Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2001 13:23:40 -0400
To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com>
Subject: NYT: A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance By JEFFREY
 ROSEN
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"

[Note from Matthew Gaylor:  This is an article that is worth reading 
in it's entirety.  Of Orwellian significance is this quote:  "The 
Office of Homeland Security might be the overall umbrella that will 
coordinate with local police forces to install cameras linked to a 
biometric network throughout American cities."  This must be opposed.]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/07/magazine/07SURVEILLANCE.html>

October 7, 2001

A Cautionary Tale for a New Age of Surveillance

By JEFFREY ROSEN

week after the attacks of Sept. 11, as the value of most American 
stocks plummeted, a few companies, with products particularly well 
suited for a new and anxious age, soared in value. One of the fastest 
growing stocks was Visionics, whose price more than tripled. The New 
Jersey company is an industry leader in the fledgling science of 
biometrics, a method of identifying people by scanning and 
quantifying their unique physical characteristics -- their facial 
structures, for example, or their retinal patterns. Visionics 
manufactures a face-recognition technology called FaceIt, which 
creates identification codes for individuals based on 80 unique 
aspects of their facial structures, like the width of the nose and 
the location of the temples. FaceIt can instantly compare an image of 
any individual's face with a database of the faces of suspected 
terrorists, or anyone else.

[...]

Of course, protecting airports is only one aspect of homeland 
security: a terrorist could be lurking on any corner in America. In 
the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Howard Safir, the former New York 
police commissioner, recommended the installation of 100 biometric 
surveillance cameras in Times Square to scan the faces of pedestrians 
and compare them with a database of suspected terrorists. Atick told 
me that since the attacks he has been approached by local and federal 
authorities from across the country about the possibility of 
installing biometric surveillance cameras in stadiums and subway 
systems and near national monuments. "The Office of Homeland Security 
might be the overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police 
forces" to install cameras linked to a biometric network throughout 
American cities, Atick told me. "How can we be alerted when someone 
is entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering 
Madison Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to 
create an invisible fence, an invisible shield."

[...]



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