Richard Kemp director of group security on the Canary Wharf Estate for the Canary Wharf Group plc has taken charge of what is believed to be the first security scanning system designed to detect suicide bombers by ‘peering’ through clothing such that it can recognise hazardous liquids or chemicals, person-borne explosives or bomb-making components even if the individual being scanned has hidden them under clothing or behind a bag.
The system at Canary Wharf is part of a wider anti-suicide bombing project (codenamed ‘Nemesis’), and uses ‘superhuman vision’ technologies to literally see straight through people as they enter their offices or perhaps one of several retail areas now open at the Wharf.
According to Kemp, monitors attached to hidden CCTV cameras can scan from very long distances for objects like guns and knives, and may even be used to detect drug couriers by spotting their ‘wares’.
This all-new device is manufactured by Oxford-based ThruVision, and is totally reliant upon the still-emerging science of TeraHertz waves (or T-Waves) designed to provide more detailed imagery than the average X-ray scanner .
To counter the privacy campaigners who would protest about such a system at the drop of a hat, ThruVision’s machines are purpose-designed to ‘blot out’ a person’s anatomical details. Scientists who have worked with this technology are 100% confident that the T-Waves can distinguish “Semtex from modelling clay, and cocaine from sugar”.
In operation, the system works to a fairly simple regimen. The cameras dotted around Canary Wharf Estate are monitored from a brand new Control Room (one of several on site, in fact). The footage is scanned continuously by security officers who, on spotting any suspicious individuals, will then train the scanners on that person. If the T-Wave scanner shows the individual is carrying items that could be explosives, operatives will then radio covert security personnel and members of the police service who’ll conduct their own investigations.
Kemp an OBE and former senior member of the Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee and his predecessor, Richard Flenley, have ensured that in-house security personnel are thoroughly trained and educated in behavioural pattern recognition so that they can understand the body language of the would-be suicide bomber. “Canary Wharf is the first installation where the TeraHertz technology is being used to monitor public areas. This is a tremendous step, and a definite milestone when it comes to dealing with today’s threat of person-borne suicide attacks,” commented Kemp.
Speaking to The Sunday Times about the ThruVision installation (issue dated Sunday 5 November), Canary Wharf Group spokesperson John Garwood explained that the T-Wave project is designed to reassure companies on the Estate including HSBC and The Bank of America their staff and members of the public who shop/dine/pass through the area that Canary Wharf is a safe zone in which to be. “It is not a response to a specific threat,” said Garwood.
