Smartcams Take Aim at Terrorists



These distributed digital video arrays, or DIVAs, are collections of really smart cameras able to detect and identify an individual in a crowded train station and track him wherever he goes -- out of the station, into the parking lot, onto the freeway and so on.

They also notify authorities when they \"think\" the individual engages in suspicious activity or meets with questionable cohorts.

You can watch for these DIVAs in summer 2004.

The Department of Defense awarded $600,000 to University of California at San Diego\'s Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab Friday for further development of DIVAs, cameras that see, think and communicate.

Granted through a federal counterterrorism interagency task force called the Technical Support Working Group, the funding is slated to help CVRR redirect these intelligent camera systems from their initial intent, which was preventing traffic delays, to stopping terrorism.

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http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59092,00.html

NEW YORK, May 29 — The latest opinion polls show the American public takes a dim view of its media outlets in the post 9/11 world - numbers punctuated by a roiling fraud and fabrication scandal that has shaken The New York Times. With big media back on its heels, the CIA fired its own broadside this week, publishing an “unclassified” memorandum that recommends using espionage laws to prosecute media outlets that publish or broadcast leaked information from government officials if that information turns out to be classified.

THE MEMORANDUM, ‘The Consequences of Permissive Neglect’, argues that the U.S. media has become an “open vault of classified information on U.S. intelligence collection sources and methods” which “pose a serious, seemingly intractable problem for U.S. national security.”

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http://www.msnbc.com/news/919521.asp?0si=-