Surveillance on a starship

[Crewman47]

Just thinking the other day, do the internal sensors of Starships continually monitor every part of a ship for security purposes or do they do this in Starfleet. There's two instances that can argue for and against the idea and the first is in Trek 3 TSFS where Kirk views a recording from Engineering where he sees Spock giving a McCoy a mindmeld but then there's at least one other incident in that episode of Voyager where Lon Suder murders that Crewman in Engineering but Tuvok doesn't think to check for any type of surveillance to see who might've been in Engineering at the time implying that none exists.

So is there or isn't there surveillance on Starships?

 

[Timo]

I'd think visual recordings from key locations on the ship would be available, as shown in ST2 and "Court Martial". However, there probably isn't a surveillance AI routine that constantly goes through that material, because the computer can never quite tell where a person is when he or she abandons his or her commbadge. A separate search procedure has to be implemented at that point.

Still, many a crime has been committed aboard a starship, beginning with "Conscience of the King" already. Visual records should have immediately established the guilt of Lenore Karidian in that case, but apparently there were no cameras in the corridor where the phaser bomb was hidden - or even at the corner of Engineering where the attempt at Riley's life was made.

One possible theory: there is constant and detailed surveillance (visual records, personnel location, phaser activity monitoring) of all spaces of the ship, including the private quarters. However, it requires Admiral-level clearance to access this material in its entirety, for reasons of privacy. The related paperwork is far too cumbersome to allow for realtime solving of crimes.

Another possibility: only very few select facilities are under surveillance, again for reasons of privacy. Thus, only bridge visuals were available in "Court Martial", not ion pod visuals. Lenore Karidian could have gotten away with her crimes if the corridor she chose was an obscure one, if she was good enough a pickpocket and seducer when obtaining the phaser, and if the nook where Kevin Riley was reassigned was a really obscure part of Engineering that didn't warrant surveillance.

As for Voyager, where Janeway would have overridden most of the bureaucratic blocks, and where Main Engineering certainly should have been under visual surveillance, we might assume that so many of her systems (the ship's, I mean!) were fried for good in "Caretaker" that some would not have been repaired during the first two seasons yet...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Forbin]

There's surveillance if the plot calls for it, none if it doesn't.

 

[Timo]

So the Security Chief is in on it!?!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

Duty stations, such as engineering or the bridge, should, and really MUST, be monitored. Public areas (corridors, recreation areas, etc) should be monitored as well, aboard-ship. FYI, this is commonly done on college campuses, military bases, shopping malls, etc, etc, today, and there are good, sound reasons to do so.

Private spaces (primarily crew quarters), however, should not be monitored, IMHO. If they were monitored, then (and ONLY then) would I be at all concerned.

Operational Security is a real concern. Ignoring it would be sloppy and really unacceptable.

On the other hand, we see in TOS that there is surveillance in critical areas ("Court Martial" shows the bridge is very closely monitored) yet other critical areas (Engineering) seem to be monitored poorly, if at all.

It could be argued that Finney, as Records Officer, was more than capable of bypassing and "spoofing" the monitoring system in Engineering. They never explicitly said so, but they never denied it either. But it's very clear that they couldn't just turn on the monitoring camera for Engineering and see Ben Finney hanging out behind the big transformers... they had to use the "heartbeat reader" to find him.

So the TOS surveillance argument is both supported (bridge) and unsupported (engineering) in the very same episode.

Go figure...

 

[FalTorPan]

Cary L. Brown said:
On the other hand, we see in TOS that there is surveillance in critical areas ("Court Martial" shows the bridge is very closely monitored) yet other critical areas (Engineering) seem to be monitored poorly, if at all.

...

So the TOS surveillance argument is both supported (bridge) and unsupported (engineering) in the very same episode.

It also seems to be unsupported on the bridge as of "The Menagerie." When Kirk first sees the video footage of the Enterprise bridge from the Talos IV incident, he states that no ship records information at that level of detail -- or something similar to that.

 

[Timo]

...Which simply proves that ships do record information at some level of detail.

And we saw that exact same level in "Court Martial", so why is Kirk so amazed? Perhaps this is because the evidence in "Court Martial" was dramatically edited, with framings and zoom-ins, but this was plausible because the prosecution had done this editing - yet in "The Menagerie", no official prosecutor or other authorized person had tampered with the feed, and it still had framings and zoomings?

Alternately, the recorder only turns on during alerts, which means there would legitimately be feed from the ion storm of "Court Martial", but not from Pike's random banter with his bridge crew.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Other records of note:

-In TNG "The Drumhead" we see footage of a camera that was monitoring Engineering when their shiny new reactor chamber door blew out.

-The visual record of the USS Victory away team, before everyone turned into lizards.

-The bridge of the USS Defiant when the Jem'Haddar performed the first of many hostile takeovers, shown to the adolescent Jem'Haddar by Odo.

Mark

 

[Forbin]

Timo said:
...Which simply proves that ships do record information at some level of detail.

