Big Brother Comes of Age

July 3 -- If you’re visiting Tampa’s trendy Ybor City, chances are your face is being matched up against those of thousands of known criminals.

The police department in this central Florida tourist district is testing a new surveillance system of video cameras and computers. At the heart of the system is a $30,000 software program called Face-It, developed by Visionics Corp. and Advanced Biometric Imaging LLC.

Surveillance cameras in public places — parks, courtyards, alongside roadways — are quickly becoming the preferred security tools of law enforcement agencies and private companies. And as surveillance technology becomes more sophisticated and cheaper to implement, the debate of public safety vs. personal privacy is once again rearing its head.

The software can capture the faces of up to four people from the 36 cameras installed throughout the heavily trafficked shopping and nightclub district.

Then, using a unique set of algorithms, the program compares the captured images against a database of photos by examining up to 80 points of facial references centered on eyes and noses.

If the program doesn’t find a match among the database of 30,000 photos maintained by the Tampa Police Department, the captured images are discarded. But if a match is found, observers radio a local beat cop to stop and verify the identity of the person on the street.

According to Detective D.W. Bill Todd Jr., Tampa police are just testing the system to determine if facial recognition could be a valuable law enforcement tool. And Todd notes that Ybor City was chosen as the test site not because of any high crime rate or special concern for public safety, but because a recent $45 million revitalization project left the area ready for the network of cameras and computer cables.

Privacy Pundits Piqued

In many cities, the easy and rapid proliferation of such public surveillance systems has privacy advocates worried.

Wagne Madsen, a senior fellow at Washington.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, remembers when a similar surveillance and facial recognition system was used in the last Super Bowl, held in Tampa last January. “Everyone was having their pictures taken,” says Madsen, “based on no probable cause.”