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DARPA Contract Hints At Real-Time Video Spying
The Washington Post has a story picking apart a DARPA contract document to assert that advanced video spying from the sky is on the way. The contract in question was awarded last month and involves indexing video feeds and matching feeds against stored footage. The example given is for an analyst to ask for an alert whenever any real-time Predator feed from Iraq shows a vehicle making a U-turn. "Last month, Kitware, a small software company with offices in New York and North Carolina, teamed up with 19 other companies and universities and won the $6.7 million first phase of the DARPA contract, which is not expected to be completed before 2011. During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said... an expert in space and intelligence matters. 'Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public,' he said. The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches to a foot, depending on the collector and environmental conditions at the time, according to the DARPA paper."
selling umbrellas (or tinfoil hats?)
Well I guess that if I don't want to be caught, I just have to wait 'til it's cloudy to commit a crime...
Sorry to say that I just can't be paranoid about "spy satellites" in the cellphone era. Satellite imaging won't give real-time coverage of a large area, so it is useless for mass surveillance.
These days, there's no point inventing new privacy threats to worry about, since you already carry an radio tracking device, and there's already at least one database with a list of your recent movements in it. But by all means, do continue to keep your passport in a tin-foil wrapper...
The tao of democracy: the government you can vote for is not the real government.
Let everyone worry about the tracking and data gathering. It stops people from actually worrying about the slide to a goverment that might use it.
A total surveilance system that is NOT used is harmless. But a goverment that WANTS a total surveilance system can introduce one anytime they want to.
Focus on keep democracy going, not worrying about what some goverment might use someday. Prevent them from coming into power.
Remember that the phone-tapping done by the bush administration didn't use any new tech. Phone taps have been around since phones have been around. Hell, telegraphs and telex was tapped. What happened is that a goverment was allowed into power that used the tech.
Fighting the tech is impossible unless you want society to stop advancing. Stop the wrong people from getting into power instead.
Of course, that would require you to vote for someone on other grounds then the one promising you a tax cut or who seems to a be a likeable guy. America, were a guy looses the election because he just seems to smart.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches to a foot"
Although impressive to myself, who doesn't keep up with the latest and greatest satellite technology, this is hardly a cause for concern. Imagine yourself from above in four-inch pixels (assuming the accuracy of that statement and that the hardware can *actually* do that in non-laboratory conditions). Maybe a handful of dots total, one or maybe two pixels wide? You'd be able to "spot" a car, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell it's make, occupants, etc. You'd be able to spot a person wearing normal clothes in the open air (JUST) but you'd have a hard job telling *how many* people were in that blob of pixels and you'd have no chance at telling *who* they were and if they were adequately camoflauged... no chance. You'd spot more of their shadows, to be honest.
You *might* be able to spot if a vehicle in the desert does a U-turn if you have an AWFUL lot of processing power and a very limited area to monitor. You might be able to easily spot a rush of tanks on your position. You *might* be able to find some WMD's if they are being moved. But, to be honest, I don't see how this is any better than what the military have now except being "real-time" (which just seems to multiply the costs of everything from the satellite to its maintenance to the radio bandwidth required and the processing power needed with little benefit over "snapshot"-style systems if they are quick enough). Although real-time intelligence like this would have a place, it's hardly Enemy Of The State even if we assume a 2x "liar factor".
Useful in wartime - no doubt about it. Useful in peacetime - Highly dubious. And for the conspiracy theorists: Useful for spying on the people - No.
Seriously, how many science-realities do we have today that were science-fiction a few years (or decades) ago? Did the film writers or book authors get any royalties when corporations suddenly took out patents on their ideas?
Any technology will be abused in the wrong (i.e 'human') hands, so I'm just not going to bother complaining about the huge privacy concerns (I'm sure others will do enough of that, it's Slashdot afterall), instead, I'm going to say it's interesting to see another science-fiction technology become science-reality.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I can imagine the hats that look like a sidewalk from the top. Such paranoid people need to not do evil things that would cause someone to need to track you down or else stop watching conspiracy theory movies. You really think the government is going to start shaving an ID onto your head and force everyone to walk around without hats. The technology here is for tracking vehicles. Wouldn't be cool if they could employ this for the Amber Alert system too? Let them spend money working on these things.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
Just about everywhere is covered by conventional video cameras anyway. One more in the sky won't make any difference!
There seems to be a a lot of activity in this area (cf.: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/05/1157243) with not so much satellites as the basic technology but UAVs like the Predator, which - according to this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RQ-1) article is also operated by the CIA. With a service ceiling of app. 25,000 feet you should not be able to see or or hear then coming and it should be able to deliver much higer resolutions than four inches from an altitude of, say, 3000 feet. This could be useful for spying on people. BTW: The software does not care, if it is analysing videofeeds from a (relatively fast moving) UAV, a helicopter or your neighborhood CCTV camera.
Government requests be damned! Verizon charges everybody 10 bucks / month for GPS tracking; even the new debt clock can't handle that much!
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
4 inches?
They still won't be able to see me masturbate!
Only way to be safe!?
When a politician claims they don't know, don't recall or don't remember a particular event that inconveniently disagrees with the self portrait they're trying to paint, they should get one of these cameras to help them remember.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Those will be the new scheduled attack days I suspect. Nothing is foolproof.
Cool, let's network all the video into one big computer with a sexy voice...
