PI Newswire

The next time you talk to a police officer, you might find yourself staring into a lens. Companies such as Taser and Vievu are making small, durable cameras designed to be worn on police officer’s uniforms. The idea is to capture video from the officer’s point of view, for use as evidence against suspects, as well as to help monitor officers’ behavior toward the public.

The concept is catching on. The cameras have been adopted by big city police departments, such as Cincinnati and Oakland, Calif., as well as dozens of smaller cities, such as Bainbridge Island, Wash., where the Vievu camera was initially tested by Officer Ben Sias.

“The only thing that really was different about doing business is that I’d tell the person that we’re being recorded,” Sias says. He sees the camera as a kind of insurance policy.

“In this job, we’re frequently accused of things we haven’t done, or things were kind of embellished, as far as contact,” he says. “And the cameras show a pretty unbiased opinion of what actually did happen.”

That makes the cameras particularly appealing in cities where the police have been accused of misconduct.

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HOUSTON – This recession is prompting a lot of reevaluation and some folks are opting for a second career as a private detective.

A brand new class, here in Houston, helps people get their private investigator’s license in record time.

“During the time you are with us, for the five months (of instruction) it’s very condensed,” says Dr. Scott Belshaw. He’s with the University of North Texas, which offers the course. “And it’s hands-on.”

Sure you’ll learn how to pull off video surveillance. But you’ll also learn to do it without crossing the line into criminality, says instructor Clyde Burleson, who’s also an attorney.

“For example, if they’re out in public you can film them,” says Burleson. “If, however, you’re peering through someone’s window, you’re now committing a crime.”

The curriculum also covers more mundane ways of gathering information using online databases and social networks.

“Private investigators don’t carry guns, by and large,” says Randy Kildow, the outgoing president of TALI, the Texas Association of Licensed Investigators. “They carry laptops and smart phones.”

But what’s unique about this particular PI certification program is that it allows you to sit for your licensing exam immediately, bypassing the mandatory three-year internship.

“With this class,” says Burleson, “you can go straight into business once you’ve passed the exam so it would save you approximately two, two-and-a-half years of your life.”

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More than 9 percent year-over-year growth? That kind of performance would make most industries and countries jump for joy. But that’s what’s happening in the worldwide market for video surveillance equipment in 2010, according to a new report from England-based IMS Research.

“Whilst the economic downturn did impact the global video surveillance equipment market in 2009, fiscal stimuli from governments and the inherent demand for video surveillance equipment mitigated the magnitude of the impact,” said report author and IMS Research analyst Gary Wong.

The “fiscal stimuli” to which Wong refers includes the so-called Stimulus Bill in the United States, which has sent billions of dollars into surveillance through the Department of Homeland Security, programs for state and local governments, and under the banner of broadband development. Security video has been growing especially rapidly in China and the Middle East.

The impact of the downturn was more profound in the analog video surveillance equipment market than in the network video surveillance market, the report said. The global market in analog video surveillance shrunk by more than 5 percent in 2009, while the network video surveillance market grew by more than 18 percent,

IMS forecasts a “short and sharp recovery” for the total market for video surveillance equipment in 2010, bolstered by strong network video surveillance growth. The introduction of high definition (HD) network cameras and the increasing adoption of open standards (such as ONVIF/PSIA) are expected to further accelerate the migration towards network video surveillance.

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DUBAI — Dubai, where a top Hamas commander was killed in January in an assassination blamed on Israel’s Mossad spy agency, is to have security cameras “everywhere,” the police chief was quoted as saying on Sunday.

The bustling Gulf city currently has 25,000 security cameras, but “surveillance needs to be ramped up to meet the growing requirements of an expanding city,” Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan told The National newspaper.

“We need to work according to a well-studied strategic plan and not only react to events as they come along… We will have cameras everywhere,” said Khalfan of the 136-million-dollar (110-million-euro) project.

Hamas commander Mahmud al-Mabhuh was killed at a luxury hotel in the emirate, and Khalfan said police were able to track down the suspected killers with the help of security cameras.

