Eye Spy

Dave Kelley recognized the entertainment potential of street view cameras long ago, when the City of Tempe webmaster, experimenting with the rotating rooftop webcam, affectionately nicknamed “Sneaky Peak,” caught a glimpse of what looked like a naked man in the window of the Duck Soup card shop.

“Sure enough, from the camera it looked like there was this naked guy standing in the window – only he didn’t move,” Kelley recalls. “So the next day, I went to look and it was a life-sized cardboard cut-out. It had a thong on, but you couldn’t tell that in the picture. The store clerks ended up moving it. But for a day, everyone who went to the city’s Web site had something to talk about.”

That same voyeuristic fun can now be experienced by everyone via Google Street View, the recently introduced feature of Google Maps that adds interactive panoramic street-level views of several U.S. cities to the detailed satellite shots already included on the popular Web mapping service.

With Street View – headed to nine additional U.S. cities, including Phoenix – Google has begun construction on the ultimate American reality show. Ostensibly a tool to let you not only find that downtown Italian restaurant on a map, but actually drop down in front of it and see how the place looks before making a reservation. “GSV,” as its addicted viewers call it, has also become a kind of game software. At sites like Streetviewr.com and StreetViewGallery.corank.com, viewers submit their favorite finds daily, as if all participating in a massive multiplayer scavenger hunt.

Already there is a Top Ten of Google Street View finds. A view of two sunbathing Stanford co-eds wearing only their bikini bottoms, lying on their stomachs in a park, has become an instant classic. So has the shot of the businessman on a bench attempting a surreptitious nose-pick and the guy caught taking a leak off California State Route 1.

Mark Laudon, the Canadian GIS specialist who runs the Street View Gallery Web site, admits he spent several hours virtually touring San Francisco, New York City, Miami, Denver and Las Vegas – the first five cities to get the Street View treatment – before finally creating the page and inviting fellow addicts to send links to their choice views. Within the first week, Laudon says, he had over half a million visitors and now boasts 400 registered viewers – many of whom continue to send in new links daily.

“I think there’s an aspect to human nature that makes us want to peer around and look where we shouldn’t,” Laudon says. “And it’s almost like this gives you an opportunity to do that.”

Laudon laments seeing a dip in the number of submissions from the first week, and feels some GSV snoopers have become disenchanted that there haven’t been more “wow” shots uncovered. A Street View peeper has yet to catch a single naked person in a window – not even a cardboard cut-out of one – and even after clicking down all the streets of New York, there’s yet to be a significant celebrity spotting.

Still, Laudon remains hopeful more killer shots will turn up. Next on the list to be canvassed by the Google Street View vans, which actually record video from 11 directions at once to produce the immersible 360-degree panoramas, will be Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Seattle and Phoenix.

“Most of what we’ve gotten in so far has been from San Francisco, because those shots have the highest resolution,” Laudon says. “But as they add cities and the technology improves, who knows what people will find?”

Even Dave Kelley, who had given up street snooping on Mill after the trees along the street grew to what he calls “jungle proportions,” admits that with the new high-resolution cameras available, Tempe.gov could give GSV a run for its money by pointing Sneaky Peak at the windows of the Brickyard.

“There’s people who live up there that we could see, if we really zoomed the camera in,” Kelley says. “Not that we would, of course. We wouldn’t even consider that. But it would be more interesting than all these stupid trees!”

Not-So Private Eyes

For his part, Richard Robertson isn’t surprised more “wowser” photos haven’t been discovered among the thousands of miles of shots assembled in Google Street View. As a past president of the Arizona Association of Licensed Private Investigators (AALPI), the veteran P.I. says most of us are merely discovering the tedious life of the surveillance detective.

“A lot of us get hired to find out if someone’s been cheating on their worker’s comp or filing fraudulent personal injury claims,” Robertson says.

“And you wind up following someone for days just to get that one video of them re-roofing their house, or bowling when they’re supposed to have a back injury. Most of what you end up watching is very uneventful.”

To make the monitoring even more mind-numbing, Robertson says people have become increasingly self-conscious about being captured on camera. As an ad for fashion designer Kenneth Cole on the window of a Nordstrom’s in San Francisco, ironically now viewable on Google Street View, proclaims, “You are on a video camera over 20 times a day. Are you dressed for it?”

“It seems like people have come to accept that any time they’re in a public place, there’s likely to be a camera somewhere,” he says. “They know there are cameras in stores, on street corners, and of course on most cell phones nowadays. It’s gotten so we in the P.I. field don’t even need to hide them anymore.”

Paradoxically, we may not actually be being watched as often as we think. Once Robertson says a deep-pocketed client hired him to track a subject’s movement through Scottsdale on a previous day, assuming that with video cameras in front of every convenience store, gas station and street intersection, he’d be able to piece together a virtual Michael Moore documentary of the vehicle’s entire trip across town. The investigator canvassed every commercial establishment on the route that had an exterior video camera – and there were plenty – but found mostly just footage of doorways and pay stations.

