San Francisco - Twitter, which is preparing for its initial public offering, said on Wednesday it will help users receive special alerts from government agencies and aid agencies during emergencies.
Users who sign up will receive smartphone notifications via the Twitter app as well as SMS text messages - assuming they agree to handover their cell phone numbers - from any of several dozen agencies who have signed on to the program.
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency, Tokyo's Disaster Prevention service and the World Health Organization are among those participating.
The alerts program starts a year after Twitter showcased its potential as a lifeline during Hurricane Sandy, when stranded residents on the eastern US seaboard reported the storm's progress and sought help on the mobile network.
A similar lifeline service played a part in the rescue efforts in Japan following the devastating 2011 tsunami, Twitter said. The program is initially available in the United States, Japan and Korea and will be expanded to other countries.
Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator, said the service was at the cutting edge of disaster management in the age of smartphones.
"Today we have a two-way street — residents are informed about hazards in real time and emergency managers receive immediate feedback on the consequences of a disaster," Fugate said in a statement.
The program reflects the evolution of Twitter from its earliest days, when it gained a reputation as a hangout for geeks to share the minute details of their most recent meal or who they encountered at the South by Southwest Festival.
But the crowd-sourced information of today's Twitter has also proved problematic.
Even as the New York City Fire Department used Twitter to communicate with residents during Hurricane Sandy, there were pranksters who spread misinformation on the service, including a rumor that the New York Stock Exchange was submerged underwater.
And in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the name of a missing Brown University student went viral on Twitter after many users, including journalists, mistakenly identified him as a suspect.
Twitter, for its part, has maintained a strictly hands-off attitude toward monitoring its content and denied responsibility for ensuring its accuracy.
Earlier this month, Twitter filed with regulators for an initial public offering. Reuters reported last week that Twitter was in talks looking to add additional banks to its underwriting syndicate.
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| Photograph by Rockstar Games via AP Images |
The release of Grand Theft Auto V yesterday brought to the forefront an apocalyptic scenario. The end-times theme isn’t part of the blockbuster video game’s setting, a fictionalized Los Angeles that’s havoc-filled but otherwise enduring. The apocalypse is part of the non-pixelated reality for gamers living through the final weeks in the eight-year reign of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Later this year, next-generation technology from the two major gaming powers will hit the market and render obsolete the current console, which will be banished en masse to dusty closets and the cluttered shelves of GameStop (GME) outlets. Grand Theft Auto V will likewise become an outmoded relic: Neither the Xbox One nor the PlayStation 4 will be able to run games made for older consoles (at first, anyway).
Rockstar Games (TTWO) reportedly spent $115 million developing Grand Theft Auto V and $150 million on marketing—and the game is expected to make almost six times that much in sales over the course of the first year. So maybe a relatively short shelf life doesn’t matter much. Still, it seems strange to develop the most expensive video game ever for machines that will soon take a major step toward irrelevance.
In part, the decision to build for the old consoles is driven by the fact that game developers have gotten really good at it. Aaron Garbut, the art director at Rockstar North, told BuzzFeed that the studio is just hitting its stride when it comes to using the capabilities of the current consoles to do things like replicate convincing-looking daylight. Dan Houser, co-founder of Rockstar Games, told Famitsumagazine that the best games for a console always come out at the moment before it’s overtaken by newer machines:
The fact that hardware’s so mature right now is exactly why we’re able to go on to the next level. GTA 4 was our first attempt at a new platform and HD visuals, so the first part of development was seriously difficult. Now we know what the hardware’s capable of, so it’s become a lot easier to move things along and a lot more fun, too.
This seems especially plausible given that Grand Theft Auto V has a rating of 98 out of 100 on the game-rating site Metacritic. While the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will be more powerful and include features unavailable on their predecessors, there will also be a learning curve that could go on for several years.
The market for gaming consoles is also relatively friendly to developers who don’t immediately move to the hot new thing. About 150 million current versions of the Xbox and PlayStations have been sold worldwide, and even the most optimistic sales forecasts for the upcoming consoles put them nowhere near those numbers for quite some time. Nor will Microsoft (MSFT) or Sony (SNE) stop selling their old gear. It could be as late as 2015 before annual sales of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 surpass sales of their lower-priced predecessors, according to
Gartner (IT) analyst Brian Blau.
