Yesterday The Washington Post ran a story entitled, “Surveillance Net Yields Few Suspects.” I was quoted in this story making the point that technologies that produce too many false positives run the risk of becoming civil liberty infringement engines.
While I am working on a formal paper in this area, let me quickly say a few things.
In the direct marketing business, false positives have one fairly minimal consequence – the wasted expense of the mail piece and its postage. In the law enforcement and national security business, false positives have other more serious consequences, namely:
1. Overwhelming analysts with dead-end leads that waste resources; and
2. Civil liberties infringements.
Our 4th Amendment requires “reasonable and particular” government searches and seizures. It stands to reason that the higher the false positives the less "reasonable and particular" the process must have been.
The good news is that analysts and investigators hate all the false positives too … so if we create systems that minimize false positives, everyone wins.
I totally agree, proper system definition, implementation, and fine tuning is the way to go.
We're living in this information overload age where there's so much information, so much communications through all types of devices etc, that analyst are not only overwelmed with leads and wasting resources, but it may mean learning about a attack, for example, too late to prevent it.
Posted by: Max | January 16, 2008 at 04:09 PM
The surveillance camera operator presses the number of the required camera and its angle and the view on the screen in front of him changes to the camera view required. Surveillance Cameras are definitely not cheaper than other methods of surveillance but are more advantageous in the sense that many different people at difference places can be monitored at the same time. Surveillance Camera systems basically involves setting up of various hubs which are then connected to a main hub.
Posted by: surveillance systems | May 28, 2008 at 10:58 AM