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.
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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."
The same ruling, on the other hand, also noted that the Fourth Amendment "protects people, not places." That suggests some protections against government searches might even extend to public areas, said Sheldon Krantz, an attorney who is leading an American Bar Association study of surveillance issues. Also, some state constitutions make a right to privacy more explicit.
Given all the uncertainty, both Viisage and Visionics lately have been calling attention to the potential for abuse. Visionics says clear legal standards are needed to limit use of its programs, and notes that it created an industry trade group several years ago to promote such standards. For his part, Viisage's Colatosti has been circulating an essay that describes the use of scanning technology in neighborhoods like Ybor City a "type of technological tyranny [that] can create a siege mentality, violate our right to privacy and could impinge on our ability to freely travel without being monitored."
It started with a police moonlighting gig. A company known as Graphco Technologies Inc needed around-the-clock watchmen for a data-processing center it operates in Tampa, part of a network for secure transmission of criminal records and other sensitive documents between police departments.
Detective Todd, who sold computers before joining the police force, signed up for the guard duty as a part-time second job. He grew intrigued by Graphco's connections to both Viisage and Visionics, whose software it resold for use in private settings.
At first Graphco supplied Todd's department with programs from Visionics, a company founded by Atick and several fellow mathematicians from Rockefeller University in New York in 1994.
Somewhat like its competitors Viisage and AcSys Biometrics Corp of Toronto, Visionics software generates digital maps of the faces of people passing by the cameras, then uses mathematical formulas to compare certain characteristics, such as the distance between the pupils, to a database of stored images. Buyers include Polaroid, which uses Visionics software algorithms in its driver's-license unit in West Virginia to deter people from obtaining duplicate IDs under false names.
When clients are asked to stand in front of a camera so their faces can be checked against a database of existing license-holders, "we get a lot of people running out the door," said John Munday, vice president of the Polaroid unit.
Visionics was also streetwise. For several years, the company has supplied its programs to authorities in London's Newham district, a legally simpler task since the United Kingdom has fewer restrictions on police searches. Local officials credit the software with reducing crime, though other factors may have contributed as well.
In Tampa, Todd arranged to link Visionics software to the Ybor City cameras in late 2000, initially comparing passersby to a database filled with photos of police-department volunteers and software engineers. But the approaching Super Bowl seemed like a perfect demonstration event for the technology, Graphco executives recall.
Hodge said he and the others decided to switch to the software package from Viisage. Viisage offered some technical advantages over Visionics, he said, when analyzing faces in poorly-lit settings, as would be the case at the stadium's entrance gates. Todd says the selection of a software vendor was Graphco's call and privacy concerns were not a factor. He doesn't remember Atick or anyone else asking him to announce use of the software before the game. "Joseph never expressed those concerns to me," Todd said.
Atick says he simply told his local representatives they couldn't install the software without the announcement, which he said there wasn't time to arrange. He disputes the contention by Colatosti and Hodge that Visionics lost the contract.
Whatever the case, the football game clearly presented a big showcase opportunity for Viisage, and the company saw it as part of a recovery strategy. Viisage, created as a spinoff from defense contractor Lau Technologies, initially found some success making driver's licenses and voter-ID cards, lines that still account for 85 percent of its revenue. But it lost money in 1997, 1998 and 1999, as it bid too aggressively for contracts.
Colatosti, a veteran of Digital Equipment Corp., was made Viisage's chief executive and took on the task of developing new markets for facial-recognition software tools initially developed by a MIT professor, Alex Pentland. Looking for more sales to the private sector, Viisage still touts its Super Bowl role and even included a photo of the game on the cover of its annual report.
Following the criticism, Colatosti said, he decided to pull back. He said he passed up the chance to use the software with the Ybor City cameras after the game, calling the setting inappropriate. (Atick and Todd say Viisage lost that contract on technical grounds.) Colatosti said he also turned down requests from other towns, including Virginia Beach, Virginia, looking to use his software to scan public settings.
He said he hopes to drum up more sales to private-sector users like retailers, looking to catch shoplifters, and banks. The software might be more appropriate in some public settings like airports and stadiums if properly disclosed, Colatosti said.
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