Monday, June 05, 2006
Surveilance 2.0?
If you listen to all the Web 2.0 hype floating around out there you'd think that we're about one AJAX app away from the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, with peace, love, and free beer for all. That may or may not be true (I'm personally coming down on the side of "not"), but one has to admit that the plethora of new Web sites based around online services and (more importantly) social interaction and collaboration are pretty cool. One glance at the traffic stats for Web2.0 poster site YouTube will show you that a lot of other people think so too. The combination of social interaction with remote collaboration to accomplish shared goals is a pretty effective way to get some serious work (and play) done.
Of course, this kind of thing has been going on for a while now with distributed computing projects like SETI@Home, Rosetta@Home, and even the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, all projects that attempt to use a large number of computers spread out across the Internet to accomplish a task. Now Texas Governor Rick Perry has a new idea: use thousands of Web cams available to anyone online to surveil the border between Texas and Mexico.
It seems like a pretty simple idea to use cheaply available technology and unpaid human volunteers to patrol the biggest single-state border in the US. Citizens see some illegal crossers, dial a toll-free number, and the deputies roll in.
Ummm...maybe. See, it seems that most deputies in the area have to patrol an area about the size of Rhode Island. Oh, and since the people looking at the Web cams are untrained amateurs it may be a little tough for them to tell if the blur they see moving through the night vision scopes is a deer or an illegal immigrant. And even though the system's online they still have to dial an 800 number and report what they see. Hmmm...
The first cameras go up in 30 days, so I guess we'll see how it works. Personally I think it's kind of creepy and seems a little too close to Internet Hunting to me. On the other hand, it does open up the door to a whole range of applications for distributing work that requires human eyeballs to work.
Of course, this kind of thing has been going on for a while now with distributed computing projects like SETI@Home, Rosetta@Home, and even the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, all projects that attempt to use a large number of computers spread out across the Internet to accomplish a task. Now Texas Governor Rick Perry has a new idea: use thousands of Web cams available to anyone online to surveil the border between Texas and Mexico.
It seems like a pretty simple idea to use cheaply available technology and unpaid human volunteers to patrol the biggest single-state border in the US. Citizens see some illegal crossers, dial a toll-free number, and the deputies roll in.
Ummm...maybe. See, it seems that most deputies in the area have to patrol an area about the size of Rhode Island. Oh, and since the people looking at the Web cams are untrained amateurs it may be a little tough for them to tell if the blur they see moving through the night vision scopes is a deer or an illegal immigrant. And even though the system's online they still have to dial an 800 number and report what they see. Hmmm...
The first cameras go up in 30 days, so I guess we'll see how it works. Personally I think it's kind of creepy and seems a little too close to Internet Hunting to me. On the other hand, it does open up the door to a whole range of applications for distributing work that requires human eyeballs to work.
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posted by Sean Carton @ 4:04 PM
posted by Sean Carton @ 4:04 PM
