School Surveillance on a High School Budget

There were few if any surveillance cameras in the high school when Jason Jones graduated from Wyoming Area 17 years ago. Today, the district is in the final stage of installing 63 cameras hooked up to a complete surveillance system that Jones designed, one that filled the district’s need for monitoring without emptying taxpayers’ wallets.

It’s an accomplishment in which he takes great pride, especially since it was for his alma mater.

“I love this school and the fact that we couldn’t see some incidents bothered me,” Jones said when he pitched the new surveillance system to the school board in August. With the new system, there are more than twice as many cameras capturing images with better resolution, and the images can be reviewed 16 at a time on one computer screen or on wireless devices carried by district personnel. Jones and district administrators can even sign on to the system from outside the school and see what is going on inside, he said.

All the equipment was carefully chosen by Jones to provide the most bang for the buck. He recalled reviewing initial specifications and an early project estimate when he first joined the district almost two years ago. “My first thought was I could put a smart board in every classroom for that estimate,” Jones said. He said while surveillance systems can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he knew he could come up with a plan that would protect the school for much less than that.

Woman Sues Landlord for Alleged Peeping

A Norristown woman has sued her landlord for allegedly using electronic surveillance devices to videotape her most intimate moments.

The woman, who resides at an apartment building in the 1400 block of Green Valley Road that is owned by accused peeper Thomas C. Daley, is seeking in excess of $100,000 in damages against Daley.

In the suit filed in Montgomery County Court on Thursday, the woman claimed she suffered psychological and emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, depression and sleeplessness since Daley's alleged activities were uncovered by authorities earlier this week.

"This man gutted my client's sense of personal security and privacy through one of the most vile ways imaginable," alleged Norristown lawyer John I. McMahon Jr., who represents the woman.

McMahon alleged in the suit that between March 2007 and September 2008 Daley regularly captured and viewed video images of the woman, in various states of undress, on dozens of occasions. Daley, the suit alleged, installed numerous hidden cameras throughout the woman's apartment, including the bathroom, living room and bedroom.

"(Daley's) surreptitious installation of the electronic surveillance equipment was done with the sole objective and purpose of gratifying his sexual desires by viewing and examining plaintiff's naked body within the privacy of her own home, without her knowledge or consent," McMahon wrote in the lawsuit.

PI WORK IS HARDLY GLAMOROUS

The field of private investigation is one in which a great many people express an interest. Much of that interest, unfortunately, is based on what they see on television and in the movies, which seldom conforms to the reality of the job.
The typical private investigator doesn't lead a life as influential, exciting or dangerous as most of his fictional counterparts on the screen, be it large or small.
The job essentially has two main aspects when you start out - working undercover or on surveillance.
The undercover assignment usually involves a blue-collar job - working on a loading dock, in a factory, driving a truck or working in large warehouse to try to find drug use or theft. You're working two jobs - the "front" job and your undercover work.
You have to perform all the work that the others do and be good at it. If you don't do it well, you will stand out, others may start wondering how you were hired and your assignment could be compromised.
You're also working alongside people whom you get to know. You will find out about their families, friends, problems and habits, and you may find yourself becoming close with someone. You must guard against getting too friendly with anyone. The person might become part of the investigation and you will have to collect evidence on him or her and possibly testify against the person.
Surveillance is another way that investigators break into the field. Surveillance is one of the toughest assignments. When police or federal agents do it, they sometimes use several vehicles. As a private eye, you almost always use one vehicle.
And most surveillance starts early, say 5 a.m., because you need to be in the neighborhood and settled before to people are up so they don't notice a strange vehicle arrive and no one get out. The goal is for it to appear that no one is in the van. Yes, true surveillance is done in a van.
And you can't run your vehicle during surveillance. When it's hot in the summer, you better have some ways to keep cool without turning the vehicle on. Picture a hot August day, inside a van parked on a street with no shade and being in it all day. How about a winter day with 30-below wind chill? Can't turn on the heater! And a bathroom break? what is that? Restrooms are confined to the inside of your van.
If this sound like fun, then maybe you have some PI blood in you.

SURVEILLANCE VIDEO HELPS NAB TWO THIEVES

Police have arrested two men they believe might be responsible for several break-ins in Somerville.
The most recent break-in was caught on surveillance video .
The video shows one suspect smashing a glass door at the Global Market on Somerville Avenue at 5:15 a.m. Friday. The man then grabs the cash drawer, getting away with approximately $200.
A local woman spotted him and his driver and called police.
Charles McCarthy and Michael Rais, both of Somerville, were arraigned in Somerville District charged with breaking and entering in the night time with intent to commit a felony.