Gartner (IT) analyst Brian Blau.
For the next several years, developers will continue to serve two sets of gamers. “I would expect that we would get one more year out of parallel development, where you will see parallel titles, but after a while the developers will start to see diminishing returns,” Blau says. “I think it’s going to take some time.”
It will take three to four years before the current consoles really become obsolete if the patterns of past cycles continue, and by then sales of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 will likely be slowing down as consumers anticipate the next generation of consoles down the line. That will be just about the time when developers finally start cranking out games that take advantage of the aging technology.
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| President Dilma Rousseff has postponed a visit to the US |
Brazil is considering ways to make local use of the internet less dependent on US-based services, following leaks about Washington's cyberspy operations.
The South American nation has suggested forcing internet firms to open data centres in Brazil, which would be used to store locally generated material.
It is also pursuing a plan to build a new internet cable.
The project would offer a way for data to bypass the US.
Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, has postponed a state visit to Washington after allegations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had targeted her emails and phone calls.
It has also been alleged that the NSA hacked state-run oil company Petrobras and intercepted billions of emails and calls to Brazilians.
US Secretary of State John Kerry has previously defended the NSA's actions, saying they were necessary to combat terrorism.
"Brazil and other countries will understand exactly what we are doing, why and how - and we will work together to make sure that whatever is done is done in a way that respects our friends and our partners," he said last month on a visit to the country.
Brics cable
Brazil's IT policy secretary Virgilio Almeida has suggested that internet firms would have to operate data centres in the country, which would make them subject to local privacy laws.
Continue reading the main story
Wyre DaviesBBC News, Rio de Janeiro
Analysis
Wyre DaviesBBC News, Rio de Janeiro
The Brazilian president was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
Her decision to cancel (or officially, to postpone) the Washington visit will be seized upon by some as an act of petty nationalism.
Some Brazilian business leaders, worried by the precarious economic climate, will question the wisdom of antagonising such an important business.
But the political pressure was greater still. There was fury in Brazil, not only at the revelation that the president's own conversations and communications may have been spied upon by the NSA but that US interests were allegedly involved in blatant economic espionage against major Brazilian interests, including Petrobras.
Dilma Rousseff will have been aware of the feelings of ordinary Brazilians had her Washington trip gone ahead.
The perception here in Brazil is that the Obama administration has yet to give an adequate response or an apology.
In addition, he said, the government might move to ensure that its own data about tax information and other sensitive subjects would be stored locally rather than in the cloud.
Last week a Brazilian official specifically named Facebook, Google and Microsoft as examples of companies that would have to change their practices, according to a report by the Reuters news agency.
The three companies are among those that have acknowledged handing over data about "national security matters" after legally binding requests from the US authorities.
However, there is no suggestion that Brazilians would be barred from using US-based storage services.
Brazil is also backing a separate plan to create the Brics Cable.
This would see a fibre-optic link run from the Brazilian city of Fortaleza to Vladivostok, Russia. The link would pass through Africa and Asia and connect with cables running to mainland Europe and the Middle East.
There would also be a link between Fortaleza and Miami, but it would mean data would not need to go through Florida before travelling elsewhere.
At present the vast majority of Central and South America's internet data is routed through a single building in Miami known as the Network Access Point.
According to documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have used cable taps to collect "vast amounts" of data passing though their countries, which are then analysed using encryption-cracking tools.
The Brics Cable's organisers hope to have their 34,000km (21,000 miles) link ready to use by the end of 2015.
Brazil's telecom firm Telebras is also planning to launch the country's first communications satellite in 2016. Its military currently relies on a system run by Mexico's Embratel.
In addition the country's postal service has announced plans to create an encrypted email service to offer the public an alternative to Gmail, Yahoo email or Outlook.com.
Limited effect
One expert warned that such measures would give Brazil only a limited degree of protection from the NSA.
"They are a step towards getting out the very strong control the US has over the internet infrastructure," said Dr Joss Wright, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.
"But if you send an email from your encrypted Brazilian provider to somebody else who has a Gmail account then Google is getting to read the thread of information anyway.