“Everyone thinks cameras are recording everything in a store and outside it, but frequently they’re just focused on the cash register – and they’re actually monitoring employees more than they are customers.”

Traffic cameras are another pervasive fixture of city life that may not be as all-seeing as we fear. Arthur Dock, IT analyst for the Mesa Transportation Department – which currently employs the most cameras in the Valley, with 25 closed-circuit television and 61 video-based detection devices in use – says most of the video is watched by machines, impartial robots that only care about counting big metal objects.

“The CCTVs are watched by traffic management personnel to monitor current road and traffic conditions,” Dock admits. “But the video-based detection units are just sending back images to a computer that processes them to see if there are vehicles waiting to make a left turn. You can get images out of them, but typically we don’t bring back live video from those to view. Our business is, is the traffic moving or not? And if it’s not, what can we do to adjust the timing of the lights, and so on?”

In other words, most of us can feel safe picking our noses at a stoplight without worrying about the movie showing up on YouTube. “At least not in Mesa!” Dock laughs. “Because we’re not recording. Now, maybe if we were doing homeland security stuff, it’d be different. But we’re not. We’re monitoring traffic flow. And that’s really it.”

Behind the Curtain

In the recent action thriller Déjà Vu, Denzel Washington, playing a government agent investigating a ferry explosion in New Orleans, is both dazzled and dumbfounded by the experimental gadgetry demonstrated by an FBI surveillance team assigned to his case.

Tapping into video footage supposedly streamed by seven satellites orbiting over the city, the crew is able to zoom in on any location within the coverage area and poke around the scene from any angle. When Washington gives the technicians the address of a particular victim, they’re able to immediately pinpoint her building and even pass through closed blinds to reveal her movements, as recorded four days earlier, inside the apartment.

And why not? With popular online tools that now put satellite views of any place in the world on our cell phones, and now even interactive 360-degree photos of real city streets on our computers, the science fantasy of the movies seems only months ahead of what’s already possible on our desktops.

In fact, just around the same time the special effects were being added to the Denzel flick, employees at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California were watching a strikingly similar demonstration, put on by an Arizona State University researcher and a couple of astrophysics-trained camera developers, that was anything but science fiction.

Standing nervously before a panel of Google execs, an invited tech-cognizanti, Noel Gorelick, then the ASU associate in charge of the university’s Mars Space Flight Facility (which had helped supply data for Google Mars), pulled up some remarkable video on his laptop showing just how much could be seen inside the Google building from 400 feet away.

Using only his software and his partners’ innovative 3-D camera, the presentation included a shot showing a window shielded by partially closed Venetian blinds, followed by another that automatically dropped out the laser pulses returned by the blinds to clearly reveal the man sitting behind them.

“One of the cool things about this camera is it sees through all types of stuff,” Gorelick said, zeroing in on an office window shot from a camera atop a distant parking garage. “So if your office happens to be on the second floor there, we were watching you yesterday. Here’s a guy rolling a mail cart through; a couple more people right after him. If one of you guys had stood up, we’d have seen your head.”

Naturally, the Google geeks ate it up. Gorelick continued to share his ideas with the company after Google set up offices in Tempe last summer. Coincidentally, a mere six weeks after the launch of Google Street View, Gorelick left ASU to begin work at the corporation’s Mountain View headquarters.

Like all its employees, Gorelick is cagey about revealing what Google’s hired him to work on. “If you’d caught me last week, I might have been able to talk about it – speculatively, of course,” he responds by email. “But now I can’t.”

Should we be worried the next version of Street View will offer the ability to peep through window blinds or see behind trees, as Gorelick’s software enables? Probably not. The company’s well-known motto, “Don’t be evil,” binds it to an expected code of ethics.

Then again, there’s another company motto at Google, where employees work without cubicle walls and personal space is deliberately minimized. “We live out loud here,” said Jaime Casap, an ASU graduate and project manager at Google’s Tempe site. “All your goals and objectives are out in the open.”

Whether the outside world is ready to live as loudly under the Internet’s increasingly Orwellian eye is a different matter. Images found on Street View of men leaving strip clubs, executives sneaking a beer on lunch breaks and people engaged in apparently shady street transactions have prompted a flurry of editorials painting Google as only a slightly gentler version of Big Brother.

But Tempe’s webmaster Dave Kelley, for one, believes the two mottos are not mutually exclusive. After viewing the colorful goings-on along Mill Avenue for the decade that the city has been operating Sneaky Peak, Kelley is convinced more people avoid doing evil when they feel their actions are being wrestled out in the open via a camera.

“Look at the U.K., where they have 250 cameras in London to every 25 cameras in New York,” he says. “And they use them, and they save lives. Personally, there’s nothing I’m doing out there that I care if somebody sees or doesn’t see,” Kelley adds.

“If someone’s doing something on the street that they don’t want anybody else to see, I want to know what that is. Don’t you?”