RICHMOND, Calif.--Taking a cue from surveillance camera-laden London, this San Francisco Bay Area city is installing security camera systems for the police and at the port to reduce crime and protect against terrorism.
The systems are being built and maintained by ADT, known for its home burglar alarm systems, and use a high-speed wireless mesh network.
Clusters of video cameras transmit data to wireless radios, which then send it over a 1-gigabit back-haul feed to servers in the Port of Richmond's security office, and for the city to police headquarters and the dispatch center. Eventually, the video will be transmitted directly into Richmond police patrol cars.
There are 34 Internet Protocol cameras monitoring high-crime areas of Richmond, which has a population of nearly 101,000, covers 56 square miles, and is located about 15 miles northeast of San Francisco. The price tag for that installation is about $1.8 million. It is expected to be completed next month.
At the Port of Richmond, there are 82 IP cameras monitoring the port's 15 square miles of perimeter and facilities, where the city runs five terminals and 10 more are privately owned. About 19 million short tons pass through the port every year, mostly noncontainerized liquids, dry bulk products, and automobiles, making it the third-largest volume of tonnage among California ports.
The cost for the port installation, $2.3 million, was paid for by a Department of Homeland Security grant. The project was completed in March.
ADT has other wireless video security systems in place, including in a Chicago suburb and on Long Island.
During a tour of the Port of Richmond officials showed off the two server racks, which include 73 terabytes of data storage. They also demonstrated how the system's analytic software works to alert security by automatically recognizing when it detects something suspicious.
For instance, the alarm--visual on the computer only at this point--will go off if someone walks into an area which is off limits or if someone leaves something behind in an area that is open.
"The analytics recognizes certain exceptions (to pre-established rules like) if somebody jumps the fence or is loitering," said Jeff Gutierrez, a national accounts manager for ADT, which also has contracts with the London Underground, the Sydney Opera House, and Chicago and New York suburbs among many others.
Eyes on the Port of Richmond: Click on the image above to watch a video of the security setup in one of Northern California's busiest shipping areas.
Security officials monitoring the system can then see various camera angles of the area, follow someone with the cameras and zoom in or out. The cameras can display license plates as much as a mile away, he said.
In the line of site are large crude oil and jet fuel storage tanks, across the channel from the port's office, which Norman Chan, port administrator, said are vulnerable to attack.
The port cameras are not focused on private property now, but may be used for that in the future, he said.
"All the federal and state ports are working with the Department of Homeland Security to try to make our seaports safer, better secured and less vulnerable to acts of terrorism," said Jim Matzorkis, executive director of the port. The system "allows us to see what's happening in real-time" and it creates a deterrent.
While Richmond city and port officials were showing off their new systems, the city council in Washington, D.C., rejected funding for a video surveillance system there, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Real-time video surveillance raises privacy questions, such as who has access to the data and for what purpose, he said.
"You can pan into peoples' living rooms and bedrooms. Board operators are zooming in on attractive young women. It's not a pretty picture," Rotenberg said, adding that real-time surveillance also hasn't been proven to reduce crime.
There have been recent reports that surveillance cameras don't do much to deter crime and instead have been used to investigate minor things like littering and misuse of disabled parking passes.
It may sound like a scene from the movie comedy Office Space, but authorities in New Jersey are not laughing.
Like one of the movie's characters--who erroneously receives paychecks--a Chicago-area man has allegedly been receiving nearly $100,000 a year for much of the past five years without actually showing up at the office or doing the job.
And that is what landed Anthony Armatys, 34, in jail about five years after he accepted a job at Avaya Communications, according to a report in the Daily Herald near Chicago. He accepted a job at Avaya in 2002, but backed out without starting the job, the paper reported. However, due to a system error, a paycheck was allegedly being deposited in to Armatys' bank account for the past five years--to the tune of about $470,000.
Armatys was arrested Wednesday at his Palatine, Ill., home on one count of theft by deception for knowingly accepting paychecks for a job he never had, police said. The arrest was the culmination of an 11-month probe by detectives in New Jersey, where the communications company is based.
He may have been the unwitting recipient of a clerical error, but--in the eyes of legal-savvy Daily Herald readers--Armatys crossed the line when he allegedly called Fidelity Investments, identified himself as an Avaya employee, and arranged the withdrawal of about $2,000 from an employee retirement fund to which the company had contributed.
Armatys is being held on $50,000 bail while he is awaiting extradition to New Jersey.
The Armatys family told the newspaper that it had "no comment at all."
Umm, yeah. I think prosecutors are gonna have to ask you to return those paychecks.
Remember when Farmer Brown would break out the 12-gauge loaded with rock salt to chase you out of his watermelon patch? Today he could take care of you and other varmints with this weaponized version of the self-stabilized unmanned mini-copter put out by Neural Robotics.
The AutoCopter uses patented "intelligent neural network-based flight control algorithms" for automated flight control, making it the easiest mini-unmanned helicopter to fly and the hardest to crash, according to an article in Defense Review.
Best of all, it's armed with the Auto Assault-12 Full-Auto Shotgun by Military Police Systems, an innovative double-ought dispenser that's pretty handy all on its own. Out of Piney Flats, Tenn., the AA-12 employs a system that reduces recoil by 90 percent, which explains why the helicopter doesn't go into an instant tailspin the second the gun is fired. Rate of fire is reportedly 300 rounds per minute out a 20-round drum.
That ought to keep you away from the sheep. Another aggie myth in the making.
