SNOOPER BOWL
By BOB KAPPSTATTER
(from the N.Y. Daily News, 2/2/2001)
Cops turned last Sunday's big football matchup in
Tampa into the Snooper Bowl.
Using a high-tech surveillance tool, they optically
scanned each face in the crowd of 100,000 Giants and
Ravens fans to look for wanted criminals, known pick-
pockets and possible terrorists seeking to target a
particularly symbolic -- and crowded -- American event.
The Big Brother "computerized police lineup" has
some civil-rights activists outraged, and a furor was
growing today over the tactic. Police responded by
saying the goal was to stop trouble before it started,
not to invade privacy.
The computerized system was capable of matching
images to a database of known crooks within seconds,
allowing cops to identify suspicious characters and
watch them with video cameras until officers could
respond and intercept them, police said.
No arrests using the system were made.
The American Civil Liberties Union demanded that
Tampa city officials hold public hearings to answer
questions about the operation at Raymond James
Stadium, which authorities called a test for future uses.
The surveillance raised serious questions about
possible violations of fans' constitutional right to
freedom from "unreasonable searches and seizures,"
the ACLU said in a letter to Tampa Mayor Dick
Greco yesterday.
"This was essentially a computerized police lineup,"
said Florida ACLU director Howard Simon.
"I don't think the issue of privacy is in question,"
Tampa police spokesman Joe Durkin said. "Clearly
the courts have ruled that there is no expectation of
privacy in a public setting like this."
The video system, designed by Pennsylvania-based
Graphco Technologies Inc., uses biometric technology
to compare facial features -- such as the size of a nose,
the set of a brow or the cut of a jaw -- with images in
a database.
The Super Bowl test project compared images from
the video cameras to a relatively small database of
about 1,700 faces assembled from FBI and police files.
The database included criminals ranging from pick-
pockets to domestic terrorists.
Signs outside the stadium warned fans that they
were under video surveillance, police said.