Interesting New Scientist article

This is a pretty good piece on what's becoming available for the police. Total Robocop stuff.

-- http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20153-augmented-reality-iphone-helps-police-track-suspects.html  " 
PICTURE the scene: armed police officers are warned on their radios that a suspected male terrorist has been tracked to a crowded football stadium. Even with a full description, it's all but impossible to pick him out amid the match-day melee. Perhaps smartphones fed augmented reality (AR) data by the police control centre could help focus the search.
After booting up an iPhone app, an officer would train the phone's camera on the crowd. The suspect's position, after he had been tracked by covert police, would be highlighted by an icon overlaid on the image. Similarly, other icons could pinpoint the positions and range of other officers (see picture), including those operating undercover.
The system, called iAPLS, has been developed by engineers at Frequentis, a surveillance-systems company based in Vienna, Austria. It is a mobile extension of the firm's Automatic Personal Location System, which shows the location of officers on control-room screens using GPS signals sent by their radios. If a suspect has a cellphone that police have a fix on, or they are being closely followed by a covert officer, they too can be tracked. Officers can also use their ph one to "tag" the location of a suspect package to make it visible to fellow law enforcers.
What Frequentis engineer Reinard van Loo and his colleagues have done is package APLS data so that it can be sent via a regular 3G link to a standard iPhone, making location information available to all officers on duty, not just those in the control room.
The extra data that this kind of AR app will provide could be a double-edged sword, warns David Sloggett, a security researcher at the University of Reading, UK. "Terrorists have been very good at turning our own technology against us. The Mumbai attacks [in India in 2008] were meticulously planned on Google Earth, for instance. If terrorists get hold of police location data on mobile phon es it could be disastrous."
Stopping criminals hijacking AR data will require strongly encrypted data links. While the Frequentis demonstration system used a regular 3G network, van Loo says that by the time it is commercialised it could be using an encrypted emergency-services-only 4G network - known as LTE for Public Safety.
Pauline Neville-Jones, the UK's Home Office minister for security and counterterrorism, believes AR could be a game-changing technology for the police and the military and so has commissioned Log ica, a Reading-based technology company, to carry out 12 months of tests against what she calls "realistic security threats" using a range of AR systems at the University of Nottingham. "We want to know how effective augmented reality can actually be in helping us fight threats," she says.
The AR offerings include visors that overlay data on an officer's field of view. For instance, BAE Systems in Rochester, Kent, is re-engineering a visor it makes for helicopter gunships – in addition to projecting a green glow around human targets sensed via infrared camera, it will also display the kind of data Fre quentis is generating. And Trivisio of Kaiserslautern, Germany, is using miniature accelerometers similar to those found in cellphones to make an ultra-lightweight visor that tracks head motion with high accuracy, says spokesman Gerrit Spaas.
For police officers tracking targets via helicopter, Churchill Navigation of Boulder, Colorado, is augmenting liv e helicopter video with terrain-contoured street maps in real time. Without this, says founder Tom Churchill, it is hard for pilots looking at a maze of streets on screen to know which street a target is in. It works by tightly coupling the map database to the software that controls the camera's motion.
Meanwhile, James Srinivasan and his colleagues at 2d3 in Oxford, UK, are working on a system that ensures search teams cover all the ground when searching for improvised explosive devices – whether that's in a shopping mall or on a dirt track in Afghanistan. Twin cameras trained on the search team allow the s ystem to generate computer images of the paths they have trodden, which are then overlaid on the video feed, allowing an operator to spots areas they have missed. "    Don't let justice be the privilege of the elite. Support the Justice for All campaign http://www.justice-for-all.org.uk/