Ubiquitous Video Surveillance and the Policing Paradigm Change it Brings

Policing in the 21st Century is obviously changing rapidly. New technological advances are fundamentally changing the way in which police forces and related government entities can track, locate, and collect evidence.

Two game changing technologies - working together - perhaps underpin the greatest tool for policing the world over. The combination of high-resolution digital video capture and facial recognition. Both sit at the crux of future policing and bring new societal change.

Projecting forward, what could the next decade or two hold? 

It's easy to get in to the realm of Science Fiction and dystopian futures, but when I consider some of the social impact (and "opportunities") such technologies can bring, it naturally feels like the premise for several short stories.

One: Peaking Under Facial Obfuscation
As I watch news of the "Yellow Vest" riots in Paris, it is inevitable that high-resolution digital video capture of protesters - combined with facial recognition - will mean that many group protest actions will become individually attributable. While the face of the perpetrator may not initially be tied to an identity, a portfolio of digital captures can be compiled and (at some future date) associated with the named individual.

New technologies in the realm of full-color night-vision video capture and advanced infrared heat-based body and face mapping lie the basis of radically better tools for associating captured maleficence to an individual. Combined with the work being done with infrared facial recognition, and we'll soon find that scarfs, balaclavas, or even helmets will cease to protect the identity of the perpetrator.

Two: Perpetual Digital Trail
Many large cities are approaching the point that it is impossible to stand in any public space or thoroughfare and not be captured by at least one video camera. Capitalizing on this, many metropolitan police forces are already able to real-time track a surveilled individual or entity through their networked cameras. In addition, some police forces have already combined such capabilities with facial recognition to quickly spot wanted individuals or suspects in crowds and track their movements across cameras in real-time.

We can expect the density and prevalence of cameras to grow. We can also expect that the video captured from these cameras to increasingly move to the cloud and be retained indefinitely. The AI tooling today already enables us to intelligently stitch together all the video content and construct a historical trail for any person or physical entity.

When combined with (One), it means that in the near future police forces could track (both forward and reverse in time) each suspect - identifying not only the history of travel and events preceding the crime, but also their origination (e.g. home) address... and from there, arrive at an identity conclusion. Imagine doing this for thousands of protesters simultaneously. Obviously, such a capability would also facilitate the capture of facial images of the suspect before they donned any masks or facial obfuscation tools they used during the protest or crime.

Three: Inferring Pending Harm and Stress
As digital video cameras radically increase their capture resolution - moving from an average of 640x480 to 3096x2160 (4k Ultra HD) and beyond over the coming years; facial recognition accuracy will obviously improve, but we can expect other personal traits and characteristics to be accurately inferred.

Studies of human movement and tooling for life-like movements in digital movies naturally lend to the ability to identify changes in an individuals movements and infer certain things. For example, being able to guess the relative weight and flexibility of contents within a backpack being worn by the surveilled individual, the presence of heavy objects being carried within a suit jacket, or changes in contents of a bag carried in-hand.

If we also assume that the surveilled individual will be caught by multiple cameras from different locations, the combination of angles and perspective will further help define the unique characteristics and load of the individual. Police forces could use that intelligence to infer the presence of weapons for example.

Higher resolution monitoring also lends itself to identifying and measuring other more personal attributes of the person being monitored. For example, details on the type and complexity of jewelry being worn, tattoos, or unique visible identifiers.

Using physical tells such as sweat density, head-bobbing (see an earlier blog - Body Worn Camera Technologies), and heart-rate, it will be possible to identify whether the person is stressed, under duress, or has recently exerted themselves.

Four: The Reverse Paradigm
Such technologies are not exclusive to police forces and government departments. It is inevitable that these technologies will also be leveraged by civilians and criminals alike - bringing a rather new dynamic to future policing.

For example, what happens if anti-riot police cannot obfuscate their identity during a riot - despite balaclavas and protective helmets? If every retaliatory baton strike, angered shield charge, tear gas spray, or taser use can be individually attributed to the officer that did it (and the officer can be identified by face capture or uniform number), officers become individually responsible and ultimately accountable for their actions.

Imagine for instance that every office present now had a virtual folder of video captures detailing their actions during the riots. With little effort and likely a little crowd-sourcing, each officer's identity would be discovered and publicly associated with their actions.