“With the al-Mabhuh murder we were able to play back time through the footage captured by cameras,” said Khalfan, adding they analysed 1,700 hours of images and “were able to pull the strings together and identify the suspects.”

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Sweeping changes to search and surveillance laws have been sent back to the drawing board after a widespread outcry.

Critics labelled the Search and Surveillance Bill “chilling” and said it gave a raft of state agencies – including council dog-control officers and meat inspectors – sweeping powers to spy, bug conversations and hack into private computers.

The chairman of Parliament’s justice committee, Chester Borrows, said it was never Parliament’s intention to bestow such powers and blamed the confusion on poorly worded legislation.

“We’ve looked at the bill too and we are concerned by some of the language … we can see how people ended up [so concerned].”

The legislation was now likely to be delayed until next year to allow time to rewrite it and take public concerns into account. Those who gave evidence to the select committee would be given time to consider the new proposals and make fresh submissions.

The bill is based on a 2007 Law Commission report and brings together police powers from several statutes.

It details powers including the ability to carry out video surveillance, install tracking devices, detain people during a search, stop vehicles without a warrant and access computers remotely to trawl through records.

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Insurance companies say conducting video surveillance on claimants is often necessary to prevent insurance fraud, but some disabled people say their insurance company has gone too far. They are claiming the Hartford wrongfully terminated their disability benefits on the basis of innocuous surveillance video- which their doctors say isn’t convincing evidence they can return to work.

We heard from these claimants after “Good Morning America” aired a story about Jack “Rocky” Whitten, who says his disability insurance benefits were unfairly cut off after a private investigator hired by The Hartford filmed him getting into a van, reading a magazine and dipping a taco chip into salsa.

Whitten, who has a broken neck, had been receiving disability benefits for years, but said shortly after the surveillance, his insurer, The Harford terminated his benefits and used that surveillance tape of him in part as evidence that he could return to work.

“I mean, they found the least little thing that makes no sense, I mean a chip weighs nothing,” Whitten’s wife, Leigh, said.

Whitten’s benefits were ultimately reinstated, but after the “GMA” report aired we heard from dozens of people who said that what happened to Whitten also happened to them.

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The most extensive and sophisticated video surveillance system in the United States is getting even bigger.

Chicago authorities say they plan to add cameras along the city’s lakefront, feeds from private surveillance cameras and may employ what the police superintendent says are “covert” cameras, perhaps as small as matchboxes.

That would be in addition to the estimated 10,000 public and private cameras already part of the network.

Police say the cameras have helped officers make 4,000 arrests since 2006.

And while critics say the cameras are an invasion of privacy, police say they usually hear from residents only when they want a camera installed in their neighborhood or worry one will be removed.

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A Senate field hearing in Philadelphia today examined whether a decades-old wiretapping statute needs revision in light of new and powerful video surveillance technologies empowered by the Internet. The hearing stems from a pending case in Pennsylvania where school administrators allegedly spied on a student in his bedroom using the webcam embedded in his school-issued laptop.

Witnesses argued whether the Wiretap Act of 1986 needs to be amended to protect the public from the rise of secret video surveillance. The law, which amended Title III of the Omnibus Crime and Control Act of 1968, regulates the interception of any oral, wire, or electronic communication by a third party without consent. Violators of the statute face both felony and civil damages. Nevertheless, a loophole exists, which needs plugging, said Kevin S. Bankston, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“The secret use of a webcam or a radio-controlled camera to photograph you inside your home is not currently regulated or prohibited by Title III, because in such a case there would be no oral, wire, or electronic communication of yours to be intercepted,” he explained to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. “The only communication would be the electronic communications between the camera and the person who is remotely operating it, and that person is a party to those communications as opposed to a third party intercepting your communications with someone else.”

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Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has announced his plans to introduce legislation to ensure electronic privacy, telling a Congressional subcommittee that current wiretap and video-surveillance laws to not do enough to protect individuals.