SURVEILLANCE TAPE OF MURDER SUSPECT RELEASED

The three men wanted for the shooting murder of William Junior Appiah should call their lawyers and surrender.
Toronto homicide Det.-Sgt. Gary Grinton today released video taken Tuesday afternoon in the playground of 4400 Jane St. of the three men who killed the 18-year-old Brampton man.
"This was, in my view, a direct, targeted murder," Grinton said.
"The three people walked up to him and he was killed without hesitation, receiving gunshot wounds to the head and torso," he said.
"My message to them is to do the right thing," Grinton said. "Talk to a lawyer. Come in and talk to us."
The video, taken from a surveillance camera on the south side of the apartment building, showed three men arrive individually and then a few moments later, the trio were captured by the camera running away towards a parked silver Japanese car.
Grinton said the confrontation between Appiah, known as Yoshi after the character from Super Mario video games, and his killers lasted only seconds.

Dallas To Increase Number of Surveillance Cameras

Dallas is installing more surveillance cameras, which police say have proven effective in the city's downtown.

Police said crime fell 18 percent in downtown Dallas since 40 cameras were installed.

"It's definitely had a positive impact on public safety in the Central Business District," Deputy Chief Vincent Golbeck said.

The cameras have caught on tape incidents such a robbery and the takedown of a man wanted for sexually assaulting a child.

The number of cameras in downtown Dallas will soon double. The organization Downtown Dallas is helping to fund an additional 40 cameras, most of which will be in the Arts District.

Downtown Dallas' John Crawford said the association wants to make people feel they are safe and secure in the area.

"We want the cameras there where we have the highest concentration of people and also, too, where you've had chronic issues -- open-air issues -- that surveillance cameras can have an effect on," Golbeck said.

ACLU Asks Court to Strike Down Spying Law

Claiming that the FISA Amendments Act puts innocent Americans' telephone calls and e-mails at risk, a brief filed in federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union is requesting the court to strike down this law. A part of the ACLU's lawsuit to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the law, this is the first legal brief challenging the constitutionality of the new wiretapping law.

According to ACLU, as the FISA Amendments Act utterly fails to protect U.S. residents' privacy and free speech rights, it is the most sweeping surveillance bill ever enacted by Congress and should be struck down. According to the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the Bush administration will have virtually unchecked power to intercept the international and in some cases domestic – emails and telephone calls of law-abiding Americans. According to the new law, the government can conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, and where its surveillance targets are located. The government doesn’t even have to disclose why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.

Alarm Over Car Surveillance Programme

Civil liberties campaigners reacted with alarm today to the expansion of a surveillance operation allowing police to store millions of car journeys on a national database for five years.

A national network of roadside cameras will capture 50 million licence plates a day, enabling officers to reconstruct the journeys of motorists.

The details will be recorded and stored at a new data centre in Hendon, North London, for use by police in investigations ranging from terrorism to low-level crime.

Already some 10 million journeys a day are being recorded using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), but this is set to rise significantly once the camera network becomes fully operational in four months' time, the Home Office said. Whereas under the original plan the data could be stored for two years only, this has now been extended to five years.

WOMAN CATCHES VANDAL ON SURVEILLANCE VIDEO

A repeat car vandal was finally caught after the owner installed a surveillance camera outside her home.

The woman who owns the Honda minivan claims her car has been repeatedly vandalized for several years, including broken side windows and a hole punched into the car's hood.

Less than a month after the surveillance system was set up, she caught the culprit.

The suspect actually got up on a chair and took down the camera in an attempt to confiscate the tape, but the footage was being recorded to a computer system inside the home.

Lionel Colon, 25, of Lawrence was arrested Friday after he was caught on camera and identified by the woman as a friend of her former brother-in-law.

Lawrence was charged with trespassing and larceny of property.

Woman Catches Vandal on Surveillance Video

A repeat car vandal was finally caught after the owner installed a surveillance camera outside her home.

The woman who owns the Honda minivan claims her car has been repeatedly vandalized for several years, including broken side windows and a hole punched into the car's hood.

Less than a month after the surveillance system was set up, she caught the culprit.

iPhone Gives Away Location of Carjackers

After three young men pulled off an almost perfect robbery — holding the victims at gunpoint and whisking away their car and valuables on National Highway II near Faridabad — it was a mobile phone kept in the car’s tissue box that gave them away.

Shakti Singh (22) was arrested late on Saturday night from Sondhi village of Bulandshahar — the police had been on his trail within 12 hours of the incident. His accomplices — Jaidev and Bhola — are yet to be traced.

