 And welcome to Think Tech Talks here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Ethan Allen. I'm guest hosting for Jay Fidel today. And with me today is Tyler Harris. Welcome, Tyler. Thank you. Good to have you here. We're going to have a great tech talk today. Jay found an article the other day that he wanted to share and get out there, because it's such an intriguing phenomenon that he ran into. It was reported in the New York Times, a sort of experimental program now happening in New York. So many cities, New York included, have these surveillance cameras around. Chicago has 30,000 of these things. London has probably several times that number. These things they mount to on street corners, anywhere they scan. The police typically have access to them, right? They can run through. They've proven tremendously valuable post facto in tracking down criminals, seeing people leave the scenes, et cetera. What Newark has done that very few other places have done is they've made the access to these video images public. So people, the man on the street can basically, if you've got a good internet connection, you can pull this up and you can choose, let's see, I want to see all in fifth and main here. I want to see that camera. What's going on in front? And that raises some interesting questions. But maybe before we get into that real meat, let's talk just a little bit about the idea of surveillance cameras. Now, I sort of think they're sort of good things. Hey, more eyes on the street, keeps potential problems down, blah, blah, blah. What's your take? Well, I mean, having security cameras available, especially for law enforcement use is fantastic. They're great tools for gathering evidence which can assist in future prosecutions of any subjects. It also gives a sense of security for citizens of any community that employ these. So that way, they know that there are being watched for other potential individuals that may look to make them a victim. So it's a fantastic opportunity, but there are some downsides. Sure, sure. I mean, if that data gets hacked and stolen, people could know where you are, where you aren't. They'll know that you're at work now, not at your home. If they want to take advantage of breaking into your home, that's a good thing for them to know, right? Definitely. If the government chooses to use this to sway public opinion or whatever, to disenfranchise people or make trouble for some people, they have some potential to do this, right? Absolutely. I mean, for every good thing, there's an equal opposite negative aspect. So definitely in this scenario, I do believe that there's an equal number of positive aspects to this plan of action and how it's being integrated, but also there's an equal amount of bad reaction and bad possibilities that come with that as well. And it would be a great opportunity, especially with this show, to be able to educate the public about the different viewpoints and allow the viewers to make a good educated decision. Yeah. I mean, all technology is that way, right? From the first time, some primitive person sharpened a stick and used it to get dinner. That's great, but he probably next turned around and used it to get rid of some neighbor. Right. Absolutely. And that's sort of how we always find our technologies, right? Definitely. So let's talk, let's go into this, what's called the Citizen Virtual Patrol in New York. So the police in Newark have had a fractious relationship, I guess, with the Newark community. And as a way to try to help sort of integrate the community into law enforcement better, they sort of set up and said, hey, we're going to give you access. You can be part of this process. You can keep an eye on the streets, you know? You can be part of the process to make your own streets safer. And it sounds really good, right? I mean, hey, who wouldn't want more people helping keep an eye on the streets and keeping the streets safe? Absolutely. And the plan of action they have in place is that they're encouraging citizens of the local community to observe this video feed, report suspicious activity to their police departments. So that way the police departments can react and then, you know, be able to confirm or deny this specific activity if there was a crime involved. So it is fantastic. However, it's still kind of fundamentally flawed. The reason for it is because these individuals that they're encouraging to go on to the public feeds and, you know, view this video footage of the public, these are, I'm sorry, they're untrained or uncertified individuals that really leave it up to their perception based on, you know, whether it's suspicious or not. So then perception is typically problematic when you're looking at facts. Right. We all have biases. Many times we are unaware of our own biases, but we may be biased, like, you know, when they may be biased against men, men may be biased against women, a lot of people may be biased against whites, fights the versa. A lot of people have a lot of biases, only some small fraction of which are we cognizant of, right? Absolutely. So yes, if you see suspicious activity, it may depend who is doing that activity as to whether or not that's suspicious or it's just, oh, it's just a guy walking down the street. Right. Right. These