Forcing firms to open data centres in Brazil would make the operations subject to local privacy laws
"Regarding the new cables, you can't say, 'My data should go from here to here across this particular path.'
"It's calculated on a very ad-hoc basis where it is going to go... which means you can't guarantee that just because there is a new high-capacity cable running from Brazil to Russia that all the data will go through it rather than an alternative."
He added that taking steps to make firms subject to local data protection laws might also be easier said than done.
"Look at the EU - it already has very strict rules about sharing and processing data and the general rule is that you can only share data if you share it with a country that has equivalently strong protection laws," he told the BBC.
"However, the US being the US has a get-out-of-jail-free card with what are called the 'safe harbour provisions'.
"They are an industry self-regulatory agreement which says they will treat data according to EU standards. But there is no oversight, there's no comeback if they do not live up to them."
The biggest extinction in history was probably caused by a space rock that changed the climate
AS EVERY schoolchild knows, the dinosaurs were wiped out in an instant, when a rock from outer space hit what is now southern Mexico. That happened 66m years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period. Well-informed schoolchildren also know that this mass extinction was neither unique nor the biggest. The geological record speaks of four others since animal life became complex at the beginning of the Cambrian period 541m years ago.
What neither these clever schoolchildren nor anyone else knows, however, is whether these extinctions had similar causes. But evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years back, at the end of the Permian period, was indeed also triggered by an impact. Nevertheless, though the trigger was the same, the details are significantly different, according to Eric Tohver of the University of Western Australia.
The idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while. As at the end of the Permian, as at the end of the Cretaceous, huge volcanic eruptions had been going on for hundreds of thousands of years. These may have weakened the world’s ecosystems, making them vulnerable to an external shock. But the abruptness of both extinctions indicates that the coup de grâce was administered by something else, and in the case of the Permian some fragments of meteorite of the correct age, found in rock in Antarctica, suggest that, as with the Cretaceous, that something was an asteroid or a comet. What was missing from the story, though, was a suitable crater.When the dinosaurs vanished they were accompanied by more than 70% of the other animal species on Earth. At the end of the Permian, the extinction figure was more than 80%. And just as the Cretaceous slate-clearing permitted the rise of a hitherto obscure group called the mammals (including, eventually, one now referred to by biologists as Homo sapiens), so the Permian clearance permitted the rise of the reptiles, one branch of which turned into Tyrannosaurus,Diplodocus and all the other names familiar from childhood.
Fracking hell!
Last year Dr Tohver and his colleagues thought they might have found it. They redated a hole that straddles the border of the states of Mato Grosso and Goiás in Brazil, called the Araguainha crater, to 254.7m years, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5m years. Previous estimates had suggested Araguainha was 10m years younger, but Dr Tohver has put it within geological spitting distance of the extinction date, which itself has a margin of error of plus or minus 200,000 years.
Which would all be fine and dandy, except most people think Araguainha is too small to be the culprit. It is a mere 40km (25 miles) across. The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which did for the dinosaurs, is 180km in diameter, and it may have been paired with an even bigger impact in the Indian Ocean. (This could have happened if the incoming object was a comet that broke up in a close encounter with the sun.)
Dr Tohver, however, has an answer to this criticism. His latest paper, just published inPalaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, describes the rock in the area in which Araguainha resides.
After an extensive geological survey, he and his team discovered that a sizeable amount of this rock is oil shale. Any hydrocarbons in the crater would certainly have been vaporised. More intriguingly, the researchers calculate that the impact would have generated thousands of earthquakes of up to magnitude 9.9 (significantly more powerful than the largest recorded by modern seismologists) for hundreds of kilometres around. In effect, it would have been the biggest fracking operation in history, releasing oil and gas from the shattered rock in prodigious quantities.
The upshot, Dr Tohver believes, would have been a huge burp of methane into the atmosphere. Since methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, that burp would have resulted in instant global warming, making things too hot for much of the planet’s animal life. Presto! The Permian mass extinction is explained.
