Could Citizen Surveillance Improve SF's Camera System?

blah blah blah

Meanwhile, we can all start humming the Death Star theme music . . . .

There are pods every 60 feet in the Oakland 12th street BART station. They don't have cameras in them, but they will soon. Sparkling white, new Sony cameras have replaced the decrepit ones--all within the last month.

There is a San Francisco company that makes software that recognizes faces--and, never forgets them. Imagine searching on the computer, typing "John Doe, 8:30pm" and have the computer show you EXACTLY where John Doe was at 8:30pm.

Big Brother is here . . . citizen surveillance may be a bit late . . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/techspecial2/25video.html

Thank you Jimmy for this post and for mentioning our project. I'm the new owner of AdamsBlock. We've renamed it, OurBlock and you can find out more at http://ourblock.tv.

I feel that the comment I left yesterday on the SFGATE Site was good enough to be repeated here so I've copied it below. You can contact us via Owner@OurBlock.TV.

This is the current owner of OurBlock (formerly AdamsBlock).

We're still developing the system but will be launching soon. It's a thing of beauty to see San Francisco embracing this. The issue they'll encounter is cost and funding. We've gotten over that hill and are on to new hurdles.

Our vote is to let citizens put up cameras w/ a mix of city owned camera systems. We'll host the city's live camera systems that they own ONLY if the feeds are made public and the quality must be low enough that people can't be stalked or identified.

The city may not like that but our goal is to fight crimes as they happen. Our system has a 1.5 second delay between capture & streaming of the video. Within 7 seconds, the police are notified. We're not in the market of cyber-stalking or playing big brother. It's about protection and safety.

Thank you for your support. You can follow @AdamsBlock on Twitter or check out http://ourblock.tv. We're hiring & currently raising funding.

Hey Ourblock person. I just tried to sign up as a broadcaster and it told me "Table 'ourblockblog.broadcasters' doesn't exist." So, you might want to look into that before going out to raise finding. Sounds like a cool idea, if you can get it working.

Thank you Matt. We have over 500 people signed up to broadcast.

Signups are closed at this time but we'll re-open it soon.