Police surveillance technology advances with AI and cameras – 03/31/2023 – Tech

Police surveillance technology advances with AI and cameras – 03/31/2023 – Tech


A brainwave scanner that can detect lies. Miniaturized cameras that sit inside e-cigarettes and disposable coffee cups. Huge video cameras that zoom in over a kilometer and capture faces and license plates.

At a police conference in Dubai in March, new technologies for the security forces of the future were up for sale. Away from the eyes of the general public, the event offered a rare glimpse into the tools in existence for law enforcement around the world: better and harder-to-detect surveillance, facial recognition software that automatically tracks individuals across cities, and computers to hack into phones. .

Advances in artificial intelligence, drones and facial recognition have created an increasingly globalized police surveillance business. Israeli hacking software, American investigative tools and Chinese computer vision algorithms can all be bought and combined into an incredibly effective spy cocktail.

Fueled by a spending spree from Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the host of the conference and an aggressive user of next-generation security technologies, the event pointed to how the tools of mass surveillance that once believed to be widespread only in China, they are proliferating. The increasing use of these technologies signals an era of policing based as much on software, data and codes as on police and weapons, raising questions about their effects on people’s privacy and the exercise of political power.

“A lot of overt surveillance can be benign or used to improve a city,” said Daragh Murray, a law professor at Queen Mary University of London who has studied the use of technology by police. “But the other side of the coin is that it can provide an incredible insight into people’s everyday lives. It can have an unintended frightening effect or be a real tool of repression.

The race was evident at a convention center in Dubai, where uniformed police from around the world piloted drones that could be remotely launched and triggered; Chinese camera makers showed software that identifies when crowds gather; American companies like Dell and Cisco had booths that offered police services. Cellebrite, an Israeli maker of systems for hacking cell phones, exhibited inside a “government zone” blocked off from the rest of the conference.

Other companies sold facial recognition glasses and sentiment analysis software, whose algorithm determines a person’s mood from facial expressions. Some products, like a rifle-mounted Segway, have pushed the boundaries of practicality.

“Currently, the police force doesn’t think about the weapons they carry,” said Major General Khalid Alrazooqi, director general of artificial intelligence for the Dubai Police. “You look for the tools, the technology.”

With full coffers, serious security challenges and an autocratic government, the United Arab Emirates, a key US ally in the Middle East, has become a case study in the potential and risks of such policing technologies. Tools can help deter crime and terrorist attacks, but they can also become an undemocratic enforcer of political power.

Under the leadership of Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, often referred to by his initials MBZ, Emirati authorities keep a close eye on critics and activists. Amnesty International and other groups have accused the oil-rich country of human rights abuses against adversaries, including the use of Pegasus phone spyware by Israel’s NSO group. Protests and freedom of expression in the authoritarian monarchy are severely limited, part of the effort to combat Islamic extremism, according to the government.

A UAE-based tech company with ties to the country’s leadership, Presight AI, sells software that is nearly identical to products heavily used by Chinese police. At the conference, its software used cameras and AI to identify people, store data about their appearance and track their journey through the event.

The lack of transparency and oversight of how surveillance technologies are used opens up the potential for abuse, said Marc O. Jones, author of “Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East” [Autoritarismo digital no Oriente Médio] and professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, in Qatar.

“The region has become so securitized and under MBZ the UAE has become so security-focused that there is almost a fetishization of technology,” he said.

The Middle East has become a “petri dish of different actors”, with China, Russia and the United States vying for influence through their technologies, Jones said. The strong presence of Chinese technologies – like most of the cameras visible on the street – is a sign of the country’s growing influence in the Persian Gulf.

Dubai Police runs state-of-the-art systems from a headquarters just north of the downtown skyscrapers and malls. One such system, a facial recognition program called Oyoon — “eyes” in Arabic — can obtain the identity of anyone who walks past one of at least 10,000 cameras, linking it to an airport customs image database. and resident ID cards. Police also required companies to provide video footage of their security systems to a centralized government database.

“He is monitoring the entire city from entering the airport to leaving,” said Alrazooqi. According to him, the systems serve the “customers” of the police – a generic term for the public. “People are happy about it,” he said.

Technological skills were showcased in a police command center where Dubai police officers could view live camera footage and the location of all emergency vehicles on a giant screen.

“With technology and smart cameras, if someone commits a crime, in a minute I’ll know which direction” the person went, said Lt. Col. Bilal Al Tayer, acting director of the command and control center.

At the Dubai police fair, officials from the UAE’s Ministry of Interior, which oversees state security and has access to all police cameras, demonstrated how, with a tablet, they can scan the irises of conference attendees and obtain information about when they entered the country, with a recent photo from customs. Also on display was a headset that detects when a part of the brain related to memories is activated, something a ministry official said is useful during interrogations to determine whether a suspect is lying.

Walking between the conference stands was Lieutenant General Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri, commander of the Dubai Police. The new skills on display, intrusive as they are, are a means to achieving a long-held utopian goal of “zero crime,” he said.

“We don’t invade people’s privacy,” he added. “We’re just monitoring.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves



Source link