preconceptions, you know, they do pose a lot of issues. You know, a prime example, if you had an individual with their back turned to the camera and, you know, they were doing some rustling, an individual that's wearing a hoodie, you know, with baggy jeans versus an individual in a business suit. Those, you know, preconceptions of the two individuals and what they might be up to are, even though they're doing the same exact act, may be entirely different. Right. So that's definitely a major issue. Right. And then this leads to the whole thing, yes, what do the police choose to respond to and how do they make that choice? Absolutely. And, you know, considering these, you know, these citizens, although their intentions are fantastic, if you have, let's say, 1,500 people watching a particular camera and half of them find this suspicious and then half of them report it to the police department, you now have, you know, roughly about 350 to 400 people that are now calling the phone lines for the police reporting the exact same information, you know, even with some variations, you know, as they see fit. And then you also have to think about the limited police force and their ability to respond to these suspicious activities. And so one of the major concerns is the increase of dispatches for these police officers, their ability to respond quickly to, you know, to crimes in progress and the ability to maintain that level of safety and security while still answering these potentially suspicious reports. Right. And different places have actually tried different techniques to get around that. So I guess in Camden, New Jersey, they've set up cameras. And if you live near one of these cameras, you can apply to have access to the video, to that camera or that set of cameras, which begins to make more sense. You've got presumably some vested interest in that neighborhood and wished to keep, you know, your neighborhood okay, right? You're not liable to just randomly call police for a prank or anything. Right. But again, there is this whole issue of training people, training people as to what may or may not be suspicious. If somebody comes up and rattles a doorknob, is that suspicious? And maybe that's a homeowner and he left the door open and now not, you know? Right, definitely. And unfortunately, when you're observing from the outside and you're looking in, so for instance, someone that's watching this video footage, they don't get to see what happens to the left of the footage and to the right of the footage. They only get to see what's going on right there in the middle. So for instance, you know, an individual that's walking into the frame, let's say that they're wearing baggy clothes, and it's a gentleman, but he's carrying a purse. In fact, he's carrying this purse very briskly. It could simply be that he got a phone call to the left of the image about, can you please bring my purse? And on the right side of the image is his spouse or significant other that's waiting for that purse. So that's a really good example on how this limitation, you know, kind of gives that issue. Yeah. So there are ways this could clearly go very, very wrong. And then it brings up sort of this whole issue of what's sometimes called the expectation of privacy, right? We used to think when we walked down the street that we had some vague expectation of some privacy. Now we all know, you'll see signs around saying this area is under video surveillance. You no longer have any reasonable expectation of privacy. Anyone who believes that almost anything they do in public space is private is sort of living a force of paradise, right? Absolutely. And with the thousands and thousands of people with video phones now and cell phones just hanging out their windows, shooting stuff randomly. Absolutely. I mean, cameras are so mainstream now that the privacy concerns of these street cameras that are being placed up versus the concerns of the privacy and just cameras in general is kind of overshadowed a little bit since cameras are so readily available on our smartphone phones now. At least the security cameras that are in place are regulated, whereas individuals with cell phones and cameras are unregulated. So there is a level of concern for privacy. You're absolutely correct. However, to be fair, we almost really don't have a whole lot of privacy anyways because we could be in any photo at any time, any video at any time entirely without our knowledge. Right. And what's even worse now, of course, with the technology being increasingly sophisticated is if somebody can record you talking for about 10 or 20 minutes and get a little video of you, they can basically then, there are tools that they can make you say anything they want, that they can literally make it appear that you are talking, spewing out hate speech, whatever they feel like making you appear to do, right? Absolutely. I mean, luckily, there's a course of actions that can be used to prove or disprove any video footage that were to come out. And digital forensics, we deal with that a lot, ensuring that a video is original and authentic. So however, unfortunately, by that time that we do disprove a video, the damage typically is already done. Right. It's gone viral. Millions of people have seen it. They know it's fact now. Exactly. And it goes right back to perception. You know, they already assume that this is fact and they're wrong with it. Yeah. And it's very hard to undo that kind of thing. People thrive on bad news, I mean, psychologically, bad news in some sense is more important twice than good. Absolutely. And therefore, we pay more attention to it. You know, it's more important to figure that wrestling in the bush besides you is a tiger rather than to think that maybe it's a rabbit that you can go after, right? You're probably better off just making that other assumption. Right. Definitely. You might live longer. Right. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, bad news basically gets higher priority in our brains and it lives longer and it lingers and it spreads faster. There have been studies on social media now that show how basically bad news does it. People spread it, more people spread it more widely, it's picked up faster by more people. Absolutely. Yeah. And preconceptions also, you know, is incredibly important in that as an individual that logs into one of these cameras to look at the footage, they're already looking for everything suspicious possible because they want to be this great citizen and get back to their community and be able to, you know, make their community safer. However, as humans, we typically like to see exactly what we want to see. Right. So that, again, is another issue where, you know, these suspicious activities now compounding, you know, based on perception, again. Right. And we really will see what we both want to see and expect to see. I don't know if you've viewed that little perception test where there's people passing and bouncing a ball around and you're asked to follow how many times a ball gets passed and all. And during this guerrilla, a guiding guerrilla suit walks through and completely unaware of it. Literally, nobody will pick up on the fact that this guy with the guerrilla suit just wore a watch because you're focused on this other aspect of the situation. Right. Right. Absolutely. So, yeah, people, each person watching this video footage has their own pre-mindset about what it is they expect to see, think what they'll see, want to see, and all that's going to impact what they do see. Absolutely. And, you know, that goes right back to the issue about, you know, the number of phone calls that are going to be reported and then the demand on the police department at that time and then also the conception afterwards if the police numbers show up to that phone call. Right. You know, so there's a lot, unfortunately, that hinge on the perception of individuals within the community. Yeah. You almost think this technology needs to have something sort of like what they do in classroom now with a clicker technology so people can sort of vote. You know, and so the police could very quickly get a scorecard and say, oh, this particular camera showing 16 people showing mild concern, three people showing serious concern, eight people showing no concern at all, okay, well, yeah, one way, if 25 people show severe concern and nobody else was on, it's like, okay, we probably should go there. Right. And that's definitely, you know, that's one good, really good possibility for your security cameras. The challenge with that, you know, would be you're going to have individuals that they turn on the live feed and they walk away from the computer. So now you're going to have people that don't find it to be a concern, you know, if that's the default action that's assigned for the voting process. But you know, also again, you're going to have individuals that are going to be basing their vote entirely on a untrained mentality. Right. So yeah, right back to square one again. There are certainly a lot of issues about this, a lot of things to think about. The question, I guess, is we can't put this genie back in the bottle, right? The cameras are out there now, camera up by the thousands, by the 10 thousands, probably by the hundreds of thousands across the country, probably by the millions actually. Right. It's going to be used, this data is already up in the cloud, being stored there, being viewed, being analyzed. So the question is how do we deal with this? What kind of process do we use? And maybe before we get into that, I think we probably need to take a quick break here and then come back after one minute and see it. Tyler Harris is with us here. We're talking about public access to these surveillance cameras. