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12 July 1997: Link to Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization (OLETC)
5 July 1997
Source:
http://www.fbi.gov/leb/aprl963.txt
Thanks to LT
See 1972-96 history of surveillance technology: https://cryptome.org/esnoop.htm
April 1996
The New Horizon
By The Rome Laboratory Law Enforcement Technology Team
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Members of the Rome Laboratory Law Enforcement Technology Team--John Ritz, Donald Spector, Joe Camera, Fred Demma, and Warren Debany--collaborated on this article, with the assistance of Rome Laboratory researchers Wayne Bonser, Hunter Chilton, Ed Cupples, Dave Ferris, Paul Gilgallen, Joseph Horner, Robert Kaminski, John Mucks, Paul Pellegrini, Antonette Pettinato, Fred Rahrig, Lee Uvanni, Bill Wolf, and Frank Zawislan.
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(The Rome Laboratory, which has spent 40 years developing technologies for the U.S. military, is now applying its expertise to law enforcement as well.)
In the wake of the Cold War, America's attention has shifted from military threats abroad to threats posed by criminals at home. As violence proliferates on city streets and in rural towns, society is seeking better ways to stop it. Adding more police officers to department rosters and implementing numerous social and economic programs constitute some of the current methods of addressing the crime problem.
The Government Technology Transfer Program[1] has made another promising approach available to law enforcement. This initiative enables Department of Defense and commercial organizations to work together to assist law enforcement through the application of defense-related technology.
As part of this initiative, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) operates the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center (NLECTC),[2] as well as four regional technology centers across the country. These regional centers use existing facilities and resources to provide specialty support to NIJ's Office of Science and Technology and to the law enforcement and corrections field. Each center has a specific technological focus.
Rome Laboratory hosts the Northeast Regional Center. For more than 40 years, Rome Laboratory has developed the technologies that have provided the vital eyes, ears, and voices for the American military. This article describes some of the defense technologies being converted for law enforcement uses by this regional center.
Law enforcement and defense missions share similar concerns and strategies. A key concept in the defense community is command, control, communications, and intelligence, known collectively as C3I. C3I includes a broad range of techniques and technologies that increase the effectiveness of a deployed force. It enables troops to perform operations more rapidly and safely and allows actions to be contained within a desired area or to a specific group of combatants. Command and control, the first two components of C3I, address resource allocation and general mission planning--aspects shared by most law enforcement operations. As forces execute the plan, commanders monitor progress and issue corrective orders to deal with the changing scenario.
The intelligence aspect of C3I refers to covertly acquiring, cataloging, and using relevant information about the enemy or its environment. In a military scenario, intelligence could include maps, pictures, or the results of interviews. For law enforcement, it also could encompass street maps, train station locations, pictures of known suspects, fingerprint files, or any other information that might provide a clue or help to determine an optimum course of action.
Closely related to intelligence is surveillance, which the military most often uses to identify both hostile and friendly forces. A radar or multispectral device used to detect an airborne threat would be one type of surveillance sensor. Law enforcement applications could include video cameras for street surveillance and multifrequency sensors for contraband detection.
The final element of C3I is communications, the infrastructure that ties everything together. Anything related to the exchange of information falls into this category, such as computer links, printed text, voice transmissions, photographs, and other imagery, to name a few.
The parallels between the military C3I concept and a similar law enforcement C3I concept easily can be recognized. Law enforcement applications include, for example, riot control, mission planning, timely decisionmaking, covert surveillance, and illegal drug interdiction. As more and more law enforcement agencies with adjacent or overlapping jurisdictions join forces to combat crime, C3I technologies will become particularly useful for coordinating activities and making the most effective use of resources.
A good plan can make all the difference in whether an operation succeeds or fails. Similarly, having the pertinent facts about a situation and its participants affects the decisionmaking process. Law enforcement commanders can take advantage of this to ensure that they have access to the information they need to control their operations effectively.
Planning Complex Operations
Many law enforcement operations, such as installing listening devices pursuant to a court order or responding to a widespread civil disturbance, require coordination among commanders at multiple locations or even in other governmental agencies. A distributed collaborative planning (DCP) process can make strategic deployment and crisis management tasks easier.
In the DCP process, "distributed" means that it links commanders at multiple locations and enables them to share data, software decision models, and other information on a real-time basis. "Collaborative" indicates that planners communicate with each other via digital video teleconferences and shared computer "desktops" and databases, passing textual, verbal, and pictorial information to one another instantly.
