Community security platform for individually maintained home computers: The Vigilante Network Project

This paper describes a project for developing a community security platform that uses individually maintained home computers. In the initial stage of the project, a preliminary system was developed, which consisted of a commercial camera, free-software and an operation manual. Using the preliminary system, an operational experiment has been conducted with the cooperation of private homes in the historic town of Kiryu. The first goal of the experiment was to verify the effectiveness of the concept for the prevention of crimes. Many other social and technical problems, such as the protection of privacy and the extension of the system nationwide, are also discussed. The purpose of the project is to recreate, in the present day, a mutual watch system which widely existed in ancient Japanese communities, but in a much more powerful and flexible form with the aid of computers and the internet. The future prospects are also discussed in detail.