IBM, CTA, Watching You

By Sean Corbett in News on Dec 22, 2006 8:55PM

IBM is officially in charge of setting up wireless cameras on busses and train platforms in a CTA pilot program to improve the CTA’s response to terrorist attacks.

As previously noted, the plan is to add wireless transmitters to existing cameras in 40 buses, several rail stations, and two garages. After six months they program will most likely be expanded “throughout the city.” It would be quite a different season of CTA commentary at Chicagoist next year if we saw some of the major improvements in bus scheduling that this program makes possible. With any luck somebody at the CTA will step up and make sure that happens.

Where do these wireless camera feeds go you ask? Well, not only can specially equipped police cars pick them up, CTA emergency response vehicles can, and they will all be routed to the CTA Control Center. If we were living in a book by George Orwell, maybe CTA would stand for Central Thought Adjustment, and the control center is where they would take us when we were thinking about jumping turnstiles or disobeying the ‘no standing between the cars’ signs. Fortunately we’re not living in such a book (yet) and these cameras will give lots of people piece of mind. If Chicagoist was stuck on a speeding bus with a terrorist at the helm we would be happy to know that the good guys had some idea of what was going on and that ‘wireless safety cameras’ was a line item not cut from the CTA’s yearly budget.

We’re not even going to speculate on what IBM could really do with the data coming in from these cameras, a face recognition program, and several Gigaflops on a Blue Gene supercomputer.