It would be reasonable to expect that police officers would adjust their responses to riot situations - and its likely that many would not want to expose themselves to such risk. While it is possible new or existing laws could be used to protect officers from most legal consequences of "doing their job", the social consequences may be a different story.

We've already seen how doxing can severely affect the life and safety of those that are victims, it would be reasonable to assume that some percentage of a rioting population would be only too eager to publish a police officers "crimes" along with all their identity, address, and any other personal data they could find. Would we expect police officers with young families take on the risk of riotous agitators arriving at their families doorstep - looking for vengeance.

Five: Ubiquitous Consumer-led Video Surveillance
A question will inevitably be raised that the ability to construct digital trails or infer motivations and harm will be restricted to police and government entities. After all, they're the ones with the budget and authority to install the cameras.

These challenges may be overcome. For example, new legal test cases may force governments to make such video feeds publicly available - after all, funding is through public money. We've seen such shifts in technology access before - e.g. GPS, satellite mapping, satellite imagery.

An interesting model for consumer video that could become even more complete and ubiquitous video capture (and analytics) may be relatively simple.

Just as today's home security systems have advanced to include multiple internal and external high-resolution video feeds to the cloud, maybe the paradigm changes again. Instead of a managed security monitoring service, things become community based and crowd sourced.

For example, lets say that for each high-resolution video camera you install and connect to a community cloud service, you gain improved access to the accumulated mesh of every other contributing camera. Overlaying that mesh of camera feeds, additional services augment the video with social knowledge and identity information, and the ability to trace movements around an event - just like the police could - for a small fee. The resultant social dynamics would be very interesting... does privacy end at your doorstep? If every crime in a public space is captured and perpetrators labeled, does that make petty and premeditated crime disappear? Does local policing shift to community groups and vigilantes?

Conclusions
Advances in high-resolution digital video cameras and facial recognition will play a critical role in how policing society changes over the next couple of decades.

The anticipated advancements will certainly make it easier for police forces to track, identify, and hold accountable those that perpetuate crimes. But such technologies will also inevitably be likewise utilized by those being policed. While the illustrated scenarios began with the recent riots in France, the repercussions for police forces in Mexico facing wealthy cartels would perhaps be more dire.

It is too early to tell whether the ubiquity of these advancing technologies will tilt the hand in one direction or the other or whether we'll reach a new technology stalemate. Accountability for an individuals actions - backed by proof - feels like the right societal movement, but opens doors to entirely new forms of abuse.

-- Gunter Ollmann

Body Worn Camera Technologies – Futures and Security

“Be careful what you wish for” is an appropriate adage for the flourishing use and advancement of body worn camera (BWC) technologies. As police forces around the world adapt to increased demands for accountability – where every decision, reaction, and word can be analyzed in post-event forensic fashion – the need and desire to equip each police or federal agent with a continuously recording camera has grown.

There are pros and cons to every technology – both from technical capability and societal changes. The impartial and continuous recording of an event or confrontation places new stresses on those whose job is to enforce the thousands of laws society must operate within on a daily basis, in the knowledge that each interpretation and action could be dissected in a court of law at some point in the future. Meanwhile, “offenders” must assume that each action – hostile or otherwise – could fall afoul of some hitherto unknown law in fully recorded technicolor.

Recently the National Institute of Justice released a market survey on Body Worn Camera Technologies. There are over 60 different BWCs specifically created for law enforcement use and the document provides information on the marketed capabilities of this relatively new class of technology.

The technological features of the current generation of BWCs are, overall, quite rudimentary - given limitations of battery power, processing capabilities, and network bandwidth. There is however a desire by the vendors to advance the technology substantially; not just in recording capability, but in areas such as facial recognition and cloud integration.

Today’s generation of BWCs truly are the 1.0 version of a policing platform that will evolve rapidly over the coming decade.

