Face to Face with Big Brother.(government and security company joints efforts to spy on you)(Brief Article)

Big Brother has found another ally within private industry. Or so it would seem in light of recent developments regarding the use of surveillance cameras in Tampa, Florida, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. As noted in "Just Face It, You're on Candid Camera!" in the August 27th "Insider Report" column, a system of closed circuit television cameras with links to computerized face recognition software is undergoing trial usage in these two cities. Dubbed "FaceIt," the system can find matches between the images gathered by the cameras and the faces stored in a database of known criminal offenders. But it is the link between the manufacturer of the system, Visionics Corporation, and the U.S. military's secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that may prove to be a match made in 1984 -- George Orwell's, that is.

On August 2nd, the International Herald Tribune lifted the veil off Big Brother by reporting that DARPA granted Visionics a $2 million contract last November as part of the agency's "Human ID at a Distance Program." Also referred to as the "HumanID Program," the DARPA website lists the following mission statement: "Develop multi-mode surveillance technologies for identifying humans at a distance in order to enhance the protection of ...