Seen Before; December 1999; Scientific American Magazine; by Dupont; 2 Page(s)

In the East London borough of Newham, a surveillance network of more than 200 cameras keeps watch on pedestrians and passersby, employing a facial-recognition system that can automatically pick out known criminals and alert local authorities to their presence. Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups oppose the system-Privacy International, a human-rights group, gave the Newham council a "Big Brother" award last year on the 50th anniversary of the publication of George Orwell's famous novel. The council, however, claims overwhelming support from citizens who are more concerned about crime than about government intrusions. It could count as one of its supporters the U.S. Department of Defense, which is keeping tabs on the Newham system as well as on other, related technologies. The department hopes that some combination of "biometrics" will vastly improve its ability to protect its facilities worldwide.

For the military, biometrics usually means technologies that can identify computer users by recognizing their fingerprints or voices or by scanning their irises or retinas. But after a terrorist truck bomb blew up the Khobar Towers U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, killing 19, the Pentagon elevated to the top of its priority list the need for "force protection"-namely, keeping troops abroad safe from attack. That spurred the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, essentially a Pentagon hobby shop, to action. Building on some ongoing work with video surveillance and modeling techniques, as well as on commercial (but still experimental) technologies such as those used to identify automatic-teller machine customers by scanning their faces, DARPA set out to investigate the potential for a network of biometric sensors to monitor the outsides of military facilities.