police video surveillance of public schools; facerecog too

[Optimizzin Al-gorithym]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-campus8sep08.story

SANTEE, Calif. -- As Mike Brooder pulls into the student parking lot
outside West Hills High School, wireless cameras record his face and
license plate--doing the same to every car that follows.

The cameras then track the 17-year-old senior as he walks up a concrete
path, studies his schedule, scratches his chin, waves to friends and
then wanders to class.

Nearly every move Brooder makes--and every move of his 2,300
classmates--is captured and stored in the campus' database.

Following last September's terrorist attacks and years of school
shootings, West Hills High sits on the cutting edge of the emerging
surveillance society.

Each bathroom door is monitored. Sensors that detect the smoke of a
single match send alerts to campus security.

By Christmas, four more cameras will be installed, and hall monitors
will carry wireless computers that can pull up a student's school
picture, class schedule and attendance record.

School officials are considering whether to expand the SkyWitness
surveillance system by adding facial recognition software that will
allow a computer to filter out who should--and who should not--be on
campus.

Technology, once viewed primarily as a learning tool, is building a wall
of electronic security on campus.

"People are saying they expected this to happen after the shootings and
the terrorists last year," said Brooder, an honor student who plays on
the school baseball team. "Still, it seems a little overwhelming and
extreme."

And perhaps likely to become far more common--not just in schools, but
everywhere.

Schools are among the first to embrace new technology, often because
companies view campuses as perfect testing grounds before rolling
products out to corporate America.

For instance, one of the companies behind West Hills' system,
PacketVideo Corp., predicts that demand for products like SkyWitness
will grow, as people are tracked at factories, office parks,
stadiums--even places such as the Third Street Promenade shopping
district in Santa Monica.

Companies like the fact that students enjoy fewer constitutional
protections than adults and have lower expectations of privacy than
their parents.

For many students, such surveillance is standard, with cameras at every
bank ATM and many fast-food drive-throughs.

But the desire to protect has led to an erosion of individual privacy,
civil liberties advocates argue.

"Once privacy is gone, you can't get it back," said Dale Kelly Bankhead,
a spokeswoman for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial counties. "This is
not just about schools, but about a broader social attitude."

Relying on such high-tech systems is an unusual move for high schools,
but is expected to become a more popular trend in the post-Sept, 11
world, said Kenneth S. Trump, president and chief executive of National
School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based consulting firm.

At Tewksbury Memorial High School, about an hour outside Boston, the
push for security has gone so far as to result in a video-surveillance
system that lets both educators--and local police--watch the hallways.

"Cameras are everywhere someone wants to watch over," Trump said.

The technology at West Hills relies on advanced hardware, but basic,
off-the-shelf technology is already used by both parents and educators
to watch kids.

Software programs can take snapshots of every Web page they visit and
every e-mail they send.

Devices such as AutoWatch can be popped into an automobile and
programmed to record a car's speed, as well as times, dates and the
lengths of time it is driven. Cell-phone bills list the calls a student
makes and receives.

"You might call it control," said Joe Schramm, head of security at West
Hills. "We call it keeping the kids safe."

Tucked into the scrub-brush valley of Santee, West Hills High appears to
be nothing but safe.

The average SAT score is nearly 1100, and 70% of last year's seniors are
attending either a community college or a four-year institution this
fall. But West Hills High has not gone untouched by fear.

Less than three miles away, Charles "Andy" Williams went on a shooting
rampage last year, killing two students and wounding 13 others at
Santana High School.

The community was stunned when nearly two weeks later another student
launched a shooting spree at a different school in the Grossmont Union
High School District.

Jason Hoffman, 18, wounded five people at Granite Hills High School in
El Cajon.

Hoffman committed suicide while awaiting trial. Last month Williams was
sentenced to prison for 50 years to life.

Despite the violence, the school district was forced to cut its budget
across the board; the security group lost three of its 10 employees,
including two of the staff members who helped patrol the 76-acre West
Hills campus.

Hoping to offset the pain of the staff cuts, the district started to
look at technology it already had in place on its campuses and explore
how the tools could be used for security purposes, said Sue Mangiapane,
education global account manager for Cisco Systems Inc.

The San Jose computer giant had been hired to install the core routers,
switches and servers that formed the computer brain to link campuses
with the district's offices and, in turn, to the Internet.

