Professor Elam

Thursday Sept 8, 2016

Ross McNutt is working his latest project in Baltimore, Maryland. His company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, has been photographing a 30 square mile radius continuously since January using a special Cessna fitted with a 192-million-megapixel camera setup. That’s the equivalent of 800 video cameras live streaming to his downtown office, where the heavy lifting occurs.

A team of analysts using the video data and police scanners follow crimes in real time. They watch activity, follow assailants and vehicles as they leave the scene. McNutt jokes the software is like “Google Earth Live with Tivo” because his team can determine both where the bad guys go, and where they came from. The only thing left to do is a detailed report delivered to the police.

This is not a new idea. McNutt, an MIT trained physicist and aeronautical engineer designed the program for the Pentagon to watch the dangerous streets of Iraq. Later, Persistent Surveillance would have limited stints in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Compton, Charlotte, Nogales and Torreon, Mexico. The latest Baltimore project is special because it’s a return engagement.

That’s the key. Increasingly, elected officials are turning toward more surveillance as the solution to crime and terror threats despite obvious objection from civil libertarian groups like the ACLU. Manhattan now has more than 4,000 closed circuit television cameras. The New York Police Department generates one million hours of video footage just from police body cameras. And advances in video analytics due to machine learning is making all of that data actionable.