From CNN:
When her baby girl takes an afternoon nap, or on those nights when she just can't sleep, Sarah Andrews, 32, tosses off her identity as a suburban stay-at-home mom and becomes something more exotic: a "virtual deputy" patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border. From her house in a suburb of Rochester, New York, Andrews spends at least four hours a day watching a site called BlueServo.net.
There, because of a $2 million grant from the state of Texas, anyone in the world can watch grainy live video scenes of cactuses, desert mountains and the Rio Grande along Texas' portion of the international border.
When Andrews spots something she deems suspicious -- perhaps a fuzzy character moving from right to left across the screen or people wading through the river with what appear to be trash bags atop their heads -- she and the site's 43,000 registered users can send e-mail messages straight to local law enforcement, who then decide whether to act.
First off, it is a very trivial thing to add a software motion sensor to a webcam -- any movement in a certain area will set off an alarm. So this kind of crowd-sourcing is completely unnecessary and a waste of time. I can't help but think that e-mails from these "virtual deputies" go straight to /dev/null.
However, if this is some elaborate plan to keep racists and various wingnuts who are scared of the "brown people" to hunker down in their bunkers and glue themselves to computer monitors, then perhaps it's a good idea after all.
