- Will the hourly chimes of Big Ben in the Palace of Westminster in London, England, soon have to be toned down?

Westminster city council wants to monitor noise in the area by attaching Wi-Fi microphones, hooked into the Net, to lamp-posts near alleged noise trouble-spots.

“This could make a really big difference,” This Is London quotes the council’s Steve Harrison as saying. “The idea is that we can pre-empt people having to call us - if the monitor hears a disturbance it lets us know.

Eventually, the wireless network, “will cover the whole of Westminster and be used by workers wherever they are.” At the moment, “by the time a noise protection officer arrives on the scene, the noise may have stopped,” the report has Harrison saying.

This would not, of course, be a problem with Big Ben. Nor would noise protection officers checking complaints that Big Ben’s hourly chimes were disturbing peoples’ sleep have to bother with Wi-Fi spy mics.

They'd simply go for a coffee and return just before the clock struck 12. This would give them plenty of time to measure Big Ben ‘s decibel levels without having to fix costly high-tech listening devices to near-by lamp-posts.

It would also negate the possibility of Big Ben’s strikes reverberating through the WI-Fi spy mics, resulting in serious injury to listeners’ ear-drums and causing Westminster council’s computer system to crash.

“Noise monitoring and CCTV are just two of the initial applications, and the great advantage is that we can move these sensors to wherever they are needed,” says the story.

It doesn't give examples of other uses.

However, p2pnet has learned that Big Music's RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) are investigating the possibility of having Wi-Fi spy mics installed in universities around the world to aid them in their detection of file-sharers.

"School staff in listening stations in each institution would hear the copyright violators as they illegally downloaded music files," says RIAA president Cary Sherman.

"It would save us the expense of having to pay companies such as Bay TSP to find IP addresses. We'd then be better able to serve the US education communities by suing more of their students as part of our on-going music marketing and PR programs."

See:-
This Is London - Microphones to catch noisy neighbours, May 3, 2005
Bay TSP - Big Brother Ishikawa, p2pnet, May 3, 2005