Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Chicago residents are no strangers to the city’s many CCTV cameras by this point — if anyone knows exactly how long to stop at Roosevelt and State to avoid the red-light cam there, you let us know, okay? — but it looks like this summer is going to bring a new twist to the city’s surveillance racket: automated camera monitoring. Video from the several thousand cameras in Chicago’s Operation Virtual Shield project currently comes into the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communication’s ops center, but starting this summer, it’ll also be watched by an IBM-developed autonomous system that can be programmed to watch for specific activities or objects, like certain cars or unattended backpacks. Since the video is stored on a 60TB storage array for 30 days, law enforcement can also do retroactive searches using the tech. That’s a huge step up from San Francisco’s useless CCTV system, sure, but we’ve never really believed any of this stuff is actually effective at deterring crime — hopefully we’ll be proven wrong. Check out the the full news vid at the read link.

[Via Boing Boing]

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