Determining whether this was really what happened will take a lot more digging, of course. Even now, there are those who think the formation of the Chicxulub crater was a coincidence, and that what did for the dinosaurs was actually the volcanoes, so Dr Tohver will have to work hard to convince the sceptics. If he does, though, he will have proved himself a great geological detective, for he will have been responsible for solving one of the biggest puzzles in palaeontology.
RADIATION therapy is a powerful tool for improving the survival rate of those diagnosed with certain forms of cancer. But the dozens of doses of high-energy radiation involved carry a risk, as healthy cells are zapped along with cancerous ones. Many short-term and long-term consequences are well known, including an increased risk of developing new cancers decades after successful treatment. But improvements in early diagnoses, chemotherapy and surgery (as well as, lately, immunology) have combined with radiation to produce larger numbers of cancer survivors living beyond the ten-year mark from the end of treatment. This has brought a previously suspected link into sharper focus: radiation-induced heart disease (RIHD). On July 16th a study called for higher level of cardiovascular screening in cancer survivors. But how can radiation therapy cause heart disease?
Oncologists use radiation, typically X-rays, to fight cancerous cells for many forms of the disease. The therapy may be used to destroy or shrink tumours, to halt malignancies, to reduce the odds of recurrence or to reduce the severity of the disease. Cancer cells tend to divide rapidly and often uncontrollably. Radiation causes the most harm to cells in the process of division. Bodies are remarkably resilient, however, and despite often challenging short-term effects, tissues recover and long-term damage in those that avoid the recurrence of cancer is often minor. However, the heart has been found to suffer the most, particularly with radiation to the thorax or mediastinum, the central part of the thoracic cavity. After radiation, the heart's efforts to repair itself appear to lead to thickening and calcification of tissues and inflamed arteries. This, in turn, substantially increases the risk of heart diseases, including atherosclerosis (thickening of the arteries), pericardial disease (damage to the heart's surrounding membrane) and congestive heart failure. Certain chemotherapy drugs may exacerbate some effects as well.
Suspicions that radiation therapy led to increased risk of heart disease date back to the 1970s. The British Medical Journal examined evidence in 1976 and dismissed concerns as minor. But the number of long-term survivors of cancers treated with radiation near the heart—notably Hodgkin's Disease, breast cancer and lung cancer—only began to swell in the 1990s, providing more data to study. A 2007 review by the American Society of Clinical Oncology put the incidence of some form of RIHD at between 10% and 30% by five to ten years after treatment. Now the European Heart Journal - Cardiovascular Imaging and theJournal of the American Society of Echocardiography have recommended that the link between radiation and heart disease is clear enough for oncologists and cardiologists to carry out heart checks on patients undergoing radiation therapy. Before the therapy begins, they say, tests should establish a patient's cardiovascular health; immediately after, tests should determine the extent of any short-term damage. Oncologists and general practitioners should look out for symptoms in the years that follow, even if deemed unlikely because of age or the absence of other risk factors. High-risk patients should receive non-invasive echocardiographic (sonogram-like) screening at five years following radiation, says Patrizio Lancellotti, chair of the group that produced the recommendation; others, at ten years. The recommendation may be enough to send former radiation patients scurrying to their doctors.
Patients face an unappealing choice: have radiation therapy and risk later getting heart disease; avoid it, and reduce the chance of surviving cancer. But the news is not all bad. Some forms of heart disease, notably atherosclerosis, appear to be far more common when radiation therapy is coupled with other risky behaviour, such as smoking or having a fatty diet. That knowledge may steer younger patients into healthier lifestyles. Catching problems earlier with screening can prevent medical or surgical interventions. Conventional cardiac therapies work for cancer survivors as well as the general population, even though the need comes earlier in life or for otherwise atypical sufferers. The best news of all is that because of the increased concern decades ago about RIHD, radiation therapy was modified to reduce energy to the heart both in intensity and by using shielding to limit the area exposed. As a result, researchers expect that even as the pool of cancer survivors who received radiation therapy will grow, the percentage suffering from related heart disease should shrink.
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| NSA boss Gen Keith Alexander said sharing more data about requests must not harm investigations |
Apple, Google and dozens of other technology companies have urged US authorities to let them divulge more details about security requests.
The companies want to be able to report regular statistics about the nature and scope of what data is being asked for.
