DARPA Developing 'Combat Zones That See'

t0rnt0pieces writes "DARPA is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Officials claim that the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas, but police, scientists and privacy experts say the technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans. Combined with other technologies, such as software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide, the government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time. Read the news story and the contracting document."

Comments

That sounds a bit strange to me

[Advocadus Diaboli]

DARPA is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Officials claim that the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas

So I guess the officials can also tell us why the hell overseas cities should provide the camera installation for US troops to fight there more easily?
To install the cameras you usually need to control the city and to control a city in a military operations requires some fighting before. Looks like a perfect Catch22 to me.

dangerous trends...

[I Want GNU!]

The trends in the government toward an Orwellian society sinerely worry me. Ashcroft and Bush have exploited 9/11 in order to pass many new laws that curb the openness of American society. They do all this under the guise of "national security" -- and yet we are not any more secure -- the non-partisan Council of Foreign Relations recently put out a report, saying that "Nearly two years after 9/11, the United States is drastically underfunding local emergency responders and remains dangerously unprepared to handle a catastrophic attack on American soil, particularly one involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-impact conventional weapons. If the nation does not take immediate steps to better identify and address the urgent needs of emergency responders, the next terrorist incident could be even more devastating than 9/11."

Our state of government is corrupt. Politicians are being bribed left and right in order to allow the big-media to consolidate even more, in order to pass DMCA type legislation, and in order to pass acts such as the PATRIOT Act, which should have been named the Big Brother Act. They are even creating Orwellian agencies such as the Total Information Awareness program (renamed to the Terrorism Information Awareness system, in hopes that this would help them fool the public on its purposes).

This is a farce. We need a new leader who will restore American values to this country. I personally think Howard Dean is our best chance at restoring this country to what it was (a good example of what he stands for is in his speech titled "The Great American Restoration", but in all honestly, almost anyone would be preferable to the anti-American Bush cabal.

Re:The Real Question

[cranos]

Ah yes, the good old "Only the guilty need fear" argument, shame its a fiction.

Around the world we have countless examples of restrictions made in the name of national security actually being used against the country's own citizens. East Germany, Russia, China, most of the old communist countries and so on.

The actions of the Stasi and the KGB were all justified by the excuse of "National Security".

Re:spy r us

[I Want GNU!]

Of course, one more USA measure to control the rest of the world.

I understand your concerns, but please keep in mind though, that it's not Americans doing this. It's the Bush cabal. I'm American and I strongly believe in traditional American values and our Constitution. Bush doesn't believe in American values. He believes that everyone is a potential terrorist and he uses fiery rhetoric in order to scare people into supporting him. All these Orwellian programs are patently un-American.

In his speech "The Great American Restoration", Howard Dean spoke of how he wanted to restore America's values to the government, and I'm sure his thoughts would be of interest to you:

"But there is a fundamental difference between the defense of our nation and the doctrine of preemptive war espoused by this administration. The President's group of narrow-minded ideological advisors are undermining our nation's greatness in the world. They have embraced a form of unilateralism that is even more dangerous than isolationism.

"This administration has shown disdain for allies, treaties, and international organizations alike.

"In doing so they would throw aside our nation's role as the inspirational leader of the world the beacon of hope and justice in the interests of humankind. And instead, they would present our face to the world as a dominant power prepared to push aside any nation with which we do not agree.

"Our foreign and military policies must be about America leading the world, not America against the world."

But I thought the U.S. was bad!

[goldspider]

Every time an emerging system/technology that could potentially endanger privacy rights here in the U.S., someone steps up and mentions that such a system/technology is already in use in Great Britain.

However, for some reason, the U.S. is still considered by many here to be the Micorsoft-of-the-World. Why is that?

You think you can't be tracked at the moment ?

[dapprman]

Do you use credit cards, debit cards, cash point card ?

Use a mobile phone, use it lots ?

Any one of the above can be used to track you.

Use store cards, reward cards (don't know if you get these in the US, but most the big supermarkets in the UK have these), combined together with you credit/debit card records a reasonable profile of you could be put together.

Technology is cool, with live by tech, we die for tech, but the same technology also traps us in an observable, trackable society.

Total Information Overload

[anubi]

So we snoop on everybody... Geez, who has the time to sort through all this stuff?

Already, I am way too swamped with information I can't process it all, and many businesses I have to deal with ( insurance companies and anything to do with retirement investments ) know this and send me reams and reams of meaningless data.

Ever tried to read those phone-book prospectus they send? Or tried to understand whats really covered in that insurance policy? Or know what you should do with those proxies?

So somehow the government is going to collect and store all this data on all of us. How many of us will be needed to snoop on the rest of us? How many of us will be actually earning our keep, rather than coercing (taxing) it away from someone else? Will our economy, already crumbling from the effects of our inefficiency, absorb yet more non-productive loading? We are already running a helluva national debt. I know we think Joe Taxpayer is going to somehow foot the bill for this whole thing, but I get the idea we are kinda in for a surprise similar to the one some astronauts got when they tried to push some overstressed things beyond their limit. Once the infrastructure collapses, we may have to start off at a very low level again. What scares me is that it seems to me that technology has outpaced our means of maintaining it without a sophisticated infrastructure in place to do so. Given the resources of a machine shop, could you produce anything you needed to keep cars running?

I have large areas of my life in collapse already from not "making time" to pay due diligence to numerous busyworks. ( I put "making time" in quotes, because I really can't make time, I only can divert it from something else. ) - I simply can't see where we as a public can afford all this busywork trying to keep tabs on everybody else.