Having a DCP capability allows police commanders to coordinate activities and responsibilities among agencies and response teams and to distribute imagery, including surveillance and suspect photographs, and other information as the situation unfolds. For example, headquarters personnel, en route response cars, helicopters, and other field units responding to a civil disturbance could share up-to-date, as well as archived, information drawn from diverse locations, both prior to and during operations. Each unit in the operation could provide real-time situation reports and work through problems as they developed.
Sharing Information About Offenders
The inability to access critical information about offenders quickly and accurately represents a significant hindrance to law enforcement today. Traditionally, law enforcement agencies have developed information systems peculiar to their unique needs, making multimedia information sharing among agencies nearly impossible. Joint automated booking stations (JABS), originally a DEA-Rome Laboratory pilot project in the Miami area, help overcome this obstacle by enabling the five Federal law enforcement agencies in the region[3] to share information more effectively.
JABS combines multimedia information systems, image- and text-oriented databases, image exploitation (enhancing images for identification, detection, and dissemination), and multisource fusion (combining information from many sources). Using computer workstations installed in each agency, agents can share unified text, photograph, and fingerprint information through a centralized database. Each workstation consists of an IBM-compatible computer, a digital video camera, a live-scan fingerprint system, and both black-and-white and color printers. A system administrator manages the centralized database and provides round-the-clock, on-call assistance to the agencies should any problem arise.
The shared data encompass prisoner case information, biographical statistics, voice prints, and images, such as facial photographs, fingerprints, and pictures of evidence. Eventually, advanced signal and image exploitation capabilities will enhance the system's ability to identify subjects using speaker identification, facial recognition, and fingerprint matching. This electronic booking process will replace the former paper method of booking arrests, although a printout of arrest information can be made. System designers project that JABS will reduce the time it takes to process prisoners by 75 percent, significantly cut the number of fingerprint cards rejected by the FBI, improve the quality of prisoner photographs, and make it easier to access information.
Intelligence on suspects, victims, and crime trends constitutes a critical law enforcement resource. A number of technological capabilities can make it easier to obtain and analyze intelligence information.
Speech-Related Capabilities
Many aspects of intelligence gathering revolve around monitoring conversations or coordinating complex operations using voice links among operatives. The needs for high sound quality and the capability to identify and understand speakers have led to the development of several speech-related capabilities.
Enhancing Voice Transmissions
Noise and other types of interference often make it difficult to understand what people say during phone, radio, or other voice transmissions. Speech enhancement technology, currently used in military operations to clean up noisy radio communications, reduces noise and interference and enables users to recover conversations that would otherwise be unintelligible. In airborne operations, the equipment is on a 6" x 9" printed circuit card; it also comes in a 19" rack-mountable box or as a software package for operation on a personal computer with a co-processor.
Speech enhancement technology offers several benefits. It works in real time with only a 200 millisecond processing delay. It reduces interference caused by a variety of equipment, atmospheric conditions, and other sources, including receivers, wire and radio links, tape recorders, automobile ignitions, and power-line hums. It has been used to recover conversations lost due to low-level recordings, malfunctioning equipment, environmental noise, and ground loop connections. Voice transmissions can be recovered using this enhancement process regardless of the language or dia-lect being spoken or the person talking.
Identifying Speakers
Automatic speaker identification technology determines the identity of the speaker in a live or taped conversation. Speakers can be identified with as little as 4 seconds of their speech used to characterize the voice for comparison. Identification does not depend on the language or dialect the person uses or which words are spoken. Identification decisions can be made using as little as one word (approximately one-third of a second).
Currently only available in a laboratory setting, the military uses this technology to identify speakers on a military communication network where the communications have been recorded. A field version will be available in 1996. Law enforcement agencies could use automated speaker identification technology in a number of ways, such as tracking individuals using wire or cellular phones, recording and identifying suspects in wire-tapping and other monitoring operations, and using voiceprints for police sorting and booking operations.
Translating Spoken Conversations
Machine voice translation equipment takes in spoken voice in one language and translates it to another language. It provides the results in printed text or in audible spoken language form. As with automated speaker identification, the system does not depend on the speaker.
Three components operate the translation system--a commercial word recognizer, a personal computer that acts as a translator and system manager, and a voice synthesizer. Currently, it translates only Spanish and English in limited applications, but researchers are developing several other language translations. Police departments in localities that have a large Spanish-speaking population would have an immediate interest in this techno