Specter’s call to action comes on the heels of a lawsuit, filed by a student of the Lower Merion School District in the Senator’s home state, over a high school’s attempt to locate 42 missing laptops by activating webcams. The issue is that doing so could have enabled the school to film students with school-issued laptops at their homes.

A statement written by the student, Blake Robbins, was read during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee today. In it, Robbins said, “My family and I recognize that in today’s society, almost every place we go outside of our home we are photographed and recorded by traffic cameras, ATM cameras, and store surveillance cameras… This makes it all the more important that we vigilantly safeguard our homes, the only refuge we have from this eyes everywhere onslaught.”

During the hearing, Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston suggested that existing wiretap laws should be broadened to include videotaped surveillance. However, according to a March 29 Associated Press (AP) article, Absolute Software Corp. chairman John Livingston recommended that an exception be included in cases where companies are tracking stolen merchandise.

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Police and officials with Sobeys are looking through surveillance video in hopes of figuring out who is responsible for the latest food tampering incidents.

“It’s early in the investigation and we don’t know if it could be a current employee, an ex-employee, a disgruntled person, there is the possibility that this could be a copycat,” says Kevin Brookwell from the Calgary Police Service.

The investigation comes after three products were found tampered with at three different Sobeys stores in south Calgary.

In one case, a woman who bought an avocado from the Millrise Sobeys found a metal pin in her avocado after she took it home and sliced into it.

The other two cases involve metal objects being found in Kaiser buns. One of the buns originated from the McKenzie Towne Sobeys; the other came form the Cranston Sobeys.

The latest incident of food tampering is even more concerning because this time the metal objects are not clearly visible.

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The European data protection supervisor has issued new guidelines on video surveillance aimed at minimising its impact on privacy and other fundamental rights.

They set out how to evaluate the need for video surveillance and how to conduct it without infringing people’s privacy and other rights.

The guidelines apply to existing as well as future systems, and each institution has until 1 January 2011 to bring its practices into compliance.

The publication of the guidelines follows a consultation draft published on 7 July 2009.

Assistant European data protection supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli said fundamental rights were at stake, such as the right to privacy in the workplace. Security and these rights were not mutually exclusive, he said.

The guidelines gave each institution some discretion on how to design its own system. This would prevent rigid or bureaucratic interpretation of data protection concerns from hampering justified security needs or other legitimate objectives, he said.

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How does 2010 look from a video surveillance perspective? Some of the country’s leading security integrators recently took a look at several of the major issues facing the surveillance industry in this exclusive roundtable: Video Surveillance — The Year Ahead.

Our five-integrator panel — which includes Sean Ahrens of Schirmer Engineering, Ray Bernard of Ray Bernard Consulting Services, Bill Bozeman of PSA Security Network, Jim Coleman of Operation Security Systems, and Bob Stockwell of Niscayah — had some diverse views regarding which technology will have the greatest impact on the video surveillance industry in 2010. Two of our integrators, however, agreed that managed and remote monitoring services will have the greatest impact.

“The industry has alluded to technology for remote diagnostics, remote system heath checks, network attached video storage and a host of other remote services that, until now, were not readily available,” Stockwell says. “With the technological advances in Management Remote Video Offerings, customers can take full advantage of their existing investment in video equipment while reducing costs and avoiding significant capital outlay.”

Remote monitoring has can also be seen as a money-maker for business: “[Remote monitoring] has been a revenue-increasing move for the business — not just a security improvement,” Bernard says. “I don’t know what the impact on the industry as a whole will be, but for many individual businesses both large and small, remote monitoring is able to make a significant contribution to the business.”

All of the integrators found some common ground, in that video analytics is finding more traction in the marketplace — although some believe progress is still slow in coming. “The improvements in the last 24 months have been noteworthy,” Bozeman says. “Video analytics can now be deployed by the traditional security systems integrator in an efficient and profitable manner — this has not been the case in the past, as deployment has been difficult, resulting in projects that were not profitable for the integrator.”

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