[wordup] survelience goes wrong ...

[Adam Shand]

Via: Cory <cory at spack.org>
From: http://www.sptimes.com/News/080801/TampaBay/_They_made_me_feel_li.shtml

They made me feel like a criminal
By AMY HERDY
St. Petersburg Times,
August 8, 2001

TAMPA -- Rob Milliron has never married. He has never had kids, never been
to Oklahoma.

Yet three Tampa police officers went to Milliron's construction job site
Monday and asked him whether he was wanted in Oklahoma for child neglect.

Milliron It seems that his face wound up on a surveillance camera in Ybor
City. News cameras captured that image. A woman in Tulsa saw his picture
in U.S. News and World Report and called Tampa police.

She said the man in the photo was her ex-husband and was wanted on felony
child neglect charges.

Turns out they had the wrong man. But the experience has turned Milliron
into a vocal critic of the controversial surveillance system.

"From that picture, I was identified as a wanted person," said Milliron,
32, whose only previous brush with the law involved a marijuana possession
charge when he was 19.

The surveillance system uses software called Face-It and is linked to 36
cameras throughout the Centro Ybor entertainment complex and along E
Seventh Avenue. Images taken from the cameras are compared with a data
base that includes wanted felons and sexual offenders.

If the image is a match, officers are dispatched to question the person.
But in this case it wasn't the system that flagged Milliron, but simply a
woman who saw his picture with a news story.

The plainclothes detective, accompanied by two uniformed officers, had a
copy of the magazine, folded open to the page with Milliron's photo.

After producing identification, answering the detective's questions and
enduring curious stares and inquiries from his construction co-workers, a
mortified Milliron went home.

"He was absolutely horrified," said Cheryl Toole, 32, Milliron's
girlfriend of nine years.

"He said, "I was surrounded by the police today,' " Toole recalled. "We
were worried they'd come to our home in the middle of the night."

Equally upsetting, Milliron said, was the fact that beneath his photo in
the magazine, a headline read, "You Can't Hide Those Lying Eyes in Tampa."

"It made me out to be a criminal," he said.

Tampa police Detective Bill Todd, who took the call from the Tulsa woman
and interviewed Milliron, said Milliron did not seem upset.

"He was laughing about it," said Todd, who spearheaded the software
project that captured Milliron's image.

Milliron's photograph was captured in June while he was on a lunch break
in Ybor City.

He didn't know it at the time, but the Police Department used his photo to
demonstrate the system to local news media.

The software costs $30,000, but is on loan for a year by its owner,
Visionics Corp. of New Jersey, while the department decides whether to
purchase it.

Milliron's photo ran in the St. Petersburg Times June 30. A caption under
the photo read, "The man in this image was not identified as wanted."

The Times later sold the photo to U.S. News and World Report.

The software system has sparked controversy nationwide. Protesters say the
"spy cameras" intrude on citizens' privacy. Mayor Dick Greco, however, has
said the system is no more intrusive than the cameras found in banks and
shopping malls.

Milliron, who says he plans to retain an attorney, hopes the software
system will be removed.

"I don't think it's right," he said. "They made me feel like a criminal."

Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
Amy Herdy can be reached at (813) 226-3386 or herdy at sptimes.com.