[extropy-chat] Many eyes

Matthew Welch mawelch at gmail.com
Mon Jul 11 02:02:16 UTC 2005


I'd be happier not having to worry about taking photos of my boring
life even if I might one day brush shoulders with a bomber.

On 7/10/05, Dirk Bruere <dirk at neopax.com> wrote:
> 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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