[extropy-chat] Many eyes

[Dirk Bruere]

Dan Clemmensen wrote:

> The Linux community has an aphorism:
> "Many eyes make all bugs shallow."
>
> We can extend this concept to anti-terrorism. The London police are 
> currently asking the public for any video records they may have of the 
> time surrounding the London bombings. We need to train the public to 
> immediately begin taking pictures whenever something bad happens in 
> public. The basic rule should be: If you cannot think of something 
> more useful to do, take pictures. When taking pictures, if you do not 
> have and obviously important subject, then take a multi-shot panorama.
>
> If every Londoner with a cell-phone camera had taken a 10-shot 
> panorama at the time of the bombing, we would almost certainly have a 
> picture of at least one of the bombers.
>
> To speed the analysis, we should also add a volunteer analytic 
> infrastructure. If every relevant Londoner made panoramic pictures, 
> there would be far more pictures than police analysts could process 
> quickly. But each photographer could add the pictures to a distributed 
> database, and each photographer (plus innumerable volunteers) could do 
> a preliminary analysis.
>
> Similarly, pictures from all the security cameras in London could be 
> made public. This would permit volunteers to assist the police in the 
> analysis.
>
> To increase pre-explosion coverage, the public should be encouraged to 
> make random pictures in public places, more or less continuously. If 
> nothing  interesting happens, most of these digital pictures will 
> never even be stored. If something bad happens, the pictures from 
> prior to the event would become available for analysis.
>
> Privacy? Sorry, These are pictures taken by individuals, in public 
> places. There is no right to privacy in this venue.
>
> I live in the Washington DC area. I thought of this  concept during 
> the ugly "sniper attack" situation last year.

An average Londoner will be picked up on hundreds of cameras on a normal 
day.
The security services have had the City cameras connected to computer 
syatems that tracks every car entering and leaving that area for years, 
due to IRA attacks. I also recall that they were trialling a system in 
the 90s where the face of every person caught on camera was compared to 
a database of wanted people.

The bombers will undoubtedly have been caught on camera and even now 
extremely powerful computersystems will be running pattern matching and 
people-tracing algorithms on all captured video for hours before and 
hours after the attack. I suspect that by now they may well have 
pictures of some of those responsible.

It's how the last London bomber was caught.

-- 
Dirk

The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org



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