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on In Tech Talks and we'll be back in one minute. Host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech, Hawaii, called Konnichiwa, Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Jay Fiedel, one of the hosts of Asia in Review, which is broadcast Monday afternoons on ThinkTechHawaii.com. We cover, we study news and politics in and affecting Asia. We work hard to bring you the most interesting subjects and guests who will raise your awareness. Please join us Mondays every week on Asia in Review on ThinkTechHawaii.com and also on YouTube and iTunes. Thanks for watching. We'll see you then. Aloha, Xie Xie, and Sai Jian. Ethan Allen here, hosting Think Tech Talks in place of Jay Fiedel, who usually does this show. Tyler Harris is with me today. We're talking about the issues of surveillance cameras in cities and in particular about allowing public access to those images and having the public then become part of the eyes on the street. And I've been sort of playing the positive side of this, thinking of all the good things they can do, how this can help the police. Tyler's been putting more perhaps realistic slant on it, pointing out the problems with the data that we'll get and all. And that does lead us to this whole issue of the sort of quality of the data, right? And how do you judge that? How do you sort through your data? I mean, what is huge amounts of data? So now all these cameras are going to be connected to a digital video recording device commonly known as a DVR. So these videos are going to be assigned typically within a server when they're stored. They'll be assigned a file name that incorporates the date and the camera number associated with that. And then it's sorted, of course, so that way the information can be easily located for evidentiary purposes later and extracted. But it does kind of raise the concern as well about this footage that's there, since it is available to the public, anybody can keep a recording of that footage, whether it's for good or bad purposes. And because this information is being stored in a cloud environment somewhere, it does become a more high profile target for hackers or anybody else that may seek to use a video footage for negative purposes, such as extortion or blackmail or anything like that. Yeah. And people clearly want to use this for different things. If you have a confrontation with police caught on cameras here, some people are going to want to use it to exonerate the police and say they acted rightly and professionally. Other people probably want to use it to sort of prove just the opposite, right? Right. Exactly. In my experience, especially in Texas, I was working for a private investigative firm doing digital forensics. And what I can tell you is that I have a lot of interaction, a lot of experience with field private investigators that conduct surveillance on individuals and subjects. And what I can tell you is that these cameras are an excellent asset for information collection in support of private investigative cases. Very much so in the same fashion as police departments. So there is that negative aspect as well. However, on the positive aspect, you're absolutely right as far as the issues that could occur if they're caught on camera and the accountability that comes from that, especially since these can be exported as an arbitrary item to hold anybody accountable for anything, which is fantastic for transparency and trust in local police departments. Yeah, but I mean it breaks down to individual stuff, right? You've told your spouse you're going on a diet and they see you stopping in a donut shop, you know, like, oops, I gotcha there. Right. But you know, it really boils down to, you know, for those that are incredibly security heavy, you know, the viewpoint is pretty simple. If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide. So don't worry about it, right? However, from a citizen's standpoint of, hey, I'm an individual, I'm an adult, I deserve my privacy, and this infringes on my privacy. And that's really the two big aspects there. And it's nice because they're trying to meet halfway in the middle with these security cameras over there in Newark. However, unfortunately, you know, there's still a lot of misconceptions about it as well. Yeah, it is. It is. Again, that gets back to the earlier issue we were discussing, what expectation of privacy do you have, and what does that really mean in this day and age? From the security aspect as well, you know, when you look at these security cameras, there's a lot more questions than just the camera itself, right? So the camera's available, but what software overlays are a part of that camera? Is facial recognition? What about audio recognition? Which apparently aren't part of the current system in Newark. Well, right, correct. But you must start somewhere. Right. Exactly. So, you know, you turn around and you start by saying, hey, we don't have any of this technology. We're just going to install the cameras. And then everybody gets used to it. And five years from now, you re-approach the subject and you say, hey, why don't we go and put in some facial recognition so that way we can nav all these people that are on the wanted list. Right. You know, so it opens up that book to push the envelope a little bit further down the line. It does. It sort of puts you on that proverbial slippery slope, right? Exactly. Yeah. Of having more and more of your information be more and more in the hands of other people, right? Absolutely. And the other aspect, too, since these are publicly available, there is the possibility that a third-party company could take that video, create the overlays, and then turn around and sell a for-profit video feed, you know, based on the facial recognition or anything else that they add into the overlay. So there are possibilities there as well. Sure. There was one of these articles that was, they were discussing a case of a surveillance camera that was located