In the wake of the bombing at last year’s Boston Marathon, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials stepped up their quest to find ways to collect photographic and video evidence from the general public rapidly and efficiently.
“The Boston bombing showed us that we clearly weren’t prepared for a big event,” said Capt. Shaun Mathers of the department’s Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau. “That accelerated our time line on the project.”
Though it launched a nationwide search for a technology to aid in its investigations, the department found the answer was closer than anticipated. Conversations with Culver City’s Citizen Global initiated shortly after the Boston bombing yielded a modified platform called Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository, or Leedir. The service launched last week.
“It’s an opportunity to have more eyes on site for us,” said Cmdr. Scott Edson of the department’s Technical Services Division, with the ultimate goal to identify potential suspects or suspicious devices as part of an investigation. “In those situations, the flag-waving public wants to catch these terrorists as bad as we do.”
The platform allows witnesses to send photos and videos of major emergencies or crimes to be analyzed by law enforcement.
Nick Namikas, Citizen Global’s chief executive, said the platform had been rolled out to a small number of law enforcement clients so far. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department is using the app to examine footage of recent spring break riots in Isla Vista.
Citizen Global’s crowdsourced photo- and video-sharing service had its origins in its co-founders’ work in nonfiction TV production. Namikas said he and co-founders Rob McFarland and Paul Laussier launched Citizen Global in 2009 after realizing the huge potential of online video.
“It became clear to us that the future of media production would be a model in which the audience would be invited to co-create the programming that they were consuming,” Namikas said.
So they built a platform to do just that and patented the technology. To date, the company has received more than $18 million in funding from a pool of private investors, whom he declined to identify. It launched SendUs in June 2013 to focus on brand and media clients.
It has provided its platform to clients such as Singapore Airlines, “American Idol” producer Fremantle Media, Ford Motor Co. and Peugeot. The company also works with political campaigns in Latin America. He declined to say what its revenue was.
For its Leedir clients, Citizen Global has adopted a variable pricing model.
For large-scale events, those that involve multijurisdictional emergencies that cover five square miles or during which a minimum of 5,000 individuals submit content, the service is free to law enforcement. A fee is charged to agencies when they use the service during events that don’t reach that threshold. Namikas said the charge could be as little as $200 a month in those scenarios, depending on how often an agency uses the technology.
Key to its success, however, is the app’s penetration among the population of potential witnesses. LASD’s Edson said law enforcement can get the word out about Leedir immediately after an emergency through the Amber Alert process, suggesting witnesses submit content via the Leedir website or mobile app.
Once a photo or video is sent, the data flows through Citizen Global’s software system and sits on a cloud drive. The interface, which only designated law enforcement personnel can access, allows them to organize it into categories such as date and time taken, location or subject matter.
“We could be looking for anyone wearing a white hat,” Edson said.
Privacy concerns
The Leedir interface allows users to submit content anonymously if the law enforcement agency opts to enable it. LASD allows anonymous submission, but GPS data is still tagged to the file.
If an individual does not send data anonymously, Edson said the witness could be called into court.
Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights advocacy group, said there’s a big question as to whether media submitted anonymously would be admissible in court. Defendants, she pointed out, have the right to challenge evidence against them during trial.
“With an anonymous source, you lose that right,” Lynch said.
Looking back on the hunt for the Boston bombers, Lynch wondered how big a difference Leedir would actually make to investigators.
“The agents were able to capture the suspects relatively quickly without this type of technology just by asking local businesses (for surveillance videos),” she said. “There’s an open question about how necessary it is.”
Still, Frank Zerunyan, an attorney and professor of the practice of governance at USC’s Sol Price School of Public Policy, said he didn’t think privacy concerns would stop people from using Leedir if they think it would help authorities catch criminals.
“I don’t see that as a major impediment,” he said. “The cause is grander.”
