Three days before the Super Bowl, Joseph Atick says, he had to punt. His software company, Visionics Corp had arranged to deploy a security program powerful enough to scan the faces of every one of the 75,000 people who would walk into Tampa's Raymond James Stadium, then match them against a database of criminals and suspected terrorists to alert authorities.
The capability had drawn interest from the Tampa police to the FBI. But Atick worried about a backlash because of growing public unease about high-tech surveillance. Atick said he called employees off the job when police wouldn't announce their use of Visionics software before the game on Jan. 28. "We have to make sure the public doesn't think there's a covert operation, or some kind of conspiracy to watch them," he recalled.
Police instead tried out a competing surveillance-software package from Viisage Technology Inc of Littleton, with the result Atick feared. Allies as unlikely as the American Civil Liberties Union and Republican House majority leader Dick Armey jointly denounced the "snooperbowl," which they said created a "virtual lineup" of innocent Americans.
The outcry might seem like vindication for Atick. But to privacy advocates, he's hardly a folk hero. His company has returned to Tampa, analyzing images from another network of cameras set up along public streets and drawing much the same criticism. Lately his critics have included Viisage chief executive Thomas Colatosti, who claims his own company has grown more sensitive to privacy matters.
Atick allies say Colatosti is full of sour grapes for losing the Tampa street project. Colatosti responds, "This is like Spy vs. Spy, and we're the good guys!"
Arguments over police use of new technologies are increasing as tools like infrared telescopes and e-mail wiretaps become more accessible to local agencies. But rarely has an issue been shaped by a competition as fierce as that between the two facial-recognition software firms, Viisage and Visionics, of Jersey City, New Jersey. In an unusual twist, each company claims to be a champion of privacy. And each suggests its rival is deaf to such concerns.
Actually, says the Tampa police detective who oversees the facial-recognition project, neither company expressed many privacy concerns until the post-game controversy blew up. The detective, Bill Todd, says the current Visionics project on Tampa's streets only makes better use of surveillance cameras that had already been installed several years ago along the city's Ybor City nightlife district, to few objections. Why undertake the facial-recognition project in the first place? "It was easy to interface the software," Todd explained.
The experience in Florida illustrates how, absent a legal consensus on use of many new search tools, a technology was able to jump rapidly from an obscure corner of military-and-security research into the arsenal of a metropolitan police force.
The new software is part of a burgeoning field known as "biometrics," or the digital analysis of biological characteristics. Since 2000, the two companies have gone nose-to-nose pitching their systems to casinos, retailers and foreign airports, and some analysts expect the industry could be worth $1 billion a year soon.
But even some Visionics business partners like Polaroid Corp. worry the software isn't right for public settings. On one hand, the Supreme Court has declined to offer many prohibitions against how people might be observed outside their homes. While the Fourth Amendment guards against "unreasonable searches and seizures," the court wrote in a 1967 case that right cannot be translated into a general constitutional "right to privacy."
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