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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
It's a shame, if they had chosen ReplayTV instead, they could automatically skip commercials.
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.
Yes, but think of the defense contractors that contribute heavily to both political parties! Won't someone think of the defense contractors?
How are you going to be able to run surveillance backward from a car bomb detonating to the origin point of the bombers -- or forward, following them to where they're hiding -- without a pervasive net of surveillance? And once you have the capacity to do this in a hostile environment, where you can assume that the opposing forces will place a priority on disabling the surveillance system, it's no stretch at all, given the track record of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst, to see the government deploying these systems in the US for our 'protection', where the populace would have much less incentive to disable surveillance (after all, if you don't have anything to hide, why would you object to someone watching you?) -- particularly since this link in TFA, where it's specifically stated "The primary application is for homeland security"; you might want to try reading more deeply than just a light scan of the first few paragraphs. The potential of this technology reminds me strongly of David Drake's dystopian story collection Lacey and His Friends, written back in the '70s.