• China deploys vast, pervasive surveillance system for Games -- and beyond

    The Chinese government has installed about 300,000 cameras in Beijing and set up a network to spy on its citizens and foreigners; cabs are equipped with hidden recording devices; many hotel rooms have one-way mirrors; Mao-era practice of neighborhood watches revives

  • Military contractors move aggressively into civil security

    BAE’s acquisition of Detica, a company with a large portfolio of British civil IT contracts, exemplifies the EU policy of encouraging military firms to use their knowledge of homeland security; civil libertarians are worried

  • A different picture of CCTV

    U.K. company says technology, in addition to providing security, can also analyze customer behavior and lead to increase in sales

  • Cyber cafes to be monitored in India

    Indian police places biometric systems and CCTV in more than 150 cyber cafes in order to catch cyber criminals in the act

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  • New CCTV cameras can see and hear

    Researchers teach intelligent CCTV to “hear” as well as see; the CCTV’s artificial intelligence software is being taught to recognize sounds associated with crimes, including breaking glass, shouted obscenities, and car alarms going off

  • Airlines may be forced to fit antiterror cameras in seats

    The EU moves across a broad front to increase air travel safety; airlines will be forced to install spy-in-the-cabin cameras and increase the use of biometrics technology for passenger identification

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  • Surveillance systems for Singapore

    The Port of Singapore is the world’s largest container transshipment hub, handling around 27 million containers last year; U.K. CCTV company wins large contract to secure the port

  • In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky

    Big Brother comes to the skies: EU-funded aviation security system uses a camera in every passenger’s seat, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles; software on the computer to which the cameras are connected detects suspicious behavior of passengers — from air rage to terrorist intent

  • FLIR acquires Ifara

    Ifara’s Nexus is a turnkey product that allows users to connect and control a variety of different sensors; FLIR hopes that Nexus will ultimately become a standard feature in many products within its commercial vision systems and government systems divisions

  • U.K. to set up massive national drivers' surveillance scheme

    Hundreds of monitoring stations would be used to track cars every five seconds — with daily itemized accounts of all trips made by Britain’s thirty million drivers; move is part of a national pay-as-you-drive road pricing plan; government says plan will reduce congestion and pollution

  • Orsus Situator to be deployed at water supplier facilities

    The new approach to critical infrastructure security is “holistic”: Planning, training, positioning information gathering equipment, imposing intelligence on video streams and other information coming in, presenting all information in accessible fashion, offering a menu of responses when an incident occurs; Orsus offers a situation management solution to critical infrastructure operators

  • Company profile: Aralia Systems

    In a recent demonstration, utilizing standard IT servers, the company’s Aster video analytics software performed an automated forensic retrospective search of twenty years’ worth of recorded video data in twenty minutes

  • ICx in contract for specialty radar system for robots

    General Dynamics gives ICx Technologies a follow-on contract for the Mobile Detection Assessment and Response System (MDARS) Intruder Detection Radar Sensor

  • Ambient blue light resets tired workers' body clocks

    Tedious work during the “wrong” hours of the body’s biological clock — think truckers who drive through the night, or security officers monitoring CCTV screens during the graveyard shift — often leads to drowsiness; falling asleep behind the wheel or in front of a security monitoring screen can lead to catastrophes; researchers develop a way to “fool” the brain to think it is morning

  • New camera vastly improves surveillance

    Revolutionary camera design could have far-reaching implications for the military, crime prevention, and enforcement as well as traffic analysis and emergency response support; design is based on an array of light sensitive chips placed at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system