Chicago Developing 'Suspicious Behavior' Monitoring System 294
narramissic writes "Over the past few years, Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) has been blanketing the city with a network of thousands of video cameras in an effort to remotely keep track of emergencies in real time. Now, with the help of IBM, the network is getting some smarts. IBM software will analyze the video and ultimately 'recognize suspicious behavior,' says OEMC spokesman Kevin Smith. 'The challenge is going to be teaching computers to recognize the suspicious behavior,' said Smith. 'Once this is done this will be a very impressive city in terms of public safety.'"
Good or bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good or bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good or bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Just walk around goofy...try to set huge ranges of standards for normal/abnormal behavior...throw the stats right out of the window.
That or everyone come to town on "dress like a stick of dynamite day"....
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If someone hasn't been witnessed actually committing a crime, they shouldn't be rounded up for it.
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If the system for example could recognize signs of someone being followed, it might be enough to dispatch a police car to drive past or ask the person being followed if they want assistance to help avoid a lot of serious crimes from being committed.
Now, ther
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The one thing I constantly keep hearing about is all those police officers who show up to work day after day with nothing to actually do. This system will help those cops fill up the massive gaps in their daily schedules...
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Let me repeat myself from another post: there is no way to make this system useful. It'll either be trivialized (hey - gunshots! get there, quickly!) or it'll be so swamped with false positives that no o
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This is Chicago.... Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's book on liberty focused on its brutality, discrimination, its perjury. Now it wants to watch us all, the good, the bad, the ugly, as we try and live life or visit.
Those what would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither-- Franklin
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While these cameras might give you a little faster response, they're still not much more useful than providing post-inc
Re:Good or bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
It will also be impressively Orwellian and unnecessary. I'm waiting for those famous Midwestern militias to get determined and start systematically tracking and disabling these cameras so that the rest of us can continue to go about our business w/o the prying eyes of the government.
I'm tired of traffic cameras, red light cameras, and the government's position that you are in the public and thus not anonymous in your actions. That rhetoric worked when you were manning more human police officers to do the work, not when you decided to become lazy and act like the public are your DVR favorites for watching and scanning at a later time.
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As long as you and everyone else keep waiting, it will never happen. Change occurs when people get fed up and do something about it themselves rather than waiting on someone else to solve the problem for them. If we hadn't been so gung-ho as a nation on giving other people the re
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Hammer meets nails. Very good.
An equivalent amount of funding put into community policing programs or Neighborhood Watches would likely be far more effective than a camera program could ever be. When citizens start paying attention and giving a shit about what happens in their neighborhoods, thin
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So...is there a fairly easy way, to disable these cameras from a distance without getting caught??
Purely hypothetical/educational question of course....
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Just so you know, many of the cameras are encased in a bulletproof box and have acoustic sensors to detect gunshots; the camera will automatically focus on the source of the shot.
The things transmit their video wirelessly and allow for remote control via a wireless link to police cruisers in addition to their wired link to the monitoring center downtown. I'd focus on jamming the signal or disabling the wired link.
Re:Good or bad? (Score:5, Funny)
In Chicago driving around a building several times is what you do before you decied to park somewhere you aren't supposed to be parked.
Sounds like putting cameras in the forest looking for trees.
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Self-fulfilling (Score:2)
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I for one.. (Score:5, Funny)
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... then please act like it! We're tired of watching you glance suspiciously at our surveillance cameras.
Sincerely,
the MRO
IBM Hal 9000 (Score:4, Funny)
Dave: What for?
Robot Officer: Hal says you are acting suspicious.
Dave: Picking my nose is acting suspicious?
Robot Officer: Yes you might be about to litter.
This is not a good idea now the cops can just say the computer said you were suspicious so we have reason to detain and search you and your car.
The berserkers are coming... (Score:2, Funny)
Obviously ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chicagoans should go out of their way to act "suspicious" in front of these cameras if they want to prevent the onset of a nanny state. Wear thick coats during the summer months, keep their hands in their pockets, look back and forth. Hell, maybe sticking their tongues out at the cameras would constitute suspicious ...
Besides, where they ought to be placing these cameras is in the halls of Chicago's city government.
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Re:Obviously ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, didn't London, the worlds first true nanny city just figure out that crime is the same or worse where the cameras are the densest?
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Also, didn't London, the worlds first true nanny city just figure out that crime is the same or worse where the cameras are the densest?
Effectiveness is not a requirement for passing more laws. All you need is to be able to pitch them in a way that makes them sound like a good idea.
