SecurityInfoWatch.com Blogs

On Tuesday, Slashdot.org linked to a report issued by the DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee that strongly recommended against the use of RFID in government-mandated cards and documents. You can view the report here: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_advcom_rpt_rfid_draft.pdf.  

This news comes on the heels of some other recent developments in RFID, including the October 19 announcement that researchers at the University College London planned to develop a system of tagging all airline passengers with RFID tags to allow their movements to be tracked. (Geoff Kohl raised some very legitimate questions about this project in last week’s Security Week that Was column - http://www.securityinfowatch.com/article/article.jsp?id=9718&siteSection=306.) 

To many of us, programs like this prospective airline tagging system sound pretty far-fetched. But the DHS committee’s report on RFID gives the impression that they have wholeheartedly bought into the feasibility of such programs, because some of their arguments against the technology sounded like they were based on a sci-fi series rather than real, available applications. This leaves me with three possible conclusions: 1) There is significant successful government R&D on RFID people tracking of which we’re unaware. 2) The committee is so concerned about the potential impact of RFID on personal privacy that they’re covering all the bases of possible future applications in order to stop the government’s use of the technology before it has a chance to progress. 3) These guys didn’t do enough research.

 Read it yourself. What do you think?

-Marleah

Scientists at Duke University report that early experiments indicate that it will one day be possible to “cloak” objects (make them invisible).  Of course, time will tell, but I still think it’s an interesting topic.  You can read about it here.

Here’s a clip from the USA Today article, “A prototype so far only hides objects from microwaves, not from visible light, so the human eye can still see the objects. But scientists say it shows the technology is feasible.

Here’s how it works: Electromagnetic waves scatter and reflect when they strike objects, and the eye picks up this reflection to see. The new technology relies on materials that theoretically can bend electromagnetic waves, including visible light, around objects as if nothing were there.”

It’s hard to fathom all the applications a technology such as this could have.  The impact it would have on the security industry could be rather significant.  Fortunately, we probably don’t have to worry about it for many, many years.  (And furthermore, the scientists speculate that if you couldn’t see the object, then it couldn’t see you either, unlike in the movies where the “invisible” person is able to see everyone else just fine.)

-Greg

This week I read an op-ed in the New York Times in which writer Jeff Stein described the responses he received when he asked U.S. counterterrorism officials and members of Congress whether they know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/opinion/17stein.html) To his purported surprise, a number of his subjects had no idea. Stein argued that if the decision makers in our War on Terror are underinformed, their decisions may put the country in more danger.

I’m not trying to turn this blog into a political forum; this article put me in mind of an important issue in corporate security. As much as our national security concerns have been changing over the last few years, this should serve as a reminder to all corporate security executives to carefully examine the threats to their organizations and facilities on a regular basis. Just as escalating Sunni-Shiite conflicts in Iraq may be reshaping the face of the enemy in the War on Terror, the changes this conflict and other events have recently wrought on our country may be reshaping the threats to your organization. Don’t overlook them.

I found this very interesting piece of news the other day. It pertained to Picasa, which is Google Inc.’s photo management system (kind of like iPhoto from Steve Jobs/Apple). This software basically finds all your photos on your PC in the same way that Google’s core web search engine finds pages like this one on the Net.   [Incidentally, I was thinking how this is pretty similar to what Steve Russell at 3VR is doing with its searches for surveillance video, but that might be a bit of a stretch.]

So, the fact that Picasa can organize your photos is nice, but so what? Here’s the “What” — the next version of the Picasa software is reportedly designed to use facial recognition to help you sort the photos. So if you want to see all the photos of Mom, you can do that, without having to add any metatags to let the software know that “this is a photo of mom.”

What brings this all the way back around is that to get the technology into Picasa, Google bought Neven Vision, a biometrics/image recognition company that was working on mobile visual recognition problems, including a recognition tool for the LAPD.

Now, as we all know, today’s video streams really are nothing more than a series of digital photos, so what Google/Neven Vision (you might as well forget the Neven Vision name now b/c Google likes its own brand) is doing is actually rather significant to our industry as well. If they are able to perfect this technology and get the consumer public accustomed to facial recognition tools by making it available in Picasa, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they couldn’t relicense this back into commercial applications for IP video surveillance.

In fact, now that Google has YouTube (which replaces its own video management and sharing platform), there’s even some people starting to speculate that Google might turn the Neven Vision recognition tools onto video itself. Of course, that’s all speculation…

Searching is everything. Finding is better, but still, searching is everything.

–Geoff