Taser’s latest police weapon: the tiny camera and the cloud

February 22, 2012 | Source: New York Times

AXON flex (credit: TASER International)

TASER International has announced new kind of camera called AXON flex, to be worn by police officers.

The half-ounce unit is about the size of a cigar stub and clips on to a collar or sunglasses of an officer. It can record two hours of video during a shift. The information is transferred by a docking station to a local machine, and eventually stored in a cloud-computing system that uses Taser’s online evidence management system.

In Taser’s cloud evidence system, which resides on Amazon.com’s cloud storage service, the videos can be tagged and labeled for record-keeping. The software has editing capabilities to protect the identities of some people captured on the video, like victims of child sex crimes or undercover officers.

The new cameras sell for $1,000, including a battery that lasts 14 hours.

If body cameras do catch on, the images will almost certainly flood the Internet. Video from cameras mounted on dashboards of police cruisers is already a staple on YouTube.