Whistle-blower Edward Snowden's revelations about US spying capabilities has left the tech firms keen to assert their independence.
Authorities are said to be considering the companies' request.
"We just want to make sure we do it right," said Gen Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency.
"We don't impact anything ongoing with the FBI. I think that's the reasonable approach."
Limited scope
The companies sent a letter outlining their request on Thursday to Gen Alexander, as well as President Obama and Congress.
It was co-signed by some of the most influential companies in the tech world, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Campaign groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch are also backing the action.
Companies are currently allowed to release limited data regarding security requests and their nature.
But as it stands those disclosures must be limited in scope, and in many cases require that the firms ask the courts for permission to make the information public.
Many users of popular services, particularly social networks, reacted angrily to the news that companies regularly make available information about users when requested to do so.
"They don't have a choice. Court order, they have to do this," Mr Alexander from the NSA said, suggesting that security authorities could be open to the idea.
"What they want is the rest of the world to know that we're not reading all of that email, so they want to give out the numbers.
"I think there's some logic in doing that."
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| Police in New York have dubbed instances of phone theft as "Apple-picking" |
New measures to curb soaring levels of mobile phone theft worldwide are to be tested in New York and San Francisco.
Prosecutors will test measures on Apple's iPhone 5 and Samsung's Galaxy S4 to measure effectiveness against common tactics used by thieves.
Various cities across the world have called on manufacturers to do more to deter phone theft.
London Mayor Boris Johnson has written to firms saying they must "take this issue seriously".
In a letter to Apple, Samsung, Google and other mobile makers, Mr Johnson wrote: "If we are to deter theft and help prevent crimes that victimise your customers and the residents and visitors to our city, we need meaningful engagement from business and a clear demonstration that your company is serious about your corporate responsibility to help solve this problem."
Kill switch
Prosecutors in the US are following a similar line - last month meeting representatives from the technology firms to discuss the matter.
They are calling for a "kill switch", a method of rendering a handset completely useless if it is stolen, rendering a theft pointless.
Statistics from the US Federal Trade Commission suggest that almost one in three robberies nationwide involves the theft of a mobile phone.
In New York, 40% of robberies are phone thefts - a crime so common it has been dubbed "Apple-picking" by police.
London has seen a "troubling" rise in mobile phone theft, the mayor's office said, with 75% of all "theft from person" offences involving a phone - 10,000 handsets a month.
Close scrutiny
The firms have offered theft solutions to help combat the problem.
Apple's Activation Lock - which will be part of the next major iPhone and iPad software update - is to come under close scrutiny.
Thieves will often deactivate a phone immediately to stop it being tracked after a theft. Activation Lock is designed to make it harder to then reactivate, as it requires the entry of the log-in details used to register the phone originally.
For Samsung and other handsets, prosecutors, aided by security professionals, will be testing theft recovery system Lojack.
"We are not going to take them at their word," the prosecutors in New York and San Francisco said in a joint statement.
"Today we will assess the solutions they are proposing and see if they stand up to the tactics commonly employed by thieves."
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| John Day from Disney tells the BBC's Dave Lee about the entertainment company's major new gaming project. |
Disney has defended the cost of its new collectable, interactive video game ahead of its launch next month.
Disney Infinity encourages players to collect additional figures and add-ons inspired by the company's films.
The starter pack, with three figures, will cost around £60, with an optional 17 extra figures costing around £12 each.
Disney told the BBC the game represented good value for parents, and that toys could be easily swapped.
Lead producer John Day said: "I think the value proposition here is really quite good because normally, when Disney releases a new film, there would be another game associated with that that would be upwards of £50.
"But with Infinity we can still deliver that additional content moving forward, and for these playset packs - which are, in their own right, an entire game - the recommended retail price is going to be closer to £30.
"So you can actually get £50 worth of stuff at a substantial discount."
Pester power
The game, which will be released on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Wii U and Nintendo DS next month, is designed to be continually upgraded as new characters become available - either from previous films made by Disney, or upcoming titles.
The starter pack contains the game's core accessory, a docking station for figurines and other add-ons which can be swapped while the game is being played, changing characters and environments instantly.
The figures contain RFID chips - tiny, low-cost components that can contain a small amount of data.
