The president of the company's Security Group, Israel Livnat, told United Press International in a telephone interview that expanding Raanana, Israel-based NICE's presence in the security market is a top concern. And this agreement, he said in a company statement, "opens the door for more large-scale security-related projects."

The system, Livnat told UPI, uses a multimedia approach to information-gathering. This includes video and sound recordings. The "multimedia unstructured data," as the company calls it, uses "very smart technology" to filter important clues from video and voice data, including "movements, certain (objects) in the picture, a voice signature, specific words, (or) a certain voice quality," he said.

"We can see an event from all angles, including who said what, and when. ... We're rather unique in the market," Livnat said.

When asked to give an example of how the NICE package might be used to stop a terrorist plot, he explained that most anti-terror law-enforcement techniques involve surveillance of "suspicious people."

"They communicate with one another, and our system helps to understand these webs of communication." Eventually, he said, investigators can identify the leader of the organization and gather information from interactions among members. He emphasized these are usually small, isolated cells that need to communicate with one another, so "understanding the process of the communication" is vital to cracking the organization.

The $4 million deal, signed with a government somewhere in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa -- the terms of the agreement prohibit Livnat from even narrowing the description down to one region -- is for "a solution to help it gather the data required to reduce the levels of crime, terrorism and other threats to security," the company said in a statement.

He noted the nature of this kind of deal is so sensitive, only one of the company's customers with this kind of system -- a Belgian police department -- has agreed to publicize its partnership with NICE.

The company also markets these analysis technologies as a kind of quality control for other organizations, such as 911 call centers and air-traffic control towers. The voice data technology points to the veracity of a 911 call, or the multimedia system can help the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration analyze close calls at control towers for what went wrong.

And, Livnat said, since all the data is saved, it can be used for evidence. "We can (put) all the evidence collected at the time (of the event), from all kinds of media, onto one disk," he said, and then it can be used in trials or investigations.

NICE was joined in making surveillance news this month by Tel Aviv-based MATE-Intelligent Video. MATE announced last week "the release of iSense/IM, an ... embedded device including built-in video analytics," a company statement said.

"This compact and cost-effective product automatically detects and counts people and cars via overhead cameras as they enter or exit an area of interest," the statement said.

MATE-Intelligent Video said that people counting via video surveillance was ideal for analyzing business traffic, while car counting via hidden camera "can assist the management of (parking lots) by estimating the occupancy on each parking level."

The company said that in addition to these everyday functions, its surveillance systems are "advanced technology (that) detects and analyzes potential threats and hazards, generating real-time alerts."

In the United States, one of the world's biggest markets for anti-terrorism technologies, the USA PATRIOT Act has famously included increased provisions for the use of surveillance by law-enforcement officers. The act was passed into law in late 2001, following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 of that year.

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