“Walk-Back Technology: Dusting for Fingerprints and Tracking Digital Footprints.”

In January of 2010 Dubai security consultants ran a series of image-sequences captured by CCTV and phone calls through advanced computer algorithms to connect a trail of digital dots which confirmed that senior Hamas military leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had not died not of natural causes in his hotel suite but was assassinated by a large team of covert operatives. A new category of image-analysis has emerged which is generally referred to as “walk-back technology”. Walk-back is a recombinant technology that works primarily with advanced facial recognition software and biometrics in combination with data-tracking to identify and plot the movement trajectories of multiple entities within differentiated spaces over time, their points of crossover, convergence and dispersion in order to play back and schematise a set of actions in relation to a chain of events.