Trapwire surveillance system exposed in document leak
August 14, 2012
(Credit: Hustvedt/Wikimedia Commons)
It sounds like something from the film Minority Report: a CCTV surveillance system that recognizes people from their face or walk and analyzes whether they might be about to commit a terrorist or criminal act, The Guardian reports.
According to documents released online by WikiLeaks last week, Trapwire is being used in a number of countries to try to monitor people and threats.
Founded by former CIA agents, Trapwire uses data from a network of CCTV systems and license plate readers to figure out the threat level in huge numbers of locations. Documents from the U.S. department of homeland security show that it paid $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and Seattle.
From the Trapwire website:
TrapWire is a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns indicative of terrorist attacks or criminal operations. Utilizing a proprietary, rules-based engine, TrapWire detects, analyzes and alerts on suspicious events as they are collected over periods of time and across multiple locations. Through the systematic capture of these pre-attack indicators, terrorist or criminal surveillance and pre-attack planning operations can be identified — and appropriate law enforcement counter measures employed ahead of the attack.
Comments (12)
by bucipirofo
And the irrational emotions you feel if you do make it out and find that what you need isn’t in your bag are certainly worth avoiding. They are cheesily conceived, often down to the titling (Snowmageddon, anyone?The trailers for the movies are better than the movies themselves. I used to believe that when you had a “gut” feeling about something it meant whatever it is you thought at that moment was the truth.
by John Drake
a couple of small laser lights attached to your ball cap brim, will flash the system and blind it when you look at a camera, and pretty much eliminate facial recognition…my understanding, that is.
by Andy
Point the cameras at congress, the oval office and upper management of several government alphabet agencies.
by Dennis
Big Brother is pleased.
by longnow
Believe Charles Stross mentions CCTV in “Rule34″
along with Cognitive Radio or phone built into
a persons head…it happened to be in the head of
of a paranoid SCZ w/o his meds which might be the best
and worst of both worlds, and besides, everyones gay in Scotland in the yr 2023 including female cops and a
woman named Straight.-(
by GatorALLin
had me wondering if they make up a face to match a known bad guy…then have everyone trying to watch this guy run around….the real bad guy gets away…or does damage other places as his mask is different. http://www.kurzweilai.net/disney-researchers-develop-new-automated-process-for-cloning-human-faces
by GatorALLin
Makes you wonder if a simple low cost face change from any hobby or costume shop, or those glasses with funny nose http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj9_yW8tZxs
would be enough to throw off this system? And here most of us thought the cool face recognition software was to tag our friends in the facebook pictures. Don’t get me wrong… I like the idea and glad DC or Tampa, or other cites where it has long been in use should be testing this idea to share data with other cities and helping catch more criminals (even terrorists). I just don’t assume this is foolproof.
by Bri
Like I’ve said in other posts, it is becoming increasingly difficult to mount a successful offensive campaign, against any large scale adversary. Aggression is up lately, but is nowhere near as high as it was, during the times when we carried swords and dueled at sunrise over honor.
by Arch Hughes
Somehow I doubt that swordplay an violence was as common in feudal societies as it might be depicted on TV and movies. That said, I’d be open to some data that supports it. And, it would be interesting to understand if that violence was more suppression than aggression due to the disparate ownership of weapons between rulers and their subjects.
by GatorALLin
….this website gives you an upfront seat to how war is being done with technology… more like a video game than the old days of face to face swords at sunrise. See if you agree http://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/air-strikes/2-apaches-engage-taliban-platoon/1741618611001/
by Gorden Russell
Thanks for the link to military.com, GatorALLin. Never been there before. Never knew that Apaches were using FLIR to hunt down the Taliban in the dark. Ended up spending the whole morning on that site. Now I won’t be able to finish the Kurzweil Newsletter until after lunch.
by Mr.x
Ah, all the freedom.Freedom of surveillance.
And if terrorists blow themselves up, you call that cowardly, but using superior technology which allows the user to be absent from the battlefield is brave?Maybe it’s high-tech terrorism.I guess that’s because most “democracies” can’t take it if the enemy inflects loses on them, which leads to the need for this costly kind of warfare.
But at least it propells technological progress forward, so that in a not-so-far future low manpower warfare becomes cheap enough to be
“democratized.”
Btw: If future wars are like videogames, everyone should try to ally with South Korea- they’d have the most skilled army the world has ever seen ;)