Ralph Angenendt wrote:

Es ist immer gut Vergleichsmaterial zu haben, also den ganzen Artikel.
Fall ist auf den ersten Blick sehr speziell, solche Interessen haben
aber viele:

<<
From Casinos to Counterterrorism
Las Vegas Surveillance, U.S. Security Efforts Involve Similar Tactics

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 22, 2007; A01

LAS VEGAS -- This city, famous for being America's playground, has also
become its security lab. Like nowhere else in the United States, Las
Vegas has embraced the twin trends of data mining and high-tech
surveillance, with arguably more cameras per square foot than any
airport or sports arena in the country. Even the city's cabs and
monorail have cameras. As the U.S. government ramps up its efforts to
forestall terrorist attacks, some privacy advocates view the city as a
harbinger of things to come.

In secret rooms in casinos across Las Vegas, surveillance specialists
are busy analyzing information about players and employees. Relying on
thousands of cameras in nearly every cranny of the casinos, they
evaluate suspicious behavior. They ping names against databases that
share information with other casinos, sometimes using facial-recognition
software to validate a match. And in the marketing suites, casino
staffers track players' every wager, every win or loss, the better to
target high-rollers for special treatment and low- and middle-rollers
for promotions.

"You could almost look at Vegas as the incubator of a whole host of
surveillance technologies," said James X. Dempsey, policy director for
the Center for Democracy and Technology. Those technologies, he said,
have spread to other commercial venues: malls, stadiums, amusement parks.

And although that is "problematic," he said, "the spread of the
techniques to counterterrorism is doubly worrisome. Finding a terrorist
is much harder than finding a card counter, and the consequences of
being wrongly labeled a terrorist are much more severe than being
excluded from a casino."
Eyes in the Sky

The casino industry, like the national security industry, is seeking
information to answer a fundamental question: Who are you?

"It's, are you a good guy or a bad guy? A threat or a non-threat?"
explained Derk Boss, the vice president for surveillance for the
Stratosphere hotel and casino, whose crew operates under what he calls
the IOU system: Identify, Observe and Understand.

"There are going to be people that just want to come and gamble and
enjoy your services," he said. "And there are going to be people that
are going to come to take your money. Our job is to distinguish between
those two groups."

In the surveillance room, 50 monitors are linked to 2,000 cameras, from
the casino entrance to the tower observation deck. Two employees keep an
eye on the monitors. Guests are on camera from the moment they enter --
except in their rooms and in bathrooms. An investigator tracking a
suspect could go back and review old tape, assembling a mosaic of a
visitor's moves for the past two weeks.

What happens in Vegas does indeed stay in Vegas -- for a lot longer than
most patrons realize.

On a recent Friday night, the surveillance team at the Stratosphere is
watching a casino host they suspect of handing out unwarranted "comps,"
or vouchers for free rooms and meals to guests. Might he be taking
kickbacks?

Down on the floor, the pit boss is observing players, looking for
"tells" -- behavioral signs of cheaters or other undesirables. The night
before, investigators identified a blackjack player as a card counter.
Casinos dislike card counters because they can determine when the cards
are to their advantage and raise their bets accordingly. When the pit
boss told the card counter he could bet only the minimum amount, he
cashed in his chips and left.

While casinos have been monitoring suspicious behavior for years, the
Department of Homeland Security is just now deploying specially trained
officers to look for behavioral clues and facial expressions.

Casinos have tried to use facial-recognition software to identify known
cheats in real time, but with little success. Casino lighting is often
dim, and a player who wants to conceal his identity can hide behind a
hat, sunglasses or a false beard.

But in a few years, some say, iris-scan technology will be mature enough
to use in gaming. Casinos might ask people to sit for a scan of the
iris, which, like a fingerprint, has a unique pattern. That pattern
would be transformed into a template to be matched against a database.

After Sept. 11, 2001, several airports tested facial-recognition
software, with little success. But the government is continuing to
invest in biometric technologies, and the military already uses iris
scans on suspects captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Following the Links

On occasion, national security and casino security interests directly
intersect. Jeff Jonas discovered that after he developed a computer
program for the casino industry that helps detect cheats using aliases.

A 43-year-old technology visionary and high-school dropout, Jonas soon
realized that his system could also identify employees colluding with
gamblers, say, by discovering that they share a home address. He calls
his program NORA -- for Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness.

Every time a player registers for a loyalty card or a hotel room, Jonas
explained from his lab near the Strip, the player's name, address and
other data are sent to NORA. Also in the casinos' NORA database is
information about employees and vendors.

NORA can spot links that a casino employee probably would never
discover, such as a phone number shared by two different names, Jonas
said. It once identified a casino promotions director who picked a
winning ticket that belonged to her sister, he said.

The idea was so powerful that the CIA's private investment arm,
In-Q-Tel, poured more than $1 million into NORA to help root out
corruption in federal agencies. Then, after the Sept. 11 attacks, it
became clear that link analysis could be useful in tracking terrorist
networks.