The victims were US student Sarah Fantasia (18), wildlife photographers Rakesh Sahai and Gagan Mehta.

Late on Friday night, the three were on their way back from Agra, when the hold-up occurred.

Mehta’s Maruti Swift, Rs 70,000 in cash, two laptops, seven mobile phones, a Nikon and a Cannon camera, ATM cards and Sarah’s visa and passport were all taken away.

What the miscreants had failed to notice was Sahai’s iPhone, which had been on vibration mode and kept in the tissue box.

Artist-Hackers Use Surveillance Cameras to Create Art

Britain, somewhat proudly, has been crowned the most watched society in the world. The country boasts 4.2 million security cameras (one for every 14 people), a number expected to double in the next decade. A typical Londoner makes an estimated 300 closed-circuit television (CCTV) appearances a day, according to the British nonprofit Surveillance Studies Network, an average easily met in the short walk between Trafalgar Square and the Houses of Parliament. Public opinion on this state of affairs is generally positive, according to recent polls. And how useful is CCTV in busting bad guys? Not much, according to Scotland Yard. In terms of cost benefit, the enormous expenditure has done very little in actually preventing and solving crime.

Right under Big Brother's nose, a new class of guerrilla artists and hackers are commandeering the boring, grainy images of vacant parking lots and empty corridors for their own purposes. For about $80 at any electronics supply store and some technical know-how, it is possible to tap into London's CCTV hotspots with a simple wireless receiver (sold with any home-security camera) and a battery to power it. Dubbed "video sniffing," the pastime evolved out of the days before broadband became widely available, when "war-chalkers" scouted the city for unsecured Wi-Fi networks and marked them with chalk using special symbols. Sniffing is catching on in other parts of Europe, as well as in New York and Brazil, spread by a small but globally connected community of practitioners. "It's actually a really relaxing thing to do on a Sunday," says Joao Wilbert, a master's student in interactive media, who slowly paces the streets in London like a treasure hunter, carefully watching a tiny handheld monitor for something to flicker onto the screen.

These excursions pick up obscure, random shots from the upper corners of restaurants and hotel lobbies, or of a young couple shopping in a housewares department nearby. Eerily, baby cribs are the most common images. Wireless child monitors work on the same frequency as other surveillance systems, and are almost never encrypted or secured.

Sousveillance on Surveillance

Watching Amy Winehouse lash out at Glastonbury this year (YouTube brings out the worst in me), I was surprised by the number of cameraphones the star had thrust in her face by the front row of the Pyramid Stage crowd. When your fans start treating you as badly as the paparazzi do, is it any wonder you crack?

This column has written a lot about surveillance, but in a world of cheap, portable technology, there is also sousveillance.

Sousveillance, or "watching from underneath", counters the unblinking eye in the sky with millions of tiny blinking ones belonging to each one of us. In the surveillance society, or so the theory goes, sousveillance is the tool of the surveilled, keeping a watchful eye on the watchers.

The term was coined by Steve Mann, a Canadian computer science professor whom the Globe and Mail called "the world's first cyborg", thanks to his penchant for using wearable web cameras to record and broadcast his every move. That was back in the Nineties - it took the invention of the cameraphone for the rest of us to catch up. This month, I watched a video uploaded by someone who had been subject to a random stop-and-search at Waterloo Station under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act and who captured the incident on his cameraphone (watch it at http://qik.com/ video/203590). One man's experience of a chillingly routine exercise in security is as powerful as any parliamentary debate in bringing home the realities of an encroaching police state.

Apple Computers Interested in Surveillance?

You've probably heard plenty about video and access control companies working with Microsoft technology for their platforms. In the last year, a number of companies have promoted the fact that they are designed to interface to Microsoft's .NET platform, including HID, Lenel, Brivo and many other networked technology and security software companies.

Now, if a panel session at this upcoming ASIS show is any indication, Apple Computers may be following suit and interested in the security industry.

Video surveillance company videoNEXT announced this week that it is co-hosting a panel with Apple at the ASIS show. The panel features Garret Rice, senior manager of enterprise solutions for Apple as moderator, plus panelists Chris Gettings, founder and chairman of videoNEXT; John Honovich, founder of ipvideomarket.info; Steve Hunt of Hunt Business Intelligence; Peter Michael, principle engineer for surveillance and security at SAIC; and Fredrik Nilsoon, general manager of Axis in the Americas.

