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The Pentagon Wants a 'TiVo' to Watch You
An anonymous reader writes "Danger Room, a Wired blog, today cites a study of future electronic snooping technologies from Reuters, written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it. 'The ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.'"
In the United States of America, government TV watches YOU!
I'm sorry, I had to.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
You watch TiVos
Geographically, would it be in Soviet Russia, by any chance?
...Welcome our new Hooveristic overlords.
On a serious note, since when as an analytical, scientific approach worked in catching bad guys. It's like C-3PO consistently panicking about the odds of a disaster happening while everybody else ( who isn't a robot ) uses their common sense and rationality without panicking, to get them through.
We all know that people are unpredictable. You can't apply scientific rationale to people.
Just my two cents.
The only reason this doesn't scare me is that I'm supremely confident that government red tape, massive budgetary blow outs and vendor selection based purely on campaign contributions will never result in a workable system.
Does the mindset of whoever wrote this creep you out too? It isn't about being religeous - it's about being Gods themselves and making you worship them.
So it well seems it's intended for military deployment to combat assymetric (and urban) warfare. That is to say to enable the military to seek out the offending insurgent/combatant after a martial event. When your local constable gets interested in this technology then it'll be time for you to worry. In the meantime keep an eye on the developments, but don't be alarmed just yet.
It's a shame, if they had chosen ReplayTV instead, they could automatically skip commercials.
For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source
Until you realise the source is in a rural area 50 miles past the first camera to see it.
"Anti-terrorism" cameras will not stop suicide bombers, nor will they even deter them. They're completely and utterly useless for their stated purpose, which means the government probably has no intention of using them for their stated purpose.
The top priority needs to be setting up these systems inside the White House and the Pentagon. Then the next time they blunder into a quagmire like this, we can scan the databases and quickly find out exactly who needs to be held accountable. Then the problem can be rectified: "It looks like we're going to have to dock your paychecks for a total of $5.0e11."
See the word "battlespace" in the description - that's DoD-ese for "battleground." They're talking about being able to go back and rapidly review/search recordings from satellites and other sensors monitoring combat zones. It's a very good idea - if you could track a car back to a house, you can then see who went in a out, and so forth. You could backtrack a small boat coming out of a sheltered hiding spot, and so forth. It's about time someone thought of this, frankly.
This isn't domestic surveillance that they're talking about.
What is supposed to happen, actually? Are we going to have cameras follow every person, 24/7? That means someone to study that footage, right? And someone to study the footage of them studying the footage of you? And....on and on.
It is clear such clinical monitoring would break down under its own weight - speculative follow-thru says the most logical approach is to give every camera the autonomous ability to decide if something you've done warrants being flagged. Happen in practice? Not hardly.
Back track from the scene of a car bomb explosion? How many cameras are you using? One or several? If several, where are they located in relation to the car? Points of the compass? Sure, if you know to watch the car from the beginning, in which case there is no point in following the arrow of time back to the start, right?
While THX1138 hinted at this and other B'Brother style tactics, it also tried to show why such a system simply isn't feasible. There are just too many ways of being defined as outside the box in terms of what such a system could handle. All it takes is one exception, and the system is no longer worth the time it took to draw up the prototype.
The title of this article is totally off. This is nothing more than a way to analyze battlefield intel better. It's got nothing to do with any kind of surveillance programs or anything other than being able to better catagorize threats and analyze data after a conflict.
This gives a whole new meaning to 'knee jerk reaction'.
Yes, but think of the defense contractors that contribute heavily to both political parties! Won't someone think of the defense contractors?
That kind of asymmetric warfare is what citizens would do against a repressive state regime.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
No, the citizens hate America. The government must protect America from its anti-American citizens.
I have a special on tin foil hats. Buy two and I'll throw in a free government conspiracy guide free. Buy four and you'll get the government conspiracy guide, AND the book "UFO's Exist" for the low, low price of $19.95 plus shipping and handling. In other news, Bush finally figured out what a pentagon was.
We could stop poisoning ourselves with floride, mercury, lead, aluminum and arsenic.
Flouride in water supplies is beneficial. The others aren't.
The entire pharmaceutical industry could decide to stop fucking everyone over and make the secrets of real whole health known. Simple cures for cancer, diabetics, and other diseases are well known to naturopaths.
Bullshit. Bull shit. Bovine excrement. Quackery. Pseudoscience. Fraud. Snake oil. No doctor on earth would hold back a cure for cancer or diabetes if such a thing existed. Bullshit artists preying on the terminally ill, peddling eye-of-newt potions and magical crystals, are the lowest form of life on the planet.
Software patents delenda est.
What?! The magical crystal I bought for 300$ from my local fortuneteller wont actually stop my cancer???
She promised in the tarot reading that my cancer was in remission!!
Bullshit artists preying on the terminally ill, peddling eye-of-newt potions and magical crystals, are the lowest form of life on the planet.
Oh yeah? I work in Marketing.
Your move, Trebek!
Triv
The military have been doing this (in a more limited fashion) for years. AFAIK it started with analogue VCRs being coupled to JSTARS radar output. With the VCR, they could track radar contacts (vehicles) over a longer period of time (hours).
For this sort of surveillance to be useful, you'd have to have 24/7 overhead coverage, either radar or optical. That's not something they're going to be able to sneak into a non-battlefield area (i.e. the US). Also, JSTARS coverage of the entire US would be prohibitively expensive.
It is not so much the doctors themselves I believe capable of this treachery, since doctors actually interact with the patients they'd be forcing to suffer, and few humans are capable of purposefully inflicting pain on a known victim for the sake of profit; rather, the pharmaceutical companies that have everything to gain from never-ending poor health.
When you never have to see the face of those you cause to suffer, it is easy to write off their suffering as unimportant.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.