National Security in a virtual world
Virtual reality (VR) is becoming more common in public with increased awareness and adoption through the emergence of domestic gaming platforms like Oculus Quest. These platforms are now being used to enhance the training experience of law enforcement officers. By using virtual reality, trainers can safely expand the scenarios that can be provided to the officers.
It is now being used in training for hostage negotiation and counter terrorism, with NYPD even using VR to train officers on active shooting. There are several companies repurposing what were originally games engines to develop platforms that incorporate learning scenarios and enabling the tutors to tweak attitudes and aspects of the training to keep them varied, while repeatable at low unit costs. VR is being explored in the UK, and simulators are already in use for driver training, but the opportunities to support training for national security use cases are huge.
Another area where opportunities abound for law enforcement is in the use of augmented reality (AR).
As technologies are miniaturised and connectivity further improves its reach and bandwidth, the ability for the deployment of AR capabilities improves. Officers and the public are already very familiar with the use of body-worn cameras to record incidents, but now expand that capability to a more augmented capability that can be interacted with live by the officer (think more google glasses than minority report at the moment). The FBI has produced some research that suggested that, in theory, an officer equipped with AR capabilities could do as much work as three unequipped officers.
The Hollywood scenario that comes to mind is an officer scanning a crowd, using facial recognition software to identify individuals that then prompts the officer with the outstanding actions for that individual. This may be a future that never arises, due to strong privacy laws and groups that are concerned with balancing the rights of the individual with the new technology capabilities being deployed.
However, AR may find its niche where it is useful to have access to detailed information or processing capabilities in a physical location for example forensic evidence recovery. The ability to view a crime scene, and log all of the items in situ, automatically producing approximate measurements and locations of evidence, Translating foreign language materials, highlighting threats or risks, logging data, and possibly even enabling remote live processing of materials as they are captured, to improve expediency.
Crime and national security in the virtual world
Another area where our thinking about national security will need to evolve is the virtual world or metaverse. Facebook have recently publicly announced their excitement to explore this type of virtual platform with the launch of the metaverse which creates virtual towns and places.
As expected with a new platform, users are exploring capabilities and identifying an apparent lack of effective controls to conduct anti-social and criminal behaviour. For policing, this means that there is another platform where social interactions exist and where criminals can spread ideologies and target the vulnerable. Law enforcement will need to rapidly learn and understand the metaverse so they can decide how to supervise, investigate and enforce in this virtual world. It leads to an interesting question about how far does criminal responsibility extend in a virtual universe.
As discussed, the virtual world brings both opportunities and challenges to policing. Policing will need to consider them and then decide how it is going to respond to them.
Author:
Muz Janoowalla (Twitter Handle: @Statman_Who)
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.