In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Although he was released shortly afterwards, information about the arrest had been kept quiet until his lawyers were able to get the charges dropped.
Tor Project Logo
(Credit: Tor Project)Tor is a privacy tool designed to allow users to communicate and browse anonymously on the Internet. It's endorsed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistle blowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists. Tor provides anonymous Web-browsing software to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, according to its developers. The largest numbers of users are in the United States, the European Union and China.
The police were investigating a bomb threat posted to an online forum for German police officers. The police traced one of the objectionable posts on the forum to the IP address for Janssen's server. Up until his arrest, Alex Janssen's Tor server carried more than 40GB of random strangers' Internet traffic each day.
Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shutdown the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a different city, more than 500km away.
Janssen's attempts to explain what Tor is to the police officers initially fell on deaf ears. After being interrogated for hours, someone from the city of Düsseldorf's equivalent of the Department of Homeland Security showed up and admitted to Janssen that they'd made a mistake. He was released shortly after.
Germany is clearly not going out of its way to make computer security researchers and activists feel too welcome. Germany recently passed a law that "renders the creation and distribution of software illegal that could be used by someone to break into a computer system or could be used to prepare a break in. This includes port scanners like nmap, security scanners like nessus [as well as] proof of concept exploits."
Back in summer 2006, German authorities conducted a simultaneous raid of seven different data centers, seizing 10 Tor servers in the process. Agents took the servers believing them to be related to a child porn investigation. Furthermore, in 2003 a German court ordered the developers of the Jap anonymity system, a completely different project than Tor, to create a back-door in their system to be used in national security investigations.
This event does raise some interesting legal questions. If 40GB of other people's Internet traffic flows through your own home network, can authorities, be they the RIAA or FBI, reasonably link anything that has been tracked to your computer's IP address to you?
Does setting up a Tor server give you the ultimate plausible deniability card? "No officer, that BitTorrent download wasn't mine. It was from one of the thousands of people who route their Internet traffic through the anonymizing sever on my home network."
The ability to have a believable claim to plausible deniability is something that some of us have been attempting to get for a while by having an open wireless access point at home. And 40GB of Internet traffic from perfect strangers may be more significant in the eyes of a court than the possibility of one or two of your neighbors connecting to your wireless network. All of this, for now, remains theoretical. No Tor-related case has made it to the courts.. but it's just a matter of time until one does.
Marlon Meacham is serving nine years in a Tennessee prison for a 2004 armed robbery that involved ordering his victim to log on to an Internet bank account.
Meacham was convicted by a jury of one count of aggravated robbery and one count of aggravated burglary for invading Kelvin Martin's home and holding him at gunpoint. He appealed on grounds of insufficient evidence and improper trial procedures.
Here are some excerpts from the Tennessee state criminal appeals court's decision on April 19, which upheld Meacham's conviction. Note that it was a computer glitch (we suspect Microsoft Windows) that kept his online banking ploy from succeeding:
On the evening of April 13, 2004, the victim, Kelvin Martin, was home alone watching television when Javonta Charles knocked on the door to his apartment. Mr. Charles asked Mr. Martin if he had food stamps to sell. Mr. Martin said that he did not have any food stamps. Mr. Charles then asked to use his telephone. Mr. Martin allowed Mr. Charles to use his telephone. After using the telephone, Mr. Charles left the apartment.Shortly after Mr. Charles departed, Mr. Martin heard another knock at the door. He answered the door, and it was Mr. Charles asking to use the telephone a second time. Mr. Martin agreed to let him use the telephone. As Mr. Charles stepped inside the door, two individuals, in addition to Mr. Charles, forced their way into the apartment. The intruders were carrying guns. Mr. Martin identified Defendant as one of the intruders. Defendant was carrying a nine millimeter handgun. Mr. Martin recognized Defendant because they were roommates for approximately two months in 2002. At the time of the incident, both Defendant and Mr. Charles were staying with a friend of Mr. Martin's, Damien Baker. Mr. Martin did not recognize the third individual, but said he was carrying a shotgun.
Defendant and the man with the shotgun instructed Mr. Martin to "strip down" and get down on the living room floor. Mr. Martin was scared and afraid that the intruders were going to shoot him. Both men had their guns pointed at Mr. Martin. Defendant instructed Mr. Charles to go and look around the bedroom. Mr. Charles did as told and returned to the living room carrying a duffle bag, a shotgun, and some duct tape. Mr. Charles attempted to tape Mr. Martin into a chair. Defendant continued to stand in front of Mr. Martin, pointing his gun at him throughout this process. Mr. Martin struggled, but allowed Mr. Charles to tape his hands "to a certain extent ... just to keep [the assailants] from shooting [him]." Defendant placed Mr. Martin's laptop computer on his lap and instructed Mr. Martin to pull up his bank account on the computer and plug in the password. Mr. Martin was not able to comply because the computer was improperly turned on and was showing an error message.
The intruders were in the apartment for approximately twenty minutes. Mr. Martin sustained injuries during the intrusion. Defendant struck Mr. Martin in the face with his pistol injuring the bridge of his nose. Mr. Martin was also kicked in the face which caused injuries to his left eye. When the intruders left the house, Mr. Martin saw them carrying his black backpack which contained several of Mr. Martin's personal belongings. Those belongings included Mr. Martin's wallet, car keys, including the key fob for his car alarm, house keys, cell phone, clothes, compact discs, and his laptop computer. Mr. Martin estimated that the items had a value of $500.00.
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