By Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News
A new CCTV system is being trialed at one of the UK’s busiest train stations. Known as “Intelligent CCTV”, the software will monitor and predict human behaviour and can be linked to a national police database.
Sheffield is the first train station in the UK to trial the system but a national roll out of the technology is expected, creating 20% of all UK CCTV systems using these methods. So far intelligent CCTV has not proven reliable as recent tests in Germany found face recognition CCTV software failed on three separate occasions to successfully recognize 8 out of 10 people, even when standing still and in good light conditions.
“Intelligent CCTV technology is so sophisticated it can detect whether a passenger is standing too close to the platform edge, if someone has had a fall, if any luggage has been abandoned or even if a wall has been defaced by graffiti or fly-posting,” said Garry Raven, Managing Director of Midland Mainline.
“We are confident that this new approach will ensure our passengers feel safer, especially at night, and that it will lead to a reduction in crime at stations. When an incident does occur, our staff will be able to respond much more quickly, giving us a far better chance at catching the perpetrators and obtaining a successful conviction,” said Garry Raven.
Alan Lipton of ObjectVideo, one of the companies creating this software said: “We want to teach the software to identify patterns and to recognize certain human activities.
“This idea involves teaching the computer to recognize complex human actions, such as a fight; a person reaching for a gun; a person falling over; or a room in which everyone has started to run,” Lipton said.
But who decides what normal behaviour is? We are creating a surveillance society that will one day have its citizens living in fear while machines constantly monitor our behaviour, judge and decide who is a threat and who isn’t, and being treated as a suspect on a daily basis is simply the price we pay for living in Great Britain.
Intelligent CCTV is just one of the many shocking methods police and government are introducing to “protect us”, which individually are often tolerated, but when combined they create a terrifying vision of our future.
This is not a democracy; it is the birth of a fascist police state.