Initially, the technology had been designed for instructional use, such
as creating digital lockers where students could store their electronic
art projects.

Then, the focus shifted toward security. At a technology conference this
spring, executives from Cisco and San Diego-based PacketVideo began
discussing the school shootings and tossing around ideas of how the
tragedies could have been avoided.

"Schools aren't a key security market for us," said James Carol,
chairman and co-founder of PacketVideo, a privately owned software
company that creates wireless video networks.

The company, along with Cisco and Sony, donated the equipment and
handled the installation of the $50,000 SkyWitness system.

"This was the right thing to do for a school that's essentially in our
backyard," Carol said.

The project at West Hills also provided the technology companies with a
test lab in which to develop and try out a security system that the
firms will ultimately market to corporate America and government
agencies.

Already, PacketVideo's software is used by cell phone and technology
firms such as NTT DoCoMo in Japan and Siemens AG in Germany, and tapped
for private security projects.

Tech firms such as Microsoft Corp. and Apple Computer Co. have a long
history of donating software and hardware to schools. The motivation is
partly the push to be a corporate good citizen and partly the desire to
influence the consumer habits of future shoppers.

"If you want to stress-test a technology, particularly a security
system, a school is a good place," said Trump of National School Safety
and Security Services. "Most often, the biggest obstacle a company must
overcome is the issue of cost. If [the technology] is free, many schools
will be open to it."

Aiding the decision is the fact that minors have fewer rights than
adults, said John Pescatore, research director for security at the
industry-consulting firm Gartner.

"If the system gets too intrusive, the school and the technology
companies are likely to get fewer complaints and fewer legal actions
filed over it" than they would elsewhere, Pescatore said. "You can do
things on a school campus that you could never do in an office
building."

Few of the students at West Hills or their parents knew about the new
surveillance system when classes began in late August.

The school's football team, the Wolf Pack, and the campus cheerleaders
had practiced on campus this summer and saw the cameras being installed.

Rumors flew, as word of the new technology became campus gossip.

Some students, carrying their bar-coded photo identification cards,
grumbled about the digital devices that tracked their every step.

But most wandered nonchalantly by the wireless cameras, ignoring the
monitoring.

"We're observed all the time," said senior Kimberly Schmidtke, 17. "It's
just that they're now taping us."

That such surveillance would not only be accepted but also embraced by
some teenagers marks a subtle cultural shift over public monitoring.

A few decades ago, students rallied against having their actions
recorded by authority figures.

But as camera technologies became cheaper and easier to use, they became
far more widely used, said Bankhead of the ACLU.

Digital cameras sit on top of home computers, peek out of mall ceilings
and take snapshots at gas station pumps.

Cities such as Simi Valley have approved grants to pay for cameras to
catch graffiti vandals, and dozens of towns nationwide use cameras to
capture drivers who speed through red lights.

"It's been so incremental, we almost didn't notice such monitoring of
our lives was happening," Bankhead said. "We don't even know it's there.
The more it's there, the more it seems to make sense to people."

In the first few days of school, only a few parents voiced
complaints--not about the technology itself, but that the district had
not informed them that the system would be put into use.

"For something so significant, it's the district's responsibility to
disclose what they're doing," said Patty Everts, 50, while waiting
Monday to pick up her daughter at West Hills. "We knew there was new
technology on the campus that was being upgraded. Most people assumed it
was for educational purposes, not security."

School officials plan to send a letter out to parents next month "as
soon as we know the full potential of how we are going to use this
technology," said Principal Jim Peabody. "The technology will help us
keep kids safe and keep out people who shouldn't be on this campus."

But the security system could not have prevented last year's school
rampages, because the shooters were not people who didn't belong on
campus.

Reliance on such technology to attempt the creation of a protective wall
horrifies privacy proponents, who insist that the West Hills system is
not only invasive, but also gives parents and school officials a false
sense of security.

"No one's even asking the question: Is this truly going to make my child
safer?" Bankhead said.

To 66-year-old grandfather Jerry Parli, the answer is moot. Lingering at
the entrance of West Hills, he sat patiently in the hot August
afternoon, waiting to pick up his two granddaughters.

"It's about time they do something like this," he said. "It's a terrible
thing, but it's time to embrace Big Brother."

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"Well, as long as everyone's videotaping everyone else, I guess justice
will be done"
Marge Simpson