Disney Infinity will launch with 20 different characters available to buy - with more being added at a later date.
As well as the figures, gamers can also buy £4 add-on packs containing discs that can make characters stronger and quicker, or change other areas of the game.
Siobhan Freegard, founder of parenting advice site Netmums, said there would be concerns over the potential for pester power.
"I do worry that at the moment so many parents are strapped for cash," she told the BBC.
"It's not a cheap present - and to go back to school and find Little Johnny down the road has all the characters will make it hard. It is a never-ending thing. Parents need to know what they're signing up to."
On the subject of the add-on packs, she added: "I'm not sure I like that your character can be better because your parents have more money."
'Immediate pull'
The Disney Infinity concept borrows heavily from Skylanders, a massively successful game that has over 100 additional characters that can be added for around a similar price.
However, Ms Freegard said children's immediate familiarity and fondness for the Disney characters might mean there was higher demand.
"The thing about Skylanders is that the children for a long time don't know the characters," she added.
Disney's John Day explains to the BBC how much the company's new game could cost parents.
"But parents will buy this, and children will already know the names of all the others [Disney characters] - there's an immediate pull."
Beyond the tradeable figures - which are interchangeable with different platforms, meaning a PS3-owning child can swap their characters with a friend who has an Xbox 360 - the game's key selling point is the ability to create worlds in its "toybox" mode.
"I'm very excited about the educational prospects of this," said Disney's Mr Day.
"I have two boys, ages two and four, and I like the idea that they can be learning about how to do logical connections using the toys in the Toybox.
"We can bring in toys like buttons and doorways, and you can connect the button to the doorway and have the button open the door when you step on it.
"It seems very basic, but at the same time we're talking about logical inputs and outputs. It really is a lightweight programming language."
In the criminally underrated Schwarzenegger film Last Action Hero, there’s a scene where the villain (played brilliantly by Charles Dance, a.k.a. Tywin Lannister) from a cheesy action movie enters the “real” world. After witnessing a mugging for which there was no consequence, he proceeds to shoot someone in cold blood and laughs as he hears nothing: no sirens, no police telling him to drop his gun. Nothing. That’s when he embarks on his plan to run loose in a world where “the bad guys can win.”
Ironically, in many cities around the country in the actual real world, this scene would play out quite differently. In Milwaukee, for example, if you fire a gun in some neighborhoods you might find yourself surrounded by police in just a few minutes.
That’s thanks to a technology deployed in Milwaukee and 74 other cities both in the United States and other countries created by ShotSpotter. The company, which was founded in 1995, uses an array of acoustic sensors deployed in a neighborhood that listen for one thing: the sound of gunfire. The sensors are paired with software that can analyze the sounds in real time, triangulating and pinpointing the location of each round fired down to the latitude and longitude. The software also filters out non-gunfire sounds that might have triggered the sensors, and the sound is also sent to trained officers who act to confirm that it’s gunfire before an alert is sent to officers on patrol.
In the first quarter of 2013, the company told me, their system detected 7,584 separate gunfire incidents in 30 cities they pulled data from. In those incidents, 26,617 rounds were fired – about 3.5 rounds per incident. One of those incidents saw 63 rounds fired. 63% of gunfire, they found, takes place between 8pm and 4am (local time) with 54% of that gunfire happening on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
That’s data that law enforcement finds useful – especially for predictive policing. In the City of Milwaukee, police use the system as part of a bigger strategy for fighting crime.
“We weren’t interested in technology for technology’s sake,” Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn told me. “We wanted to ensure that it assisted us in accomplishing our mission. Which is to help people live in a safe neighborhood so they can raise their children and pursue the American dream.”
“Our strategy,” he continued. “is community based and problem oriented. We’re looking for the root issues that crime more likely. We spend a lot of time analyzing data to find problems and measure success.”
One measure of that success is just catching bad guys in the act. The Milwaukee police have used ShotSpotter to catch several criminals shortly after they fired shots. ShotSpotter data has been used to obtain convictions in several cases, including a murder conviction. The latitude and longitude locations also help police recover shell casings, which are used to provide forensic evidence in court. But Flynn doesn’t only see ShotSpotter as a tool for a fast response.