I’ve had a chance to look a little closer at the specifications and capabilities of today’s BWC solutions and have formulated some thoughts to how these BWC platforms will likely advance over the coming years (note that some capabilities already exist within specialized military units around the world – and will be easy additions to the BWC platform once the costs to produce reduce):

1. Overcome the bandwidth problem to allow real-time streaming and remote analysis of the video date. As cellular capabilities increase and 4G/5G becomes cheaper and more reliable in metro centers, “live action” can be passed to law enforcement SOC (just like existing CCTV capabilities). In cases where such cellular technology isn’t reliable, or where having multiple law enforcement officers working in the same close geographic proximity, the likely use of mobile cellular towers (e.g. as a component of the police vehicle) to serve as the local node – offering higher definition and longer recording possibilities, and remote SOC “dial-in” to oversee operations with minimal bandwidth demands.
2. Cloud integration of collected facial recognition data. As the video processing capabilities of the BWC improves, it will be possible to create the unique codification of faces that are being recorded. This facial recognition data could then be relayed to the cloud for matching against known offender databases, or for geographic tracking of individuals (without previously knowing their name – but could be matched with government-issued photo ID’s, such as driver license or passport images). While the law enforcement officer may not have immediately recognized the face or it may have been only a second’s passing glimpse, a centralized system could alert the officer to the persons presence. In addition, while an officer is questioning or detaining a suspect, facial recognition can be used to confirm their identity in real-time.
3. BWC, visor, and SOC communication integration. As BWCs transition from a “passive recording” system in to a real-time integrated policing technology, it is reasonable to assume that advancements in visual alerting will be made – for example a tactical visor that presents information in real time to the law enforcement officer – overlaying virtual representations and meta-data on their live view of the situation. Such a technology advance would allow for rapid crowd scanning (e.g. identifying and alerting of wanted criminals passing through a crowd or mall), vehicles (e.g. license plate look-up), or notable item classification (e.g. the presence of a firearm vs replica toy).
4. Broad spectrum cameras and processing. The cameras used with today’s BWC technology are typically limited to standard visible frequencies, with some offering low-light recording capabilities. It is reasonable to assume that a broader spectrum of frequency coverage will expand upon what can be recorded and determined using local or cloud based processing. Infrared frequency recording (e.g. enabling heat mapping) could help identify sick or ailing detainees (e.g. bird flu outbreak victim, hypothermic state of rescued person), as well as provide additional facial recognition capabilities independent of facial coverings (e.g. beard, balaclava, glasses) – along with improved capabilities in night-time recording or (when used with a visor or ocular accessory) for tracking a runaway.
5. Health and anxiety measurement. Using existing machine learning and signal processing techniques it is possible to measure the heart rate variability (HRV) from a recorded video stream. As the per-unit compute power of BWC devices increase, it will be possible to accurately measure the heart rate of an individual merely by focusing on their face and relaying that to the law enforcement officer. Such a capability can be used to identify possible health issues with the individual, recent exertions, or anxiety-related stresses. Real-time HRV measurements could aid in determining whether a detainee is lying or needs medical attention. Using these machine learning techniques, HRV can be determined even if the subject is wearing a mask, or if only the back of the head is visible.
6. Hidden weapon detection. Advanced signal processing and AI can be used to determine whether an object is hidden on a moving subject based of fabric movements. As a clothed person moves, the fabrics used in their clothing fold, slide, oscillate, and move in many different ways. AI systems can be harnessed to analyze frame-by-frame movements, identify hard points and layered stress points, and outline the shape and density of objects or garments hidden or obscured by the outer most visible layer of clothing. Pattern matching systems could (in real-time) determine the size, shape, and relative density of the weapon or other hidden element on the person. In its most basic form, the system could verbally alert the BWC user that the subject has a holstered gun under the left breast of their jacket, or a bowie knife taped to their right leg. With a more advanced BWC platform (as described in #3 above), a future visor may overlay the accumulated weapon and hard-point detection on the law enforcement officer’s view of the subject – providing a pseudo x-ray vision (but not requiring any active probing signals).

Given the state of current and anticipated advances in camera performance, Edge Computing capability, broadband increases, and smart-device inter-connectivity over the coming decade, it is reasonable to assume that BWC technology platform will incorporate most if not all of the above listed capabilities.

As video evidence from BWC becomes more important to successful policing, it is vital that a parallel path for data security, integrity, and validation of that video content be advanced.

The anti-tampering capabilities of BWC systems today are severely limited. Given the capabilities of current generation off-the-shelf video editing suites, manipulation of video can be very difficult if not impossible to detect. These video editing capabilities will continue to advance. Therefore, for trust in BWC footage to remain (and ideally grow), new classes of anti-tamper and frame-by-frame signing will be required – along with advanced digital chain of custody tracking.

Advances and commercialization block-chain technology would appear at first glance to be ideally suited to digital chain of custody tracking.