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."

Comments

one can make a killing

[ionix5891]

selling umbrellas (or tinfoil hats?)

Re:one can make a killing

[Spazztastic]

And don't forget removing fillings! It's all a conspiracy by the MLB!

Re:one can make a killing

[Rob the Bold]

Time to paint "FU Bushtard!" on the roof of yer house...

They coulda read that from satellite. Time to paint it on your car roof and embroider it on your hat. Me, I'll just take a sharpie to my poor bald head.

Re:one can make a killing

[Dare nMc]

well paint the key 0x09 F9 ... C0 Then they will have to blur out your house, or be in violation of the DMCA. (or arrest you, and paint your house; charging you government contractor rates to do so)

Re:Cloudy

[Anonymous Coward]

the one time a invasion a privacy issue comes up and i'm proud to live in the UK

Verizon protects from being tracked by GPS phones

[ToadMan8]

Government requests be damned! Verizon charges everybody 10 bucks / month for GPS tracking; even the new debt clock can't handle that much!

I'm safe anyway

[aliquis]

4 inches?

They still won't be able to see me masturbate!

There's a perfectly good use for this technology

[mmalove]

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.