Word: colatosti
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...surveillance system, FaceTrac, is based on technology originally developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach computers to recognize their users, and was installed by a Pennsylvania firm called Graphco Technologies. "It takes everything from forehead to chin," explains Tom Colatosti, CEO of Viisage, whose software drives FaceTrac. "It gets the distance between the eyes, then it calculates the other features: thickness of the lips, angle of the cheekbones, and so on." The beauty of the system is that it is disguise-proof. You can grow a beard and put on sunglasses, and FaceTrac will still pick...
...crime-fighting tool. For Graphco and its partners, it was a chance to see whether the system could capture tens of thousands of faces in difficult lighting and random angles and process them in real time--while grabbing a little free publicity. "It was a phenomenal success," says Colatosti. "If you had told me the day before that we'd get one, that would be great. The fact that we caught 19, that's astounding...
That may be a tough case to make. Under U.S. law, citizens have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces like the Raymond James Stadium. Furthermore, as Colatosti points out, the Super Bowl surveillance isn't the first of its kind, only the most dramatic. The Viisage system is already deployed in some 70 casinos across the country, from Atlantic City to Los Vegas, to identify cheats and card counters. A similar system has been used for the past two years in a tough section of East London called Newham, where British police attribute a drop in crime...
...Colatosti insists that the issue is not privacy. "It's simply the fear of change and technology," he says. "Once you've adapted, you look back and say, 'I was afraid of what?'" Perhaps. No one disputes that the deployment of cheap, ubiquitous video cameras has made an environment of near total surveillance technologically feasible. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, however, depends on how much you trust the cameraman...
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