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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
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.
"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."
No more "Hooveristic" than a camera at the local Quickie Mart. An action is filmed, the data trail is followed backwards until something useful is found.
"We all know that people are unpredictable. You can't apply scientific rationale to people."
This is not about predicting them, it is about recording what is done in public space and using it to trace activities back to source.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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.
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.