Slashdot Mirror
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
Just about everywhere is covered by conventional video cameras anyway. One more in the sky won't make any difference!
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!
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.
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.
What are the people of Iraq considered to be?
Oh, I see, if you CALL someone something other than civilian, they're fair game. No way THAT can be abused.....
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.
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...