The 1994 Crime Bill passed in the US is a good example. Some firearms related restrictions were implemented, they had no impact on crime, then they were allowed to expire, and that had no impact on crime. This does not prevent similar restrictions from being pitched as effective ways to combat crime on a local or state level.
Now you've done it! (Score:2, Interesting)
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That will work until big brother makes it a crime to "act suspicious" under the premise that it's deliberate interference with law enforcement activities, and therefore a threat public safety.
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This from Kevin Smith?!? (Score:2)
Well, after this weekend...
This is the goddamned end of the universe (Score:5, Insightful)
End of the fucking universe, right here.
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With rancorous students being tased for being rancorous students and professors being arrested for art projects and US citizens being detained without cause or due process, its really just yet another step down the road to a police state. The really sad thing is that people are only just now noticing that we've gone down the road quite a long way. It's going to take a long time and a lot of really ugly effort to get out of this.
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Two words: racial profiling.
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Bah! No way...computers aren't racist.
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From TFA:
Better hope you don't break down in a no parking zone... Instead of AAA, you'll have the DHS stopping by to help you!
Re:This is the goddamned end of the universe (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no one will be arrested because a flag. Don't you realize what this system is supposed to do. Reduce the amount of material that has to go through human eyes. If IBM software can flag suspicious activity, then police officers will monitor mostly the flagged videos, and work only a FRACTION of those flagged videos (if a human eye decides activity is suspicious.. then it may really be).
The problem isn't the fact they try to automate it. There are two other distinctive issues:
1. The fact they installed cameras everywhere. This is an actual problem, but, not the "end of the universe". You're already under control in public places, there are people EVERYWHERE around you, and they SEE you. If there were no cameras, would you feel ok to pull your pants down in the middle of the street? No. So, beside the people around you, few guys monitoring the cameras will also see you. Not that big of a deal.
2. Second problem is they put too much hope on software detecting suhspicious behaviour. That's a joke. We're AT LEAST, and I say AT LEAST, super-duper-optimistic, 20 years away from being able to create a system smart enough to detect suspicious with good accuracy. This means IBM's system will have big number of false positives, and big number of false negatives. In the former case, it means it won't be as effective in reducing the number of material a human eye has to go through. That's not a big problem but makes throwing so much money into a poor system worth question. In the latter case though, it means monitoring guys trusting the system too much and not watching the NON FLAGGED videos, and missing on ACTUAL suspicious activity which doesn't look suspicious to a computer system.
Conformity (Score:5, Insightful)
Boston (Score:2)
Conform! Conform! Conform!
False Positives (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager the false positve rate is going to be very high, and it will be interesting to see if they can bring that down. Something like an alert for a stolen car ( or a car related to an amber alert ) could generate a very high false positive rate if the car is a common make/model.
On the other hand, if it teaches criminals to act in less "suspicious" ways, then the system will be of no value or perhaps even detremental ( showing no "suspicious" behavior when criminal activity is present, leading to a false sense of security ).
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On the other hand, looking at the definition of the word I guess it sums up nicely why such an automation is ill:
1. The act of suspecting something, espe
IBM again ? (Score:2, Insightful)
London (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that's right, nobody. However, that doesn't stop the company pushing this from trying to make a buck. It's sorta like the DRM companies. The DRM companies all know it doesn't work, but companies keep falling for the salesmen's lies.
Re:London .. yes (Score:2, Informative)
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Wasn't there an article on how the massive London camera network doesn't actually do any good? And that one has real people monitoring it. Who really thinks a computer will be able to do a better job at something so nebulous as "suspicious behavior?"
Actually, if you accept the premise, then computers probably are better than people.
It's the same reason passengers are regularly able to accidentally or even purposely 'smuggle' all kinds of contraband past the luggage screeners at the airport. When 99.999% of the time there is nothing to get alarmed about, the people doing the monitoring get so bored of their jobs that they stop paying attention. This is not an indictment of the TSA's people (there are plenty of other reasons to flame them) it's just h
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They may help solve a few really serious or high profile crimes though, which would perhaps lead to people deciding they are worth having.
Once this is done... (Score:3, Insightful)
How many times have I heard this on an AI related project? "Once this is done..." is a fantasy, especially when they already describe it as a "trick" and a "challenge." From TFA:
Challenge, indeed. I'll believe it when I see it.
Scratch that. I'll believe it when the system sees it.
