Read how the UP government plans to map and integrate data from surveillance cameras while it mentions for the first time the use of Jio cameras by the UP Police, raising further questions. This is the third of a four-part series. You can read the first two stories here. You are reading it here first: Imagine a large room, possibly with multiple screens displaying facial recognition data and other CCTV camera feeds from all over a city. At the touch of your fingertips, the 'relationships' of entities will be mapped out by going through numerous databases in seconds. Seems surreal, doesn't it? Welcome to the Lucknow Safe City Project’s Integrated Smart Control Room (ISCR), the proposed one-stop surveillance center from where cops will be able to monitor and analyse all feeds and incoming data as well as access other databases. If that was not alarming enough, the Safe City Project’s ISCR will also integrate with existing surveillance projects in Lucknow such as the Smart City Project, Drishti Project, and Jio Cameras — a separate CCTV system comprising Jio cameras, according to a tender published by the Uttar Pradesh Government for selecting a system integrator for the Safe City Protect. Being mooted in the garb of saving women, the overarching surveillance architecture in the ISCR (according to the tender) will have — A command and control center (C4i) where live video feeds from the surveillance cameras would be monitored and analysed. Apart from relaying live feed, the videos and images…