near a gay bar. And some police officer was basically taking this, getting them license numbers, tracking these people down and trying to use it to extort money from them so as to not expose them. Right. They were really, really seeming stuff, very, very ugly, very much a downside. So it sounds like one of the things we're here or really in agreement on is that with any system like this, some degree of public education is going to be a really key component, right? Absolutely. You know, if we leave it up to perception, or I'm sorry, perception, and if we don't educate the public on the pros and cons, the positives and the negatives, and everything that could occur with these systems, then we're going to be living up to imagination, which is horrible. So you know, if education accompanies these cameras and the citizens of that community are educated as far as how they work, what they're being used for, and the potential downsides, and they're okay with that, I think it's fantastic. But not every community might be okay with that. Right, yeah. And you can see, I thought it was very interesting that this was being tried in Newark as a sort of, I think a desperate bid to try to get, heal some rift between law enforcement and the broader community and more power to them if they can make that work and actually get people on board. Absolutely. But yeah, so then we get into that area. How do you make this data more secure? How do you stop the abuses? How do you try to make the system work as well as it can over? Unfortunately, that's an incredibly complicated answer. There's a lot of security needed on the camera side as well as the server side. There needs to be a encryption, preferably a 256-bit encryption or better, between the server and the camera itself. What do you mean by a 256-bit encryption? Sorry. So AES, 256-bit encryption is a quote-unquote military grade encryption that encrypts the data so it's not easily readable if anybody were to intercept that data in between. Now on the server side, everything should be encrypted there as well. So what it does is if I were to hack that live feed or if I were to hack that server, any information I pull from that is going to look like gibberish. Right. So as long as that's in place, which it should be, I would imagine that the technicians responsible for that camera system would already employ that. But it's not impossible to steal the information and steal. So yeah, there's that. As far as for the live feed offered to the public, every time that a live feed is pushed out and individuals are able to gain direct access to that feed, there does raise the risk that there could be a potential hack in progress or that it's already being hacked and observed. And again, this is worldwide. So anybody in any country can hack that system. So that's pretty important to remember. Yeah, and then there's all these other sort of odd associated risks, right? Somebody who's in a witness protection program, for instance, just walking down the street and suddenly, you know, Joey the knife sees, hey, there's a guy who put me behind bars 20 years ago. Right. Now I know where he is, right? Definitely. Or again, spouses who have taken their kids to leave an abusive situation and suddenly that the kid is running past one of these cameras and the spouse who shouldn't know where the kids are now knows, I mean, how do you stop that stuff? Unfortunately, there's not really a good stopping with that. You know, if there was anything such as a restraining order, you know, that legal document would would be the protective factor. Unfortunately, not very effective. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you're absolutely right. That's that's the case. It's just it's not effective. Sometimes. However, it goes right back to and how much privacy are you willing to give up to increase the security of the community? And for new work, they determined that this was a reasonable compromise between the two. So unfortunately, without having that facial recognition, the camera would never know to blur out that face as it went by for a witness protection program participant. So it's a catch point too, no matter how you look at it. Yeah. But I like what you just pointed out that in a sense, every community has to or should come together and make a decision about this kind of technology, which is sort of rolling out now and say, do we want this? Do we not? Here are what we see as some costs here are what we see as some benefits. Here are some real potential downsides here are some real potential gains. Let's talk about this. Have a civil discussion about it. If we can find some common happy middle ground, we'll keep most people satisfied. Absolutely. It made me naive, right? Yeah. I mean, just as long as the public education was out there to educate the public that this is the intended use, these were all the potential downsides. This is what we look to gain from this. As long as the community is all in the same page and they kind of eliminate that uneducated perception, then I absolutely that that would be the way to approach it. Excellent. Well, thank you, Tyler. And very educational for me to discuss this with you. I've enjoyed this and I hope you'll come back and join us on Think Tech Talks next week.