I am reading a cold war novel about a communist “selective listener” who has the job of discerning which embassy personnel to listen to in an apartment building. It’s very old in its concepts, but it had me thinking about the latest issue with print cartridges from Yemen.

Are our systems today sophisticated enough to discern the differences between tampered and factory sealed products? Are the inventory systems used to track packages capable of isolating potential threats?

I am a great believer in technology, but it feels like the government did most of the work without relying on computer systems.

In the novel, the selective listener position was created when they realized collecting all the recordings and processing them all was not giving timely information.  The listener is caged in a sound proof room in the basement of the building. The nervous breakdown rate is tremendous as the listeners have a tendency to adopt the paranoia that the people who have voices on the other should maintain.

We might fair better given the facts that distance and quality are achieved thanks to the Internet. These days we have enough processing power to enable “listening devices” to be set with thresholds and alarms. So the selective watcher can be called upon once characteristics are identified. In the selective listeners case a hunch was often his best guidance.

However the amount of video surveillance systems being deployed makes we wonder if we already have selective viewers? I would like to believe that my government has all these systems I see in the movies and TV, but if Jason Bourne can thwart them, who else can?

We have a tendency to have knee jerk reactions after these attacks and I heard that I will not be able to pack print cartridges. I am glad we did not block tennis shoes after the failed Christmas attack.

When I think about Security and the Certified Information Systems Security Professional [CISSP] training, it requires all the layers to be covered from physical to application. 

When thinking about this latest attack, what systems were accessed to track the planes and the packages?

While I want to believe in developing systems, I know that they have enabled selective hijacking of materials.

I want to celebrate companies like Bridgewave who have been used to do video surveillance by some municipalities. 

Right now, I believe the most sophisticated part of a security strategy should be the people running it, but often that is not the case, so here are some tools that may help.

3VR                       http://www.3vr.com/
AgentVI                 http://www.agentvi.com/
Aimetis                 http://www.aimetis.com/
Bikal                      http://www.bikal.co.uk/
BRS Labs            http://www.brslabs.com/
Cernium               http://www.cernium.com/
Clickit                    http://www.clickitinc.com/
EMZA VS               http://www.emza-vs.com/
EPTASCAPE        http://www.eptascape.com/
Guterbrueck         http://www.geutebrueck.com/index.php?wai=&fenv=2&fver=10.&flang=
IOImage                http://www.ioimage.com/?p=home&ClusterID=720
March Networks  http://marchnetworks.com/
Mate IV                   http://www.mate.co.il/
NICE                      http://www.nice.com/video
ObjectVideo (News - Alert)          http://www.objectvideo.com/
Sightlogix               http://www.sightlogix.com/
Tyco                        http://www.tyco.com/wps/wcm/connect/tyco+home/Home/
VIA (News - Alert):SYS                  http://www.vas-gmbh.com/
VideoIQ                  http://www.videoiq.com/
VideoMining          http://www.videomining.com/
Verint (News - Alert)                      http://verint.com/corporate/
Vident                     http://www.vidient.com/

If you are someone who sits in front of these systems, I would love to hear you speak at ITEXPO (News - Alert) East in Miami, Fl, Feb 2-4.

I will be featuring a discussion about video surveillance in M2M.

I am not sure the people working with this gear have the same embracing of open dialogue as the IT security types do, so if you just want to hang in the audience we will understand.

But I have to warn you we will be keeping our eyes on you.