In 2002, Jonas shared his technology with Pentagon officials, who were
researching a more controversial technique called pattern-based data
mining. Their aim was to identify terror networks from patterns of
behavior, by plowing through vast beds of data such as hotel, flight and
rental-car reservations. Jonas, now an IBM chief scientist, said
narrowly focused link analysis is less invasive because it starts with a
known suspect rather than casting about in the general population.

At the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, for
example, investigators have used link analysis to track money
laundering. From one Suspicious Activity Report -- which financial
institutions are required to send to the government -- they have
identified a money launderer's partners in crime. FinCEN has a decade's
worth of data on 170 million report forms. "We find a tremendous amount
of connectivity," said Steve Hudak, FinCEN spokesman. "We find suspects
linked by addresses, suspects linked by phone numbers. So we definitely
know that these people are operating together."

But privacy advocates warn that the farther it moves from the suspect,
the more likely link analysis is to snare innocent people.
Chips Tracking Chips

Rolland Steil moves a stack of 34 casino chips across the felt of a
baccarat table. On a monitor linked to the table in this desert
laboratory, 34 numbers pop up. Each chip is embedded with a radio
frequency identification (RFID) chip that enables the casino to track
how much money is being wagered on this roulette number or that baccarat
spot.

Steil, a product manager for Progressive Gaming International, which
developed the chips, expects all casinos to use RFID-enabled chips soon
-- to detect counterfeiters, to keep track of chip flow at tables, to
know instantly how much a player has bet, won or lost.

"We're providing so much data to the casinos, they're drooling for it,"
he said.

In the outside world, counterterrorism and Homeland Security officials
are looking for ways RFID technology can help them, too. RFID chips are
in new passports, EZPasses, credit cards and building passes. Soon they
might be in clothing.

All this electronic data is trackable, as are text messages sent from
cellphones or instant messages from laptops. Following the trail could
uncover a terrorist network.

Or an innocent group of, say, bird-watchers.

"We often hear of the surveillance technology du jour, but what we're
seeing now in America is a collection of surveillance technologies that
work together," said Barry Steinhardt, the American Civil Liberties
Union's technology and liberty project director. "It isn't just video
surveillance or face recognition or license plate readers or RFID chips.
It's that all these technologies are converging to create a surveillance
society."
'We Know Who You Are'

Under the elegant chandeliers at Caesars Palace, 10,000 people a day
willingly give up personal information -- name, address, birthday -- and
allow their gambling habits to be tracked so they can win free hotel
rooms and show tickets. In nearly a decade, 40 million have signed up
for Harrah's Total Rewards loyalty card.

Harrah's Entertainment, owner of Ceasars Palace and the industry leader
in data mining for marketing, can then customize the gambler's
experience. A guest celebrating her birthday might insert her card in a
slot machine and be surprised by a promotions manager bearing a birthday
card and a cookie.

"It's really about, how do we convince these people to be more loyal and
give them a sense of 'We know who you are,' " said David W. Norton,
senior vice president at Harrah's.

Guests may or may not see that as a good thing.

In December 2003, faced with a warning that terrorists were about to
attack Las Vegas, the FBI asked hotels, rental-car agencies and airlines
for customer data. Some balked, but others produced the data, sometimes
voluntarily, sometimes when presented with a subpoena.

The data sweep turned up no leads. One gambler who was there at the time
said he approved of the tactic. "The only people who have anything to
worry about are the people who have something to hide," said Dale
Weinstein, a Los Angeles media market consultant sitting at a Caesar's
Palace slot machine where he had just won a $2,000 jackpot.

But for David Richardson, a real estate inspector from in Upstate New
York, the data gathering crossed a line. "They have no right to get in
your shorts," he said, strolling between casinos. "It's all about
gathering personal information, which I'm not so crazy about the
government knowing. It's none of their business."
Below the Radar

Despite all the high-tech gizmos, some casino targets still slip through.

On a Sunday afternoon, Mike Aponte slides onto a stool at a blackjack
table in a medium-size casino on the Strip and lays $300 on the felt.
Aponte draws little notice in a town filled with droves of other Asian
gamblers.

Both the dealer and floor manager urge him to sign up for a player's
card. He demurs. Within 15 minutes, he's up by $700.

At one point, Aponte has a 12, with the dealer showing a 3. Basic
strategy dictates that Aponte should take another card. But he has been
counting and knows mostly high cards are left, so he has a good chance
of busting. He stands, the dealer busts and he wins the hand.

An hour and 15 minutes later, Aponte cashes in, $500 richer.

No one realizes it at this casino, but Aponte is a veteran of the
card-counting team of math whizzes from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. The team reportedly took more than $10 million from casinos
in its heyday from 1994 to 2000.

Aponte has been barred from more than 100 casinos in the United States
and a few overseas. In St. Kitts, he said, he was recognized by a
Biometrica database, and now he avoids the biggest, most modern casinos.