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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 02, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 22
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Special Features:
CAN GRID-BASED WEBCAMS CONTRIBUTE TO HOMELAND SECURITY?
Jay Walker jump-started an online shopping craze by inventing Priceline.com,
the Web site that lets people bid on airplane tickets and hotel rooms.
Now Walker is hoping his newest brainchild revolutionizes a completely
different field: national security.
The premise behind Walker's USHomeGuard is simple: America has 47,000 power
plants, airports and other "critical infrastructure facilities."
Walker believes a terrorist can get within 100 feet of most of them,
unchallenged and undetected, and kill or injure thousands.
But if onsite cameras beamed photos to the World Wide Web, Americans could
monitor these sites from home. If they spied a potential attacker -- a masked
man trying to scale a power plant fence, or a van parked next to a reservoir -
- they could alert security agents with a click of the mouse. Agents would
call local authorities and help avert disaster.
Walker envisions spotters getting up to $10 per hour, paid by the government
agencies and companies that need protecting. He wants to sell USHomeGuard to
the federal government for $1, then charge fees to run the system.
Critics dismiss USHomeGuard as a doomed scheme that exploits September 11
paranoia. Others question the effectiveness of a security system built on the
Internet -- itself vulnerable to hackers, power outages and congestion.
David Wray, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said federal
officials have not done any "serious evaluation" of the project, adding that
the agency isn't contemplating a defense strategy that hinges on Internet
surveillance.
Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited USHomeGuard's
new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of thousands of Americans
to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs.
"We like to think of USHomeGuard as a digital victory garden," Walker told a
recent tech conference, referring to vegetable patches Americans planted to
help ease food rationing during World War II. "It lets people be part of the
solution."
A new twist
USHomeGuard is a twist on distributed computing, an idea that captured
imaginations in the 1990s, when thousands plugged their PCs into the SETI
project to scour radio telescope signals for extraterrestrial communications.
Walker wants to distribute surveillance across thousands of computers and the
people who use them. He says spotters could register online and get paid for
clicking through photos and sending data back to USHomeGuard's central
database.
The spotters answer a simple question about each image: Does it contain a
person or vehicle? If yes, local authorities could be notified in as little as
30 seconds.
Walker said it's possible to guard against errors and attempts to foil the
system.
For example, as many as one in 10 photos may be traps. If a spotter clicks
"no" on a photo of a masked man airbrushed into a reservoir photo, the
software suspends him for three minutes -- without pay. He must requalify by
clicking correctly through several test photos.
If a spotter clicks "yes" on an unstaged photo, he triggers a first-stage
alert. Software automatically routes the same photo to other spotters, and Web
cams mounted near the site of the potential attack site beam more photos to
more spotters.
Triggering an alert
When many spotters click "yes," they trigger a second-stage alert. Security
supervisors at a data center review photos from all the Web cams and analyze
video from the site.
Supervisors who see a suspicious person can speak to him through the Web cam:
"Why are you approaching the reservoir?"
If the trespasser is toting a rod and says he's going fishing, the agent might
simply ask him to depart. If he doesn't, the security agent may alert local
authorities, who could arrive within minutes, depending on the location.
Walker, who has so far funded USHomeGuard with his own money, says he could
quickly muster the volunteers needed to guard as many as 3,000 sites by the
end of the year.
But it's unclear whether airports, chemical plants and other sites would buy
it. Security experts say recognition software can spot potential attacks more
economically and with more accuracy than thousands of Americans getting paid
$10 per hour.
"Asking people to make a determination of human or not human based on static
images is going to be extremely difficult," said Gary M. Lauder of Atherton,
California-based Lauder Partners, who heard Walker's business pitch in
February. "A computer could probably do a better job."
Is the time right?
Bruce Schneier, co-founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., praised
Walker's fresh approach. But he noted that USHomeGuard could not have
prevented the World Trade Center attacks or the recent spate of overseas
bombings.
"Like every security product, it would do some good against some evil,"
Schneier said. "This has nothing to do with suicide bombers in crowded markets
or airplane terrorists. This would work in no man's land but nowhere else."
Firefighters, police officers and others who investigate scenes worry that
such a system would generate too many false alarms and require computer
upgrades and extra employees.
Capt. Joe Carrillo of the San Jose Fire Department, which protects dozens of
technology and defense laboratories in Silicon Valley is bothered by the
expense.
He said California's worst budget crisis in a generation will doom the idea.
"People get suspicious easily, and this could quadruple our call volume,"
Carrillo said. "The idea is really good. But the timing is really bad."
For more information, see USHomeguard.org
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