THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
From surveillance cams to facial scans, in Las Vegas the whole world is watching.
When the New York-New York Hotel & Casino opened in Las Vegas in 1997, its facade was lined with 1:3 scale models of Manhattan's signature skyscrapers. Notably absent was the World Trade Center. Even at a third the size, the twin towers would have been a gargantuan engineering feat, and would have eclipsed the other feel-good highlights of Gotham's skyline: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Seagram tower, and the Statue of Liberty. In its brassy art deco exuberance, the casino was meant to be a throwback to the New York of an earlier era. In the wake of September 11, it turns out to have been a premonition.
The fact that the ersatz New York was built without a World Trade Center is pure coincidence of course, but beyond the walls of this miniature city is a living lab for surveillance technology. On the ceiling of every casino, hundreds of glass eyes look down on the bustling, blinking playgrounds below. They're over the blackjack tables, the roulette wheels, the craps pits, the slots, the pai-gow poker lounges, the keno parlors, the cashiers' booths, and the money-counting rooms - where every piece of furniture is Plexiglas.
Out on the floor, a calliope of slot machines jingles with jackpots and payouts. But the real bells and whistles are in the casinos' surveillance rooms, where hundreds of video screens and thousands of VCRs monitor and record the action. Vegas security systems have been running face-recognition software 24 hours a day for three years, to suss out cheaters and scam artists, not to mention the professional card-counters.
Cameras zoom in on a face. The image is captured, digitized, and converted into a set of measurements: the distance between your eyes, for example. The software fixates on the geometry of a person's bone structure, rather than on skin, eye, or hair color. These measurements are then gauged against 128 generic faces of all different races, and the variances from these generic faces comprise an individual template. If a person's template closely matches one in the database, a record pops up, with the image of a card-counter or criminal along with a list of his aliases and associates. The software never makes a positive identification - it just alerts the staff. Then it's up to human operators to decide how good the match is - and whether to escort the person off-site and send out a bulletin over an intracasino network.
These systems are churning on PCs up and down the Strip - at the Mirage, the Bellagio, the Venetian, and the MGM Grand. Downtown, too, at Fitzgerald's and the Golden Nugget. In one sense, the technology just automates what casinos have been doing for years, with pan-and-scan cameras, mug books, and sharp memories. But speed and networking do make a difference, especially since the databases are shared.
"A cheater can leave the Golden Nugget and walk down Fremont Street toward Fitzgerald's," says Beverly Griffin of Griffin Investigations, which provides software and data to dozens of Vegas casinos, "and before he gets to Fitzgerald's, they'll have a picture of him and can meet him at the door and say, 'You're not welcome to play here.'"
Griffin and its rival, Biometrica, have the mug shots that matter in the gambling business. But the underlying code is licensed from two East Coast companies, Visionics and Viisage, whose sights are trained on larger markets, like the government (Visionics is working with the Defense Department and Interpol). Earlier this year, Viisage ran a large-scale test of its face-scanning software at Tampa, Florida's Raymond James Stadium during the Super Bowl - 100,000 people in a two-hour time frame. The system helped identify 19 criminals, mostly ticket scalpers and petty thieves, none of whom were arrested.
In retrospect, the alarm this raised with civil libertarians looks misplaced. Much of the resulting controversy revolved around the assumption that the 100,000 scans had been stored and the data would be sold to the highest bidder. That was not the case. In Tampa, law enforcement was playing by Vegas rules: no match, no memory. Las Vegas establishments make a lot of money off people who don't necessarily want anyone to know where they are or whom they're with, and casinos are sensitive to these concerns. For now, that sensitivity is still built into the surveillance software that cut its teeth on the Strip - unless you were one of the 19 criminals at the Super Bowl, no one knows you were there or ever will.
There's no guarantee that these Vegas-style protections will continue, of course. But the irony is that, even in the most watched public spaces in America, privacy safeguards still exist. In a world reconfigured by terrorism, perhaps the best we can expect is the anonymity of a gambler rolling the dice in Vegas, who can tread unrecognized beneath a constellation of cameras, unless he's on the wanted list.