Man charged with stealing campaign signs

Police made an arrest in connection with stolen lawn signs for a Congressional candidate.
Four lawn signs touting Steck for Congress were taken from the lawn of a Loudonville home.
45-year-old Griffith Lewis turned himself in and is charged with petit larceny.
Candidate Phil Steck went to unusual steps to find out why his signs were disappearing.
"It was very costly to the campaign and a major distraction to have to hire a private investigator and we did do that," said Steck.
Steck's campaign then shared that information with Colonie Police.

Smile! Candid Cameras on the Rise

They're easy to hide, cheap to buy, and simple to use. Evolving technology makes them more useful than ever. They can ease personnel costs, reassure parents who employ baby-sitters and boost security.

Is it any wonder surveillance cameras are tucked away seemingly everywhere?

Recent arrests -- of a photographer accused of videotaping a mother and children changing their clothes, and an airport employee charged with hiding a camera in the women's bathroom -- highlight just how common these devices have become. And just this week, three Nassau women are among five former employees of a Manhasset cardiologist who charged in a suit that he secretly took pictures of them with the video camera.

The decreasing cost of surveillance -- a video system can be installed for under $1,000, and cameras can cost as little $200 -- as well as the simplicity of connecting them to the Internet have driven the cameras' popularity, experts said. An industry group estimates that $3.2 billion was spent on surveillance devices in 2007 -- not including home security. That was a 35 percent increase from 2006 alone.

Surveillance Video Before Lawnmower Theft Examined

Police Say Man Acted Suspiciously Hours Before Theft

Manchester police are looking for a man seen on a surveillance video hours before a $3,000 riding lawnmower was stolen.
Police said the lawnmower was taken from the Sears at the Mall of New Hampshire on Friday morning. Surveillance cameras didn't capture the theft, but they did show a man acting suspiciously the evening before, police said.
"He's in the store at 6:15 on the 14th, and like I said, the crime takes place between 4:30 a.m. and 7:30 a.m. on the 15th." Detective Robert Keating said.
Police said the man shown on the tape had bolt cutters in his pocket and, after taking a look around the store, went to the tool aisle and began sharpening them with a file hanging on the wall.
"It's definitely not normal surveillance, but people do some weird things these days," Keating said.
The surveillance video shows that the man stops filing as another man walks by before continuing. Later, the same man is seen looking at the riding lawnmowers outside. He then walks to a U-Haul van parked in the lot where another person is standing.
"There's a second subject he appears to have a quick conversation with and then leaves the area," Keating said.
Given the type of cable used to tie up the lawnmowers, Keating said a tool like bolt cutters would be needed to steal one.
Police said they hope someone might recognize the man after seeing the video, although they said he hasn't been positively linked to the stolen lawnmower.
Keating said whoever took the orange-colored Husqvarna may be planning to sell it. He said thieves sometimes approach landscapers and offer to sell them the equipment at a discounted rate.
Police said there have been similar crimes in stores in Massachusetts, and they are working with authorities there to see if there is a connection.

How Google put Bill's grief on show

Losing his best friend in a freak boating accident was bad enough.
But Google's Street View has made a bad situation worse for Bill, from Victoria.

Bill - not his real name - had been drowning his sorrows over the weekend after the Friday funeral of his friend and felt worse for wear when a taxi dropped him off at his mother's home early on Monday February 4.

Feeling ill, he lay on the grass, and fell asleep.

The next thing he knew was being woken up by police in the morning.

He wasn't aware that Google's camera-equipped car had driven by earlier and snapped his picture.

Last week when Google launched its Street View tool for Google Maps, that picture was on display for anyone with an internet connection to see. It has since been taken down after it was flagged by users.

Surveillance Improves Teen's Driving Skills

In an age when cameras are everywhere, a national insurance company is using the technology to help make better drivers and to provide parents of teenagers with some peace of mind.

The Teen Safe Driver program, an exclusive program American Family Insurance provides its clients, utilizes an in-car camera to record the behavior of teenage drivers behind the wheel.

Hilliard resident Dennis Williamson said it has vastly improved the driving skills of his daughter, Ameila, the senior class president at Hilliard Darby High School.

"It was a condition we had in order to let her drive again," said Williamson, whose daughter was involved in a single-car accident in the construction zone near Hilliard Crossing Elementary School soon after obtaining her license.

Burglars Captured on Home Surveillance System

Michael Crews doesn't know who broke into his home last weekend, but he knows what they look like after capturing video of the break-in on a home surveillance system.

Crews, who took his daughter to summer camp and was away for the weekend, came home to find a mess in his living room and a shattered window in his son's bedroom.

"(Police) couldn't quite identify what they used to break the window, but it was obvious they used something very heavy because it broke the frame as well," he said.