Fighting Crime From Above?

Five months ago, a mentally disturbed man entered Laguardia Airport with a fake bomb attached to his body. The security officers tackled and subdued the wanne-be terrorist and then looked for the footage from the surveillance camera.  It turns out the groggy cameras were broken, pointing the wrong direction, or had very grainy footage.  Oy! Well, at least we all learned from this situation, right Newark Airport?

From the NY Times:

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey's U.S. senators slammed federal authorities Wednesday over a security breach at Newark Liberty International Airport over the weekend and called for upgrades to surveillance camera systems and better training and accountability for security officers.

At a news conference in a terminal adjacent to the one that was shut down for six hours Sunday night, Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg and Rep. Donald Payne used terms like "major negligence" and "management failure" to describe the incident, in which an unidentified man entered Terminal C through an exit door and was not seen by the Transportation Security Administration officer assigned to the area.

The breach exposed flaws at three levels: at the exit, where the security officer failed to see the man entering a secure area; the subsequent discovery that security cameras weren't working properly and hadn't been storing images, and a resulting delay of about an hour before law enforcement authorities were notified, after TSA officials viewed images recorded on cameras owned by Continental Airlines.

Menendez called it "unfathomable" that the recording system wasn't already being checked routinely and suggested a system that would provide a warning when it stopped recording.

"There clearly are innovations that exist that will set off an alarm if your system shuts off," he said. "You shouldn't depend on whether or not there's a security guard checking every hour on the hour — what if in the interim there was a failure of the system?"

In a statement, the TSA said it was working with the Port Authority "to ensure consistent performance and confirm operational readiness" of the camera system.

Senators, I have the solution and it's rather easy: regulate all surveillance technology.

By regulating surveillance technologies, standards could be set regarding minimal technology effectiveness standards.  These standards would include: resolution rates, storage retention thresholds, the use of video analytics in specific camera contexts like airport terminals.  If government doesn't  begin to regulate these devices, we'll end up like the U.K. – millions of useless cameras where it takes an average of 1,000 cameras to solve one crime.