Senior thesis: Watching technology

Princeton NJ -- Sept. 11 heightened our nation's fears about terrorism and increased our longing for technologies that would improve security. Fortuitously, several companies were already working on a possible savior: face-recognition technology, which uses video surveillance to examine the images of human faces in an effort to nab criminals.

Adam Dressner looked at the technological and social sides of video surveillance

Adam Dressner '02 has studied that technology since last year, when police in Tampa, Fla., installed several dozen cameras on the streets of one neighborhood in an effort to find criminals. "It was heralded as one of the great policing tools," said Dressner, who wrote his senior thesis for the Woodrow Wilson School on face-recognition technology. The technology captured images on video that were cross-referenced with a database of photographs to single out people who were crime suspects.

But the technology had one major glitch, Dressner discovered. It didn't work.

"You can very easily trick the system by changing your appearance," Dressner said. Wearing glasses, donning a mustache or exhibiting the effects of aging can throw the system off. During a six-week period when it was used in Tampa, the technology never produced a correct identification of a face in its database, though it did generate several false matches a day, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Among the system's errors was mistaking a man for a woman. "In a setting like a city street, it probably won't work for a very long time, if at all," said Dressner.

In addition to examining whether the technology was effective, Dressner studied the social costs of this kind of surveillance. "It's subtly changing the nature of public space. That's the creepiness factor here," said Dressner, who, having grown up in Manhattan, believes the anonymity of walking down a city street should be preserved. Having such cameras hovering over streets could discourage people from participating in political activities such as attending rallies, Dressner pointed out.

Some critics believe the technology could promote racial profiling, and "everybody from people in industry to civil libertarians agrees it needs to be regulated by the government," said Dressner, who thinks the technology should probably be regulated at the state level.

Faculty member Stanley Katz, who supervised Dressner's thesis, was impressed by his student's sophisticated thinking. "He has done innovative work on the technological side and on the constitutional side; it's unusual for a student to work those two sides of the street at the same time," said Katz, who is lecturer with the rank of professor in public and international affairs.

And he has distinguished himself by making discoveries in a field in which few scholars are well-versed. "As far as I know, he's one of the few people working on the problem from a social science point of view," said Katz.

Dressner said he may continue to study the topic next year, since the technology has not received much scrutiny so far. Now that his thesis is finished, Dressner is busy working on some video surveillance of his own: He is making a film of a short screenplay he wrote, which stars his classmates. But don't worry they know they're being videotaped.

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