And we saw that exact same level in "Court Martial", so why is Kirk so amazed? Perhaps this is because the evidence in "Court Martial" was dramatically edited, with framings and zoom-ins, but this was plausible because the prosecution had done this editing - yet in "The Menagerie", no official prosecutor or other authorized person had tampered with the feed, and it still had framings and zoomings?

Alternately, the recorder only turns on during alerts, which means there would legitimately be feed from the ion storm of "Court Martial", but not from Pike's random banter with his bridge crew.

Timo Saloniemi

That kinda stuff was rampant in the 60s. In any show that featured "security camera footage" or early CCTV footage, that footage was always filmed, well-directed, professionally edited, etc. Even as a kid I would laugh at it - "Where was the camera getting this dramatic low-angle of McGarrett running to his car, and who's panning and zooming it?"

I think it was a Rat Patrol I was watching the other day. Chris George was looking at a Nazi column thru binoculars from a dune overlooking a road. They cut to his POV with the binoc mask on screen, then did a fast zoom in to a low-angle one-shot of Eric Braeden (er - Hans Gudegast) standing in the tank hatch. I'm thinkin', those are some damn binoculars for 1943!!

 

[Timo]

From the treknological standpoint, I see nothing wrong with a visual recording system that can edit its own material "dramatically" - perhaps highlighting movement or exceptional events, perhaps listening to subtle verbal cues from the audience.

Nor does it seem that the visual feed should be limited to a specific angle, or by the laws of optics. More probably, the recording is done holographically in the literal sense: the total 3D reality is recorded with, say, a thousand tiny cameras in each room, and the 2D visuals are then mathematically modeled out of that material. Thus, one can zoom in on a specific console from the angle that is the least obscured by the operator's hands, or take a peek under Uhura's miniskirt or observe Scotty's bald spot from directly above.

It's too bad that we are still sometimes shown conventional optics in use, such as in the Martine-Tomlinson wedding or in the hands of the EMH. Then again, we often use antiquated modes of recording today, such as having oil paintings done of us, or silhouettes cut, or black-and-white photographs taken. The couple in "Balance of Terror" may have opted for an optical camera recording of the events for sentimental reasons, even though they could just as well have asked for the regular surveillance feed that would have been of far superior quality and malleability.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Verbal cues..? Wait, so if Kirk was the only one making soft noises in "Court Martial", they would have spent the whole court time using the camera that looked down Uhura's top?

Mark

 

[David cgc]

Timo said:
And we saw that exact same level in "Court Martial", so why is Kirk so amazed? Perhaps this is because the evidence in "Court Martial" was dramatically edited, with framings and zoom-ins, but this was plausible because the prosecution had done this editing - yet in "The Menagerie", no official prosecutor or other authorized person had tampered with the feed, and it still had framings and zoomings?

I seem to remember the amazement being specifically that there was such detail in a record that was more than ten years old. Perhaps the AutoMovie Security System™ was a more recent development, at least in a form mounted in starships.

 

[Timo]

Kirk: "That's impossible. Mr Spock, no vessel makes record tapes in that detail, that perfect. What were we watching?"

and immediately afterwards

"Mendez": "Captain Pike, were any record tapes of this nature made during your voyage?"

There's no particular emphasis that the tapes are old, although that could perhaps still be read into the text if need be.

What impresses the audience here is "detail" and "perfection". It's not the sharpness of focus or the rich colors that could amaze them, because that's part and parcel of the many visual recordings we and they have seen before in TOS. So perhaps the "detail" and "perfection" refers to the fact that every trivial minute of the events is covered, instead of just crises from Yellow Alert up?

Then again, what we see of the old events prior to Kirk's exclamation of disbelief is an alert situation, with the klaxon hooting and the lights flashing. No different from the "Court Martial" feed in that sense.

Perhaps we have to conclude that no ship in the fleet makes visual recordings beyond having a single-viewpoint black-and-white still camera in the bridge ceiling taking photos every thirty seconds. That is, no ship other than the Enterprise, where Kirk has personally had a system of sixty high resolution color video cameras installed to record his heroic poses for posterity. It's only after these events that other captains indulge themselves in a like manner.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

You know, there's another way to think about this...

We're all thinking of the displays at flat, 2D television-type screens. What if it's a HOLOGRAPHIC RECORDING? And suppose... just suppose... that one of the fun bits with holographic "tapes" is that you can have a virtual camera that you can fly around in "real time" inside the recorded scene?

Maybe the zips and zooms and cinematics were done by the Court Reporter in each of those instances???

And maybe the comment was that the holographic records normally are a bit grainier, or maybe every tenth of a second instead of 600 frames-per-second like the Pike recording was (just for example)?

My only point is that we're applying our own, contemporary TV-based biases to something that might be, in "reality," a totally different thing.

Thoughts?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Wasn't there a brief blurb in "Dark Mirror" about how personal communicators were intentionally avoided for shipboard use - in the MU - because they made people too easy to track and (presumably) kill?