the street) and he is only shown suspicious camera feeds, not the people having fun. The dutch privacy guard not only allows this system, but also encourages its development as long as the audio signal does not leave the sensor on the street (which it doesn't without proper authorization).
2. On the point of a denial of service attack, the system can make a difference between enacted aggression and real aggression. Recordings of aggression can work, but a cell phone won't produce a good enough quality sound.
3. The statistics on how much verbal aggression leads to physical aggression are interesting, but not for such a system. Police is only send to places that may become interesting, it is then at the discretion of the officer whether or not to act.
4. The operator of the system cannot listen in on any scene (sure technically it's no problem, but it is strictly forbidden by law.). In the Groningen(the city where I live) setup only with a warrant from a judge the audio from a specific incident can be retrieved.
5. The detection doesn't work on keywords or speech recognition, it works on the actual changes in the voice signal due to the loss of control over your speech production system when you are aggressive. This is also why acting doesn't work, it that case you keep control. Accents or foreign languages are no problem.
6. It won't stop some crimes like terrorist bombings, pickpocketing or other silent crimes (at least silent in their preparation), but the system is not aimed at that. And picking a fight while being mute is very, very unpractical so that probably won't happen.

The privacy checks in the system depend of course on correct implementation and correct use by the police. So these two factors should be under constant control.

Stand and Yell at the camera

If I knew of these cameras were installed in my city I would go out and yell profanities at the camera and probably some colorfull gestures to boot. When the cops showed up I would claim free politically motivated speech and would claim that I was merely protesting that fact that such an Orwellian device had been setup in a free land.

Re:Probably a good idea

There is a subhuman race that inhabits some areas of the UK called Chavs (or in Scotland, Neds).

Any city or country has a poor, uneducated underclass. I've been in the UK. There's nothing that makes British thugs special as compared to thugs in other countries. Besides, the money spent on cameras could be spent for better education or to develop cheaper manufacturing technology that would keep manufacturing jobs in Britain, thus alleviating unemployment.

-b.