The Associated Press State & Local Wire
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May 24, 2003, Saturday, BC cycle
SECTION: Business News; State and Regional
LENGTH: 929 words
HEADLINE: Priceline.com founder envisions a nation of Web cam watchers guarding homeland
BYLINE: By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Business Writer
DATELINE: SAN JOSE, Calif.
BODY:
Jay
Walker jump-started an online shopping craze by inventing Priceline.com,
the Web site that lets people bid on airplane tickets and hotel rooms.
Now Walker is hoping his newest brainchild revolutionizes a completely different field: national security.
The premise behind Walker's USHomeGuard is simple: America has 47,000 power plants, airports and other "critical infrastructure facilities."
Walker believes a terrorist can get within 100 feet of most of them, unchallenged and undetected, and kill or injure thousands.
But
if onsite cameras beamed photos to the World Wide Web, Americans could monitor
these sites from home. If they spied a potential attacker - a masked man
trying to scale a power plant fence, or a van parked next to a reservoir
- they could alert security agents with a click of the mouse. Agents would
call local authorities and help avert disaster.
Walker
envisions spotters getting up to $10 per hour, paid by the government agencies
and companies that need protecting. He wants to sell USHomeGuard to the federal government for $1, then charge fees to run the system.
Critics dismiss USHomeGuard
as a doomed scheme that exploits Sept. 11 paranoia. Others question the effectiveness
of a security system built on the Internet - itself vulnerable to hackers,
power outages and congestion.
David Wray, spokesman
for the Department of Homeland Security, said federal officials have not
done any "serious evaluation" of the project, adding that the agency isn't
contemplating a defense strategy that hinges on Internet surveillance.
Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited USHomeGuard's
new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of thousands of Americans
to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs.
"We like to think of USHomeGuard
as a digital victory garden," Walker told a recent tech conference, referring
to vegetable patches Americans planted to help ease food rationing during
World War II. "It lets people be part of the solution."
USHomeGuard
is a twist on distributed computing, an idea that captured imaginations in
the 1990s, when thousands plugged their PCs into the SETI project to scour
radio telescope signals for extraterrestrial communications.
Walker
wants to distribute surveillance across thousands of computers and the people
who use them. He says spotters could register online and get paid for clicking
through photos and sending data back to USHomeGuard's central database.
The
spotters answer a simple question about each image: Does it contain a person
or vehicle? If yes, local authorities could be notified in as little as 30
seconds.
Walker said it's possible to guard against errors and attempts to foil the system.
For
example, as many as one in 10 photos may be traps. If a spotter clicks "no"
on a photo of a masked man airbrushed into a reservoir photo, the software
suspends him for three minutes - without pay. He must requalify by clicking
correctly through several test photos.
If a
spotter clicks "yes" on an unstaged photo, he triggers a first-stage alert.
Software automatically routes the same photo to other spotters, and Web cams
mounted near the site of the potential attack site beam more photos to more
spotters.
When many spotters click "yes," they
trigger a second-stage alert. Security supervisors at a data center review
photos from all the Web cams and analyze video from the site.
Supervisors who see a suspicious person can speak to him through the Web cam: "Why are you approaching the reservoir?"
If
the trespasser is toting a rod and says he's going fishing, the agent might
simply ask him to depart. If he doesn't, the security agent may alert local
authorities, who could arrive within minutes, depending on the location.
Walker, who has so far funded USHomeGuard with his own money, says he could quickly muster the volunteers needed to guard as many as 3,000 sites by the end of the year.
But
it's unclear whether airports, chemical plants and other sites would buy
it. Security experts say recognition software can spot potential attacks
more economically and with more accuracy than thousands of Americans getting
paid $10 per hour.
"Asking people to make a
determination of human or not human based on static images is going to be
extremely difficult," said Gary M. Lauder of Atherton, Calif.-based Lauder
Partners, who heard Walker's business pitch in February. "A computer could
probably do a better job."
Bruce Schneier, co-founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., praised Walker's fresh approach. But he noted that USHomeGuard could not have prevented the World Trade Center attacks or the recent spate of overseas bombings.
"Like
every security product, it would do some good against some evil," Schneier
said. "This has nothing to do with suicide bombers in crowded markets or
airplane terrorists. This would work in no man's land but nowhere else."
Firefighters,
police officers and others who investigate scenes worry that such a system
would generate too many false alarms and require computer upgrades and extra
employees.
Capt. Joe Carrillo of the San Jose
Fire Department, which protects dozens of technology and defense laboratories
in Silicon Valley is bothered by the expense.
He said California's worst budget crisis in a generation will doom the idea.
"People
get suspicious easily, and this could quadruple our call volume," Carrillo
said. "The idea is really good. But the timing is really bad."
--
On the Net:
http://www.ushomeguard.org/
GRAPHIC: AP Photos FX110-111, NY899 of May 22
LOAD-DATE: May 25, 2003