ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

Closed-Circuit TelevisionNikolay Volodiev Dzhonev, center, appears on a television monitor during his closed-curcuit arraignment in 2002 after he was arrested for attempting to boardan airplane en route from Atlantic City, New Jersey to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with box cutters and a pair of scissors in his backpack. AP/WIDEWORLD PHOTOS.therefore, difficult to make a PIDS expert system expertenough to be authentically useful. PIDS designers continueto emphasize that there is no near prospect ofintelligent CCTV systems outperforming human guards,with all their weaknesses.Public-surveillance CCTV. Surveillance by police of sidewalks,train stations, courtyards, parking lots, and otherpublic spaces has proliferated rapidly throughout Europeand the United States during the last decade, propelledlargely by the increased availability of inexpensive electronics.Many major cities, including Copenhagen, London,New York, and Washington, D.C., now possess public-surveillanceCCTV systems, most often operated bypolice departments. In some cases, images from thesesystems are being processed using facial recognition systems(also termed biometric systems, from the Greek for“life measurement”). Facial recognition systems are softwarealgorithms that seek to extract telltale facial featuresfrom video images and match faces in photographs tothose in a database. Public-surveillance systems are thusadvertised as serving two basic purposes, deterrence ofcrime in watched areas and identification of wantedpersons.Such systems have been criticized on several grounds.In Britain, where public-surveillance CCTV has been in usesince the 1980s, studies have cast doubt on whether CCTVhas any tendency to reduce crime through deterrence.Crime sometimes decreases in monitored areas, but manycriminologists argue that this is because criminals simplymove their activities elsewhere. Further, facial-recognitionsoftware has an extremely low success rate. Severalsystems, including ones deployed by the city of Tampa,Florida and by the U.S. Immigration and NaturalizationService, have been abandoned within months of deploymentdue to their zero or near-zero success rates. Policedatabases have also occasionally been used by individualswith access for illegal purposes (e.g., stalking exspouses,blackmailing), and public-surveillance CCTV systems,like any powerful surveillance tool, are vulnerable tosuch abuse. Further, system operators, who are usuallymale, sometimes use CCTV systems to voyeuristically220 Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security