The term I picked up on was "universities". Universities do not get involved in contracts. They live in the world of DAPRA grants, typically at level 6.1 and rarely 6.2 (old terms for "basic research" and "transition technology"). DARPA's grants are often blue-sky stuff: "Imagine that we had sharks with laser beams on their heads. How could we use them?" DARPA is encouraged to think forward even when the technology support doesn't exist. That's what the first "A" in DARPA stands for. So just because this is a system for doing real-time video surveillance (which is fairly common topicwise), and the blue-sky example is a keyhole satellite, doesn't at all mean that there's a keyhole satellite which enables real-time video surveillance. It just means the project manager is being encouraged to dream big.
I don't see why the Post considers this news. Our company considered bidding on this contract. The sensor technology is routine and has been around for years. Its true some higher res cameras are becoming available but the UAVs have always had video capability.
UAVs only operate in combat areas for air traffic reasons. They are not used for spying on civilians.
A DARPA story that doesn't mention Metal Gear Solid? Hold on, let me try: "What about cameras mounted to the ends of slow-moving rockets?"
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
- Reasonably attractive hooker to seduce target: $1000
- Hidden spy camera to record target's naughty shenanigans: $500
- Express Mail of blackmail photos to targets' home address: $50
- Making defense contractors look like overpriced idiots: priceless.
Looks like I'm gonna have to repaint the one finger salute on the roof of my home.
Geek Hillbilly
Movies like "Deja Vu" are meticulously designed to make this kind of surveillance acceptable to the public.
Would be very interesting to follow the money trail of films like that.
you had me at #!
you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell it's make, occupants,
It can be more important to know exactly where that car travelled for every moment of the past 48 hours, what addresses it stopped at, etc. In other words, the Feds already know who you are - they just want to know everything that you do, and high resolution surveillance is cheaper than gumshoes on the ground. Plus, car tracking and even pedestrian tracking seem feasibly automatable.
Yes, the implications of such a system are horrifying (combined with, for example, the continuous spying on domestic communications that is already in place). No 'free' citizen can accept constant government surveillance.
you had me at #!
I saw a demonstration of some interesting technology that can pick moving objects out of a digital TV feed and analyze their velocity vectors in real time. It is based (from what I gather) on manipulating and analyzing the B-frames from the data stream. I'm wondering if this is what they are trying to develop.
Have gnu, will travel.
Kitware was the company founded to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), an open source software system for data visualization. VTK has a huge C++ library as well as hooks for scripting for very rapid development. Who wouldn't want to build custom 3D views of their data?
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
How many mils will be surveyed, measured and recorded.
CHET-NUN
Did you say this system is coming? It already is here, and has been in use for some time.
American medical data has been sold to European nations for a long time now.
Full radio spectrum did you say? This means psuedo-scientific health data is being shared on US.
Obviously you all need one of my GEO-eyelet veils:
http://www.visual-vault.com/hawkshare/07bank/notices/sir-veil.gif
When i flip the bastards off?
This is REALLY getting out of hand.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Speak for yourself, some of us have NOT given up our privacy like you have.
Just because people bend over for violation A, doesn't mean we have to accept violation B, or C.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Will your opinion remain unchanged in 10 years, when the resolution increases by 20x?
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
I see more like low-alt. cameras picking gigapixel video on a secured zone, like bagdag.
if there is an explosion, you can select the tile of the image where attack has ocurred, then rewind until the attack and more. you see the terrorist parking the car, and then "split" the image. Image-A goes rewinded and you can track the terrorist to where the attack where prepared, and even you see other people entering the hideout and preparing the attack.
then goes to image-B on the attack moment, and forward to see where has the terrorist gone and where is her actual hideout.
but then you cash a politician involved, and he send killers to your house and make a conspiration against you, and... well, let this to spielberg! :D
That's what our cameras should be used for. Instead our employees want to spy on us, the owners, to keep us in line. WAKE UP PEOPLE!
*DrugCheese rants*
A very secretive/private girl I know at a very big university in a certain western state just got a grant (or part of a grant) to do something like this a few months ago. She has for the past few years been interning at a couple large defense contractors and also certain government agencies involved in space.
She didn't go into much and I don't want to give away any more details than I should (losing her funding would suck, she has already spent two years on this as her thesis work).
Basically she said they are working on what the article said, but more specifically tracking specific people via satellite.
I do not know if that means actively passing a person from satellite to satellite as they move into and out of area or what but it sounded pretty spooky.
Government requests be damned! Verizon charges everybody 10 bucks / month for GPS tracking; even the new debt clock can't handle that much!
Verizon charges you 10 bucks to tell you where you are. But they surely collect that information regardless of whether you purchase access to it. Meanwhile its still available to -them- to be handed over to government, data-mined, and otherwise sold to advertisers.
I'm sure there is all sorts of information you can determine from data-mining cellular gps data... what percentage of church goers visit mcdonalds vs burger king after service... how many different restaurants the user visits in an average month... what percentage of those meals were lunch vs dinner... the correlation between their rate plan and their restaurant choices...
How about using this technology to monitor traffic patterns during rush-hour or spot accidents the moment the occur? Certainly a satellite could detect the rapid deceleration of a vehicle hitting a pole, or a car spinning on ice, or a truck traveling the wrong way on a ramp, or spot a car careening off-road. How about just checking for speeding and then tracking the offender until a patrol car can apprehend them? Seems like boundless possibilities.