Privacy advocates are going to hate this one I think, but I thought I would Bake it..

What if you placed sensors at every intersection in a city that recorded a 360-degree view in infrared - basically infrared camera. I understand that infrared signatures are unique for every vehicle and person, but can change daily or hourly. The infra-video is taken in 1-second or so increments, sort of like a security camera video. By itself, there would be no information that could be easily abused by authorities, but if a crime is committed, the police could engage a computer program to follow the infrared signature from frame-to-frame, location-to-location to pinpoint an individual or vehicle to gain more information on where it had been and where it went after a crime. It could reverse the path of someone entering your home, or find out where they went afterwards. With one on every corner, it would be difficult to hide from the system, but it would not record any overt information. Hopefully it would give law enforcement a tool to know what happened after the fact, but little information before. Big Brother is watching, but inundated with so much information, that he can only act on the crimes, and still has to do enough sleuthing that it is only worthwhile in criminal cases.
-- trekbody, May 25 2005

[infrared signatures are unique for every vehicle and person]

I suspect it's more like there is some variance between persons and vehicles. Most of us are approximately the same temperature, undead excluded, and there are enough autos out there to average out the signatures.
-- normzone, May 25 2005


I thought that the infrared signature would allow tracking of a person or an object but would not allow identification - thus delivering some anonymity.
-- trekbody, May 25 2005


Pa've - if nobody were watching this video (if you want to call a collection of infrared data video), wouldn't that preserve most privacy for you. You can think of it in terms of video because it could be reconstructed into some sort of a picture, but you could also think about it as potential tracking data. They have to have seperate person / time / location information in order to reconstruct who is doing what. Again, not as self-evident as video, BUT you could definitely track the movements of people leaving your home at any given time, but again, the authorities would not know who is coming and going - it would be more of a forensic tool.
-- trekbody, May 25 2005


And what happens if a crime is committed in the midst of a large group of people, say at a protest rally or amusement park? There would be too much heat from too many objects.
-- squogglewonker, May 28 2005


First, I imagine a crime in a large group would have witnesses, but lets assume not. I believe that an infrared image could record enough information to differentiate and track an individual in a crowd. Think of it like the heat signatures in the movie Predator. The infra-red video would allow moment-to-moment tracking. It might not be infalable though.
-- trekbody, May 31 2005


On a related topic, I was thinking this could be done with satellite imaging. A geostationary satellite would take a super-high resolution picture of a city of interest (say Baghdad) every few seconds. When a crime is committed (say a car bomb explodes), the path of the vehicle is traced to a point of origin, thus uncovering the criminal's identity (and possibly the source of the explosive material).
-- xaviergisz, Jun 01 2005


I don't know if the resolution is good enough from a satellite. Then you run into the problems of cloud cover and such. Might stationary earthbound sensors be more reasonable? And for the satellite, you have to have it pointed at a particular location - it can't look everywhere at once - you might be able to get a number of telescopes up on a blimp or something, but probably not enough from space. Especially geosychronous one - too far up (22,000 miles if memory serves?)
-- trekbody, Jun 06 2005


Instead of having a camera at every crossing, have spray cans at every private building.

When a computer detects a crime has been commited, it calls the police and covers the criminal in long-lasting ultra-violet spray. The ultra-violet in normal streetlamps will make the criminal shine like a beacon (now if only we had enough police on the streets to notice him...)
-- dbmag9, Jun 07 2005


//Eventaully, the planet will collapse under the weight of all the VHS tapes and DVD's we made watching each other.//

Which would make a pretty good video tape to sell to college-age kids.
-- shapu, Jun 07 2005


The satellite version is baked: search for ARGUS-IS on YouTube.
-- notexactly, Mar 02 2015


More expensive and less useful. More expensive: Have you ever looked at the prices of thermal cameras, even low- resolution consumer ones? Less useful: Can't be used to analyze a crime or other incident after the fact like visible- light cameras can.
-- notexactly, Nov 15 2015



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