The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Electronic Image Database.
Law Enforcement Technology.- 1996.- November.- P. 56 57.
Even before the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, more than 15,000 color photographs were taken of the venues.
But, unlike photographs published in newspapers and magazines, these photographs documenting the progress of the Olympic Games were never available to the general public.
Obtaining these cataloged photographs was part of the FBI's Olympic site surveillance plan.
The goal of this plan was to create an image database that could be used by operational personnel in the event of any incidents (terrorist attacks, hostage situations, etc.) that might occur during the Games.
The more information law enforcement has before an incident occurs, the more effectively they can respond to it.
This information included photographs of the exterior and interior of buildings and stadiums, floor plans of the locations of rooms in 60 different buildings adjacent to the game sites. Particular attention was paid to the locations of foreign sports delegations from 197 countries, including 10,700 athletes.
Gathering the necessary data and presenting it in a form convenient for prompt use required a great deal of effort on the part of the FBI.
But while in previous years, events such as the Olympic Games required large quantities of paper documents to be transported to the venue by truck, including 15,000 to 18,000 20×25 cm colour photographs, in 1996 this task was made much easier.
The documents that required trucks to be transported were recorded in compressed form on Kodak Photo CDs and Writable CDs.
These disks were duplicated and delivered to various operational locations such as the Armed Criminal Apprehension Squad headquarters, the Rapid Response Teams, and the Atlanta and Washington, D.C., command centers.
Four CD-ROM based computer systems were used in Atlanta.
In addition, a special photo installation, controlled by a notebook-type portable computer with a CD drive, could be quickly used at the scene of incidents. A database of electronic images with indexing, searching and displaying information was created using Kodak's Quick Solve software.
The main goal was to ensure quick, operational access to information. Instead of manually searching for the required information in voluminous card indexes and files, a database of images registered in digital form made it possible to immediately obtain the requested information.
Law enforcement officers could request the required information using their computer keyboards.
The photographs of buildings with their phased layout recorded on compact discs had a special mark in the form of a circle, which contained frame numbers and arrows indicating the angle at which the shooting was taken.
All this made it easier to find the necessary frames of the image.
The image database also contained other important information, such as which law enforcement personnel were responsible for surveillance in certain locations, for the normal water and electricity supply, for the protection of telephone stations — everything that was important to know in a crisis situation.
Speeding up the process of finding the necessary information was one of the reasons that prompted the FBI to create the electronic image database.
An equally important reason was the ability of law enforcement personnel to study specific information before an incident occurred.
Tactical rapid response teams on duty could familiarize themselves in advance with the objects where they might have to act.
When it was necessary to have information in printed form or color photographs, three 8600 PS color printers from Kodak Digital Science were used.
Command centers in Atlanta and Washington were able to reproduce and view images on a large television screen.
FBI rapid response teams used the electronic image database for the first time during the Olympic Games in Atlanta. images.
It is expected that such a database will be used as a standard tool in the FBI's daily work.