Booze-thieves beware: Utah has its video eye on you

Liquor stores keep an eye out for anyone pilfering bottles off the shelf, and in Utah, where the state has a monopoly on the sale of alcoholic beverages, watching for thieves gets a boost from digital video surveillance technology over the state’s wide-area network.

Utah’s electronic eye, in the form of a network of IP-based video cameras, is focused on shoppers on the dozens of state-owned retail liquor stores which bring in about $100 million a year to the state’s budget.

“Someone will use a credit card to buy a can of beer and hide a bottle of tequila,” says Keven Perry, tech support specialist supervisor at the State of Utah’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (UDABC), citing a typical problem. But if someone filches a bottle, they can expect to end up as the star on a video recorded by the state of Utah.

The IP-based Toshiba Surveillix digital video system in each Utah liquor store includes small cameras that are motion-activated, capturing the activities of shoppers as they move about the store. With each store having a T-1 link back to the UDABC’s main data center in Salt Lake City, this captured footage of shoppers is sent back daily and stored in servers there. No one pays particular attention to this video footage until clerks and managers operating a liquor store notice that something is missing off the shelf during inventory, says Perry.

Inventory is maintained through the Windows-based point-of-sale system from SAP Triversity, in which the cash register streams data to a back-office computer and information is stored in an Oracle enterprise resource management system.

“At that point, if something is missing off the shelf, someone will file a report,” says Perry.

If a theft seems to have occurred, the IT staff at UDABC will work with managers to retrieve the stored video footage of the area of the store in the timeframe when the liquor was pilfered. It’s usually clear which shopper stole the item and the video may provide evidence to law enforcement.

“Sometimes we’ll see the same person again and again,” says Perry.

The state’s WAN is not only used by the state-run liquor stores for surveillance but for e-commerce as well.

“We allow restaurants and clubs to order over the Internet by connecting in to our real-time inventory if they have an account and password,” said Perry. About 400 do so in Utah today, ordering cases of liquor, sometimes using credit or debit cards.

With the state liquor stores using the high-speed WAN for critical e-commerce purposes, keeping an eye on the network for security ranks high at the UDABC. This is complicated by the fact that not only are private enterprises connecting into the state’s WAN but in addition, about 20,000 computers from other state agencies also use it, says Perry.

In the past, the UDABC simply monitored the state network using a variety of intrusion detection systems and sniffers. But during the past year, Perry says the IT staff started to take a more aggressive approach by installing an intrusion-prevention system (IPS) to block traffic that posed a threat.