Automatic surveillance systems against security threats

New threats to security have appeared in recent years: terrorism, organized crime, trafficking, smuggling, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the role of video and the Internet in spreading extremist propaganda is currently highlighted. The reaction to the new threats is slowed for the huge, unmanageable amount of available data about them. To contrast these new threats and their new “weapons”, the research in automatic surveillance technologies (i.e.: able to detect criminal or suspect behaviour without human help) has quickly advanced. Intelligence analysts in their daily fights are profiting of these new surveillance technologies (e.g. advanced CCTV and crawlers, text and video mining) to automatically analyze the content of video data streams, suspected web sites containing videos, blogs, emails, chat lines, instant messages and all other digital media detecting links between people and organizations, trends of social and economic actions, topics of interest also if they are “sunk” among terabytes of information. Examples of application are here presented.