With the introduction of the USA Patriot Act of 2001 the people of the United States are being spied on in ways that are intrusive, invasive and evasive in their technologies. All done for "our own good" in the name of "National Security".

How do you argue with your "Big Brother" when he's watching you in order to protect you? This is the evil genius of the design to eradicate our civil rights and liberties. We the people are happy to give them up for our peace and security. But who's design is it?

Ultimately the ringleader is Satan. He is soon to bring his Antichrist, the ultimate "Peace Maker" to the world stage. But first the stage must be set. The world is being made ready through fear and technology to gladly surrender all power to a world leader that brings peace, economical stability, and security to the planet. Of course that peace will be a smoke and mirrors ploy leading up to all Hell unleashed on Earth.

What the system can do is basically identifying where a person is, how he is moving and whether he is a person or for instance a car. Based on this information the system developers implement features such as blurring faces or "virtual walls" that block the sight of a camera where it is not allowed to film. It is also possible to provide the system with rules, such as for example "sound the alarm whenever a person is walking close to that fence" or in a museum "set off an alarm if a painting is taken down from the wall".

VCA can also be used for forensics after the film has been made. It is then possible to search for certain actions within the recorded video. For example if you know a criminal is driving a yellow car, you can set the system to search for yellow cars and the system will provide you with a list of all the times where there is a yellow car visible in the picture. These conditions can be made more precise by searching for "a person moving around in a certain area for a suspicious amount of time", for example if someone is standing around an ATM machine without using it.

In crowds the system is limited to finding anomalies, for instance a person moving in the opposite direction to the crowd, which might be a case in airports where passengers are only supposed to walk in one direction out of a plane, or in a subway where people are not supposed to exit through the entrances.

VCA also has the ability to position people on a map by calculating their position from the images. It is then possible to link many cameras and track people through a building, this can also be done for forensic purposes where a person can be tracked between cameras without anyone having to analyze many hours of film. Currently the cameras have a hard time identifying individuals, but if connected to a key-card system it can find out the identities of people and the input for instance their ssnr as a tag over their heads on the filmed material.

There is also a big difference of where the VCAtechnology is places, either the data is being processed within the cameras (on the edge) or by a centralized server. Both technologies have their pros and cons.

The implementation of automatic number plate recognition produces a potential source of information on the location of persons or groups.

There is no technological limitation preventing a network of such cameras from tracking the movement of individuals. Reports have also been made of plate recognition misreading numbers leading to the billing of the entirely wrong person. In the UK, car cloning is a crime where, by altering, defacing or replacing their number plates with stolen ones, perpetrators attempt to avoid speeding and congestion charge fines and even to steal petrol from garage forecourts.

CCTV critics see the most disturbing extension to this technology as the recognition of faces from high-definition CCTV images. This could determine a person's identity without alerting him that his identity is being checked and logged. The systems can check many thousands of faces in a database in under a second.

The combination of CCTV and facial recognition has been tried as a form of mass surveillance, but has been ineffective because of the low discriminating power of facial recognition technology and the very high number of false positives generated. This type of system has been proposed to compare faces at airports and seaports with those of suspected terrorists or other undesirable entrants.

Computerized monitoring of CCTV images is under development, so that a human CCTV operator does not have to endlessly look at all the screens, allowing an operator to observe many more CCTV cameras. These systems do not observe people directly. Instead they track their behavior by looking for particular types of body movement behavior, or particular types of clothing or baggage.

The theory behind this is that in public spaces people behave in predictable ways. People who are not part of the 'crowd', for example car thieves, do not behave in the same way. The computer can identify their movements, and alert the operator that they are acting out of the ordinary. Recently in the latter part of 2006, news reports on UK television brought to light newly developed technology that uses microphones in conjunction with CCTV.

If a person is observed to be shouting in an aggressive manner (e.g., provoking a fight), the camera can automatically zoom in and pinpoint the individual and alert a camera operator. Of course this then lead to the discussion that the technology can also be used to eavesdrop and record private conversations from a reasonable distance (e.g., 100 metres or about 330 feet).

