As homeland security concerns have escalated, so has the popularity of surveillance technologies. In a recent interview with GlobalPOV, Mr. Bill Green—CEO of VistaScape—tells us more about what companies are doing to protect critical assets, and how surveillance technologies have progressed from a technological standpoint.

GlobalPOV: What does your technology do?
BG: Vistascape offers software that provides complete situational awareness in an area under surveillance. We take information from any kind of sensor—video cameras, infrared cameras, radar, sonar, GPS, RF transceivers, etc.–and send that data into a single relational database and propagate that data onto a 2-D or 3-D visualization of the area under surveillance.

You can think of it as a poor man’s satellite system for protection of high value assets and high risk areas.

Part of where the technology is going is that over time, people we partner with will be adding things like biometrics, facial recognition, fingerprint recognition at the entrance to buildings – maybe even outside of buildings -- trying to track who’s going by and seeing if they’ve gone by more than once or twice. We throw that data into our database -- who that person is, including a picture of them – and then if they’ve come by three times and we don’t know who they are, we’ll go find out if it looks like their scoping out the building.

GlobalPOV: High risk areas would include borders?
BG: The typical places would include borders, airports, military bases, pipelines, critical infrastructures such as nuclear power plants, communications hubs – those types of things.

GlobalPOV: So tell us a little bit about the days when you had all these disparate systems. What type of information was getting lost, and why does it make sense to have a centralized platform?
BG: Well essentially, the only information that people had was information that was time-stamped video tapes or DVR recordings – and they’d throw them away after a week if nothing happened. What we provide is information about everything that’s happened in the area of surveillance – the size and type of objects, the traffic that’s gone by the facility – and if there’s a way to identify who’s going where, we provide that information as well on our database. So we don’t ever lose this historical information, and it can be used for pattern and trend analysis. Where should I deploy my guards between 2:00 and 4:00 on Saturdays in July? There’s no way to know that information, unless the guard happens to remember. We keep that data forever. The difference between our system and traditional systems that are somewhat privacy-friendly is that we don’t actually send back video tape or record video from these cameras unless there’s an alarm triggered, and the user defines the rules that trigger alarms. So anything involving space and time can trigger an alarm with our system just through the single user interface. Say you want to know if a large truck stops in a circle, for example – that will trigger an alarm if that happens. Otherwise, no video is sent back to the central station.

GlobalPOV: How have the attitudes changed since September 11? You’re in a lot of conversations with prospective customers and people that are looking closely at their internal policies and practices. What are their greatest fears right now? Do you think there’s any paranoia that’s unjustified?
BG: To be honest with you, I don’t think people are paranoid enough. Some of the places we go to, you can literally just walk up and blow it up – say a power supply that supplies 20% of a state’s power. We’ve seen the level of sophistication and planning that these terrorists have. People can clearly bring that kind of sophistication to bear in the future—even if it’s not Al-Qaida—and we could be in a serious world of hurt if we don’t start to wake up. You’re not able to walk up to places like that in Europe and the rest of the world. Here we’ve been very relaxed about that sort of thing, and I don’t think we’re near paranoid enough.

GlobalPOV: Are there any potential privacy implications with these systems?
BG: When you talk about corporations, they’re going to want to avoid any kind of conflict. I think that people are prepared to make the right decision with respect to what to do with the information they gather, and not share it. When you’re talking about the protection of physical assets, you don’t really have a lot of information about the people walking around the environment. So I don’t see this in the same way as you’d consider people’s information – over the Internet – that corporations can share and make money from. Privacy advocates seem to be mostly concerned about this, or just other people knowing their information. All the people in my industry are trying to do is protect physical assets, or protect people. I’m not sure I see a conflict, because we can’t gather information unless people come to the place we’re trying to protect.

GlobalPOV: So is the person in question typically trespassing?
BG: That’s partly true. Most of our configurations end up looking outside the boundaries of the areas we’re protecting. With our system, unless they were to do something to come over the boundary, it would never be recorded and sent back to the main office for action. So it would just happen and there’d be no history of it.

GlobalPOV: Can you talk in a general way about some of the concern areas that haven’t been adequately addressed?
BG: I wouldn’t want to say with respect to any particular industry. It’s hard for me to answer that question, other than to say that nuclear power plants are probably some of the most secured assets we have. But if you move away from that category, there are chemical plants, oil pipelines, and gas pipelines that people can just literally walk up to. The only thing standing between them and, say, a military base or chemical facility, are the woods or a chain link fence, or one guard standing there at 4:00 in the morning. And there’s no organized plan to get the information about what’s happening at one facility up to anybody in authority that could know that there’s a threat happening at 5 different places across the country that would raise the alarm everywhere. There’s no way that information gets coordinated and sent up the line—to, say, the Homeland Defense organization—so that they could send every sheriff in every little county out to every station that’s being attacked at that time. There’s just no coordination of information at all. There would be five different things happening and no one in the federal government would know about it until the next morning. And that’s the big piece that’s missing – is the coordination of all this information. There’s an economist who predicts that in order to get this done, security and surveillance would have to become a permanent 3-4% of our Gross Domestic Product, which is obviously a huge number.

GlobalPOV: Do you see more relationships between private companies and the government working together to head off national security issues? Is there going to be more give and take between those two separate worlds?
BG: There has to be, or we can’t be successful at this. We’re getting sophisticated people who are coming after us who do coordinated attacks at roughly the same time. Somebody with a lot of authority has to know immediately when that happens across the country at different places. What wehave now, and I use the military term, are “stove pipe systems” – there may be a local security system, but it’s a bunch of coaxial cables and video monitors. And local guards will call the local sheriff, and it’s going to take a long time for that information to get to the proper place with any kind of coordinated threat.

GlobalPOV: Taking a step back from your specific technologies, where do you think this is all headed in terms of the tradeoff between national security and privacy? There seems to be a lot of infrastructure being laid down. Is it possible that when the terrorist threat goes away, we have systems in place that could have some concerning implications?
BG: I don’t think so, because I don’t think this type of technology is being created to spy on the ordinary citizen. I think it’s there to protect physical assets and the folks that work at those facilities. Our security is too critical an issue for us not to pay attention to it. If you look at the level of security that exists in London—you can’t walk a street there without a security camera on the corner monitoring everything that’s going on. We’re not talking about doing that in this country—we’re talking about trying to protect our critical assets and the people that live and work around there. I think people are willing to trade a reasonable amount of privacy when they’re near those critical installations, so that they can be protected while they’re there. I think of it that way.

GlobalPOV: Would you say that people responsible for those locations have a greater responsibility to the citizens in that area? A major catastrophe at a major power plant isn’t going to affect just the people in that immediate vicinity…
BG: Right…it’s going to affect the whole region.

GlobalPOV: So do you think there might be some more regulations passed down – more requirements for more security.
BG: I think the government is going to start coming out with more recommendations for security for all sorts of industries – electricity, oil and gas, chemical, power plants, things like that. I do, and that’s happening right now. But it will be a long time before those get down to industry, and then it’s a question of who’s going to pay for it. So it will be many years before we move on protecting our assets the way I think they need to be protected today.

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