“It does that, and it does it well,” he said. “But we also want to use it to build up neighborhoods. People in the community are very supportive, because it enables us to catch people before a 911 call is made. It also lets us catch people without neighbors being accused of ‘snitching.’”
That latter point is important when you consider that in the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter is deployed, Milwaukee police determined that only about 14% of them were reported to 911. The company told me that similar numbers have been seen in other neighborhoods where the system is deployed.
Chief Flynn is also seeing measurable results. The number of shots fired in the area where ShotSpotter is deployed has seen a year to date reduction of 18%. They’re also using the patterns of the gunfire to identify drug markets and gang battles so that the police can effectively intervene in the area.
“Gunfire is a symptom,” he said. “It often means something else. We use it in conjunction with other data to pinpoint the intelligence we need.”
That support from law enforcement has enabled the company to successfully sell its services to more and more communities over the years, as well as attract investors. The company has raised $62 million from its investors (but would not disclose its revenues).
Despite the endorsement of law enforcement, though, not everyone is convinced about the usefulness of the technology. That’s largely because independent data about ShotSpotter is pretty thin on the ground.
“It’s a neat technology,” University of California Berkeley Criminologist Frank Zmiring told me. “But the real question is the cost and benefit for police response. There are very effective ways of evaluating this, but it’s not clear that this has been done.”
“In general, though, policing is so goddamn labor intensive that any technologies that displace human labor would be terrific,” he continued. “Whether this is worth it is an answerable question. The problem is that there is no department rigorously studying this kind of urban policing.”
“In general, though, policing is so goddamn labor intensive that any technologies that displace human labor would be terrific,” he continued. “Whether this is worth it is an answerable question. The problem is that there is no department rigorously studying this kind of urban policing.”
One study that has been performed was in 2008 of the SECURES system, which was purchased by ShotSpotter in 2009. That study was led by Peter Scharf, a criminologist at Tulane University. That study found some high number of false positives in one area where it was deployed, especially when fireworks were set off. However, in another area of deployment, they found a higher level of accuracy. That system, however, didn’t have a human listener to analyze shots the way the current one does.
“They’re trying to avoid the false positives by having a human person listen in,” Scharf told me. “But there needs to be a study done to see how that improves the accuracy.”
For Scharf, one of the biggest questions is whether the return on investment is worth it. It may be, he said, for bigger cities. “But you might have to seriously ask if it’s rational for smaller markets.”
That said, he does think that the technology is worth developing. “I think that this is like the airplane in 1912,” he told me. “It’s a promising note on a series on integrated technologies that are coming down the pike.”
ShotSpotter itself, however, is eager to provide as much data as it can. “We are passionate about data at the local level to help cities address gun violence issues,” ShotSpotter President and CEO Ralph Clark told me. “Now we’re excited about a second chapter for our company to aggregate data and help inform policy decisions and discussions happening at a Federal level.”
“The data that local law enforcement agencies have is limited, incomplete and noisy,” he continued. “We want to tell the ground truth as to where they were deployed.”
Data aside, though, anyone reading this article so far has probably wondered about what Scharf calls the “1984 issues.”
“It’s a little creepy that you can police without touching the community,” Scharf told me. “So there’s a sci-fi part of the technology that bothers me a little bit.”
In light of the debate over the NSA’s surveillance operations, I had to admit that the privacy issues bothered me, too. So I asked Clark about how the system impacts the privacy of people in the neighborhoods where ShotSpotter is deployed.
“That’s a timely question,” he said. “But first of all, this is a passive technology. We refer to them as sensors rather than microphones because it’s important distinction. The system is programmed to detect impulsive noises. In order to get what we need and not have them going off all the time, we have to deploy them about 30 feet in the air.”
“We don’t record everything,” he continued. “We’re just listening to the ‘booms and bangs.’”
For the company, though, the bottom line is about assisting local law enforcement in making safer neighborhoods.
“We’ve become a source of data that police don’t otherwise have,” Clark said. “We allow them to analyze which of their neighborhoods have the most gun violence so that police can mobilize the right resources.”
And maybe, in the end, make sure we live in a world where the bad guys can’t win.
