Home Office surveillance at london linux meeting

Home office pushes the case for mass surveillance on the streets, and linux role in techno-monitoring. at linux world expo in london 6-7 oct, regsiter now for free ticket, but not for paying conference.
We are not deceived by claims that the technology is only for 'ID parades', it can easily be used on the streets.
It would appear they cant even put proper english sentences together1

15:50-16:20 Mission Impossible: Linux to the rescue

The Mission: reducing street crime needs effective ID parades
Overview of VIPER: Video Identification Parade Electronically Recorded
aggressive time scale
new build of equipment, police ID suites and new video ID bureau
From cottage industry to installation and production in 5 months
Overview of the technology:
4TB of storage
industry standard hardware configured as a LINUX cluster using IBM GPFS for easy and rapid access to images
operating system for sharing bandwidth, required for large image files and keep costs low
It worked first time and every time - £ 7.5m budget - ROI 9 months
Tony King, National Video Identification Systems Programme Manager, Home Office

Penguins against the New World Order
Homepage: http://www.linuxworldexpo.co.uk/conference.htm

Comments

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Hang on a moment

19.08.2004 20:54

By all means protest about the Home Office's committment to the surveillance society, but I doubt that VIPER has got the capability to even pretend to be a street-level face-recognition system, such as the ones that Visionics tried out in the states. It's a system for automatic ID parades: there is no computer-based face-recognition built in.

Looks to me more like the Home Office linking every penny then spend to street crime, cos it sells. And besides, VIPER-driven ID parades, while no more likely to work than the manual version, are a shed load less stressful for the poor sod who's just got mugged. Shame about all those easy tenners, though.

Why not check out what the HO is proposing to do (or not) to make the ID card database secure instead?

Chris
mail e-mail: vontrippenhof@hotmail.com