Kevin Smith? (Score:2)
Does this mean the next time I go to Chicago... (Score:2)
That's rich (Score:5, Insightful)
Impressive if your main hope in life is to live in some sort of Orwellian nightmare. Hey, here's a thought. If you put cameras in every house you can cut down on child abuse! You don't object to that do you? What are you some sort of kid toucher? Won't somebody please think of the children!
So much for Chicago being the lovely city I wanted to visit again.
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It isn't. Either situation means that you're living in a police state.
How about turning this around? (Score:2)
Seriously, if they can design systems to watch the people, why can't there be a system designed to watch the government?
is this serious? (Score:4, Insightful)
I expect that "suspicion" is a fairly complex process in the human brain (it relies on a lot of different senses) so I am having difficulty understanding how anyone in their right mind would undertake such an effort.
bad (Score:2)
At worst, this will be a kind of voodoo evidence, like a polygraph test, that can be used against anybody. And of course, like a polygraph test, the results of the 'suspicion machine' can only be interpreted by an expert. It will give a false 'aura of objectivity' to scapegoating and persecution.
resistance (Score:2)
I've worked on machine learning systems... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's how the system will work.
head covered: check
metal flash: check
loud sound: check
Result: sound warning
There's absolutely no way in hell that the system is going to be able to do a real-time analysis that goes beyond basic image and sound recognition that is coupled with a set of expert rules. Why? Because no will have the time to properly train the system. And even if someone would be insane enough to do that, it'll still fail, because context is utterly missing.
Example: someone runs out of a store in a hurry. Someone comes after him. Should the police be involved? Did someone steal something from the store, or did two people find out one of their friends is in trouble? Or are they late to a movie?
This system is doomed to complete failure and is nothing but a boondoggle for IBM. Kudos to the IBM salespeople who sold Chicago on this system. They're able to sell fridges to eskimos, I'm sure.
The only thing that really worries: the politicians who drank the kool-aid. For those of you who live in Chicago: vote them out, or move. This is a sign of serious trouble on the horizon.
there goes urban geocaching... (Score:2)
When the inmates run the asylum... (Score:2)
The human issues that drive crime will not be solved by surveillance even if every square foot of Chicago is monitored. In this scenario, only the innocent will suffer.
Just hire some actors to act suspiciously... (Score:2)
I suddenly have the urge to hire a bunch of poor starving theater majors to act suspiciously for the cameras. I wonder how it will take for such street performances to be outlawed, and then how long will it take to get those 'Stop Confusing the Cameras' laws overturned.
From Slashdot... (Score:2)
and i live in chicago, sigh....
I can't wait (Score:2)
Seriously...what's that quote again? "Technologists always question whether they CAN do something, but never whether they SHOULD"...
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We need to fix the wetware first.
Excellent!! (Score:2)
Cause it's worked SO well in Britain. They've installed millions of cameras, and the crime rate has gone up.
The problem is (Score:2)
- Somebody taking a leak in an alley (sure it's nasty, and a felony, but is it worth it?)
- Two members of the same sex kissing?
- Somebody wearing a T-shirt saying that "Bush is an (insert favourite invective here)"
- A gang wearing medieval knight outfit including swords. (can be a weapons felony)
- ...
Just take your pick and figure...So much for probable cause...
Hey, why hide? (Score:2)
Why else would they believe in outmoded concepts like "privacy"?
This is a snow job... (Score:2)
Who Defines "Suspicious"? (Score:2)
And everone (Score:2)
Pros and cons... (Score:2)
Of course, we'd have to know what exactly defines "suspicious behavior". On the other hand, I'm completely against false positives and people arrested without motive. An old law (now banned) in my country stated that if a cop detected "suspicious behavior", he could arrest the "suspect". In turn, this resulted in many abuses and trivial a
Perhaps i should justify my viewpoint... (Score:2)
However, I live in a country where crime is rampant, the majority of police officers are corrupted, and criminals go out of jail with blatant impunity.
When I heard about security cameras and identifying suspicious behavior, my first thought was "hey, this could do a lot for crime preventi
Good thing for defense and civil lawyers... (Score:2)
If the cameras pick up a lot of people breaking a particular law, but the cops do not enforce that law (they only arrest or ticket a small percentage of the people,) then couldn't you get those convictions overturned on the grounds of selective enforcement?
And imagine the civil lawsuits against the city when the cameras show a crime, but the police fail to respond for any reason or if they're late in arriving.