The same type of system can track identified individuals as they move through the area covered by CCTV. Such applications have been introduced in the early 2000s, mainly in the USA, France, Israel and Australia. With software tools, the system is able to develop three-dimensional models of an area, and to track and monitor the movement of objects within it.

To many, the development of CCTV in public areas, linked to computer databases of people's pictures and identity, presents a serious breach of civil liberties. Critics fear the possibility that one would not be able to meet anonymously in a public place or drive and walk anonymously around a city. Demonstrations or assemblies in public places could be affected as the state would be able to collate lists of those leading them, taking part, or even just talking with protesters in the street.

Spied On!

Surveillance of the public using CCTV is particularly common in the UK, where there are reportedly more cameras per person than in any other country in the world. There and elsewhere, its increasing use has triggered a debate about security versus privacy.

Privacy

Opponents of CCTV point out the loss of privacy of the people under surveillance, and the negative impact of surveillance on civil liberties. Furthermore, they argue that CCTV displaces crime, rather than reducing it. Critics often dub CCTV as "Big Brother surveillance", a reference to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which featured a two-way telescreen in every home through which The Party would monitor the populace.

More positive views of CCTV cameras have argued that the cameras are not intruding into people's privacy, as they are not surveilling private, but public space, where an individual's right to privacy can reasonably be weighed against the public's need for protection from presumptively innocent people .

The recent growth of CCTV in housing areas also raises serious issues about the extent to which CCTV is being used as a social control measure rather than simply a deterrent to crime. However, since the events of September 11, 2001, many studies have suggested that public opinion of CCTV has grown more favorable. Many proponents of CCTV cite the attacks of the London Underground bombings as one example of how effective surveillance led to swift progress in post-event investigations.

Quite apart from government-permitted use (or abuse), questions are also raised about illegal access to CCTV recordings. The Data Protection Act 1998 in the United Kingdom led to legal restrictions on the uses of CCTV recordings, and also mandated their registration with the Data Protection Agency. In 2004, the successor to the Data Protection Agency, the Information Commissioner's Office clarified that this required registration of all CCTV systems with the Commissioner, and prompt deletion of archived recordings.

However subsequent case law (Durant vs. FSA) has limited the scope of the protection provided by this law, and not all CCTV systems are currently regulated.[31] Private sector personnel in the UK who operate or monitor CCTV devices or systems are now considered security guards and have been made subject to state licensing.

A 2007 report by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, highlighted the need for the public to be made more aware of the "creeping encroachment" into their civil liberties created by the growing use of surveillance apparatus. A year prior to the report Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, warned that Britain was "sleepwalking into a surveillance society".

In 2007, the UK watchdog CameraWatch claimed that the majority of CCTV cameras in the UK are operated illegally or are in breach of privacy guidelines. In response, the Information Commissioner's Office denied the claim adding that any reported abuses of the Data Protection Act are swiftly investigated.

In the United States, there are no such data protection mechanisms. It has been questioned whether CCTV evidence is allowable under the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures". The courts have generally not taken this view.

In Canada, the use of video surveillance has grown very rapidly. In Ontario, both the municipal and provincial versions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act  outline very specific guidelines that control how images and information can be gathered by this method and/or released.

Technological developments

Computerized monitoring

The first CCTV cameras used in public spaces were crude, conspicuous, low definition black and white systems without the ability to zoom or pan. Modern CCTV cameras use small high definition colour cameras that can not only focus to resolve minute detail, but by linking the control of the cameras to a computer, objects can be tracked semi-automatically. The technology that enable this is often referred to as VCA (Video Content Analysis), and is currently being developed by a large number of technological companies around the world. The current technology enable the systems to recognize if a moving object is a walking person, a crawling person or a vehicle. It can also determine the color of the object. NEC claim to have a system that can identify a person's age by evaluating a picture of him/her. Other technologies claim to be able to identify people by their biometrics.

A problem for these types of systems is that they have been "oversold", meaning that poorly working systems have been sold which has undermined the trust for the technology. The technique will for instance not work well in large crowds, and the oversold feature of "unattended luggage detection" for airports have severe problems with determining whether or not a piece of luggage is really unattended.