And then there's the lawsuits about what constitutes a crime. Do the cameras ignore jaywalki
Lazy-Ass's Crime Prevention Machine (Score:3, Insightful)
To prevent crime, educate the populace so as help to instill acceptable ethics and a sense of shame. Help them to acquire the resources they actually need and stop telling them they're less of a person if they don't have the "best" of everything. Teach people about people and reinforce those teachings throughout life.
To predict crime, go see a psychic because they are just as likely to choose an imminent criminal due to "suspicious" activity. You'd spend less money this way. You'll need it for the counter-suits.
Truth of the matter is that the nation isn't a fan of raising their children. Nor do they look kindly on higher taxes to reduce classroom size so that teachers can be mentors as well as lectures. And since crime prediction is a fantasy, the best we can do is crime reaction.
Duh (Score:5, Funny)
When the UK installed city-wide surveillance (Score:2)
Beware of unintended consequences.
taking a piece of candy from the counter (Score:2)
this is wrong, because two identical videos can be produced by two different behaviours.
in a video, you can have two identical videos of a person taking a piece of candy from a counter.
they have a different behaviour -- and yet, one paid for it, and the other is stealing.
Anyone here knows Max Frisch' "Andorra"? (Score:2)
I'm gonna call sales pitch here. (Score:2)
And:
So at present it probably does nothing at all. But with questions being raised in other places about the usefulness of CCTV [slashdot.org]. They have to do something
Suspicious Behaviour is not illegal!!! (Score:2)
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Now we're teaching machines this human trait.
Foot in the door (Score:2)
Typical. Tell the public its for 'good' things to get them to buy off on it, and by the time the true intentions are known its too late to turn back.
Mired in statistical fallacies (Score:5, Informative)
Let's apply a little Bayesian reasoning, shall we?
Given that system X identifies your behavior as suspicious, what is the probability that you are a terrorist? This probability is written P(T|S). This is what we want to find.
Bayes' Rule: P(T|S) = P(S|T)*P(T)/P(S).
P(S|T) is the probability that the system will identify you as suspicious, given that you are a terrorist. You can call this the system's "accuracy." Let's be generous and say the accuracy is 99.99% = 0.9999.
P(T) is the probability that you are a terrorist. Let's say that this probability is one in a million: 0.000001.
P(S) is the probability that the system thinks you are suspicious. There are two sources of suspicion: true positives, and false positives. The true positives are given by P(S|T)*P(T). The false positives are given by P(S|~T)*P(~T).
Let's again, be generous, and say that the false positive rate P(S|~T) is only 0.1%, or 0.001.
P(~T) is just 1-P(T) = 0.999999.
So, let's substitute everything in:
P(T|S) = P(S|T)*P(T) / (P(S|T)*P(T)+P(S|~T)*P(~T)) = 0.9999*0.000001 / (0.9999*0.000001+0.001*0.999999)
What's that equal, everybody? 0.0009989 which is about 0.001, in other words 0.1%
What does it mean? Even with a system that has a true positive rate of 99.99% and a false positive rate of only 0.1%, the probability of a "suspicious person" actually being a terrorist is only 0.1%.
In other words, these systems are inherently useless in identifying terrorists. This is because terrorists are inherently RARE in the population. The massive accuracy of the test cannot make up for this fact.
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In other news, this system would classify 0.09% of all activity as true positives which are also false, miring the poster in statistical fallacy.
In yet other news, doctorcisco falls for the fallacy that the sum of the false positive rate plus the true positive rate must be 1. It needn't be, and often isn't.
Video overlords (Score:3, Funny)
It looks like this person is trying to sell crack. Cancel or allow?
Schizophrenia and ticks (Score:3, Interesting)
This could backfire (Score:4, Insightful)
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City camera is pointed at a window in which is visible the screen of a computer at a public internet cafe. You log on to /. at the cafe. Bam! Suspicious activity! See, it's applicable. :)
Also, and call me crazy if I'm crazy, but its awfully hard to live as a free, responsible person online if you can't live as a free, responsible person offline . Hence, meat-space rights are relevant to YRO.
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Maybe like in Britain they'll come equipped with loudspeakers so that the all-seeing overlords can chastise you to discontinue your deviant and/or naughty thoughts. That'll nip those perversions right in the bud! If they're really industrious they could automate that part as well, with pre-recorded messages by someone with a suitably authoritative-sounding voice (I nominate James Earl Jones).
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Oh, and you know, some of the compassion stuff never fucking hurts.
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That's the problem right there. Computers are quite capable of flawlessly interpreting speech, faces, handwriting, gestures, behaviors, you name it . . . as long as we can unambiguously define how to do so.
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Jews... (Score:4, Interesting)