Slashdot Mirror
Blimps Monitor Crowds At Sporting Events
Death Metal tips news about how defense contractor Raytheon is adapting military-style surveillance packages for use aboard blimps at public events like the Indy 500. "Until recently, Raytheon's eye-in-the-sky technology was used in Afghanistan and Iraq to guard American military bases, working as airborne guards against any oncoming desert threat. Using infrared sensors and a map overlay not unlike Google Earth, the technology scans a large area, setting important landmarks (say, the perimeter of a military base), and constantly relays video clips back to a command center. If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera — all from a mighty-high 500 feet." Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is shopping it around to police departments and other organizations that might want to keep an eye on large gatherings of people.
Silly Raytheon.
There aren't going to be any terrorist attacks.
You just throw money at congressmen.
But seriously, this is horseshit. The only bad guys they catch will be the ones up in the nosebleed section sitting alone with their girlfriends who are discretely giving them head or playing "bouncy-horse" on their laps.
In Transformers 2, we are faced with the possible annihilation of the human race at the hands of the Decepticons. The scary thing is that these robot/aliens take on forms that make them blend in with our everyday environment. We don't see the threat because the threat is masquerading as part of our normal world.
"The airship is great because it doesn't have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness," says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon's Integrated Defense division.
Oh, okay. As long as we don't feel like we're being watched, everything's all right then.
Excuse me? Isn't the whole idea of a good spy not to make the targets feel like they're being watched? Is it okay for foreign agents to get copies of classified documents as long as we don't feel like they're doing it?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
As long as I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The problem is in the abuse of this, like the footage that came out of the police using their night surveillance equipment to spy on individuals having an evening with a lady in their penthouse.
So as long as abuse is monitored and actively discouraged, what's wrong with being watched while you're in public?
Considering the fact that we've had so many problems with stadium slaughterings and bombings.
oh wait... i ate too much scramby eggs w/ sarcasm on the side.
Lol @ excessive response to lesser problems.
When I read the title, I thought this was about donut-eating cops.
Never mind.
Have gnu, will travel.
Ah, that explains everything.
Like a car, for example. Do you think you could work a car into your analogy somehow? This is Slashdot, after all.
Using traditional slashdot logic, I have arrived at the conclusion that this must be bad... somehow.
Then again, haven't they always had those "weather satellites"?
"The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games." - Eugene Jarvis
Wonder how many of these were flying over the skies of Pittsburgh and Detroit last night?
The fact that this is in yro makes it sound like someone thought it would be a privacy issue, but I don't see why. The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc., where they don't have any expectation of privacy. Viewing from 500 feet and at a high angle, with a field of view wide enough to take in the whole crowd, they're not going to be able to identify individuals. They propose zooming in to a particular region if there are gunshots or something, and maybe then, if the angle is appropriate, they could get some kind of view of an individual's face, although it seems unlikely. What makes surveillance like this scary is if it (a) goes into places where you do have an expectation of privacy (like the Obama administration's plans to read email that crosses international borders), (b) is ubiquitous (as it is in the UK), (c) raises the prospect of aggregating data in creepy ways (like being denied health insurance because you buy too much vodka with your preferred customer card at Albertson's), or (d) forces us to take the government's word that it isn't going to be used more than they said (like the Bush administration's wiretaps). The blimp concept doesn't seem to lend itself to any of these.
Find free books.
There was a book with a movie followup about putting a bomb in a blimp over the super bowl.
Looks like it just got easier to do that.
Who watches the watchers?
I wonder if they offer cool tech for us regular citizens to watch over the authorities. Kinda doubt it.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
Raytheon is a for-profit corporation in a country where everything is for sale including the country. They are just trying to make a profit off of the pop-fear of domestic terrorism.
Try to change the culture of "profit first" above anything else and educate the masses if you want to never see programs like this again.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Doesn't this make the blimp an obvious target for anybody who really wants to do mischief?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Probably a bad idea. This is known in the military as the "Great Squad Leader in the Sky" syndrome (a phrase coined by David Hackworth, one of the greats of small-unit combat), and has been since Vietnam. Leadership from a helicopter overlooking a combat zone sounded like a great idea; at last, the commander could see everything. In practice, it works very badly.
Piping vast amounts of imagery back to a command center is popular with commanders and politicians, but not with grunts. It's useful for finding enemy activity, but not much help once the enemy has been engaged.
It turns out that the technology the people on the ground really like is small robots. Sending in a robot first in urban warfare is very popular with the troops. Nobody likes going into a possible ambush or booby trap several times a day. Eventually the odds catch up with you.
If there are terrorist attacks in a stadium, I think video footage BEFORE the gun or bomb noise would typically be of greater interest than the footage after.
It'll take about 0.5 seconds for sound to travel the 500 feet up to the airships.
Thus all that fancy expensive tech might end up giving you just lower res pics before the camera zoomed and focused in and got videos of everybody except the culprits.
How expensive is that system going to be?
If it's in the millions and I was seriously going to be monitoring stuff, I'd rather spend the money on more hires cameras that are always running, than some fancy "pointing" system with fewer cameras.
The summary forgot to mention a shocking revalation from the article, where Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation talked about their choice of operating system:
Now we know who's been trolling Slashdot!
Seriously though, in the entire history of modern stadiums, is there really enough of a threat to warrant constant surveillance of that kind? How many millions of people go to stadiums each year for games and races, and how many are killed, blown up, stabbed, or raped, 0.01%?... if that? And are these blimps really going to prevent that from happening again? I doubt it.
The eye-witnesses combined with the usual surveillance (guards, cameras, at the gates, ticket centers, etc) is likely quite sufficient in tracking anyone who blows something up or kills someone, and probably even better at tracking down people who may have planted something there days or weeks beforehand when the blimp wasn't even there.
Besides, your example is excluded almost entirely from this scenario, that wasn't a normal event, it was a large gathering of people essentially forced to that location which just happened to be a stadium, in a rather intense point of time, the same sort of stuff would have happened no matter where they were, and the military and whatever else was already involved and would have brought their own surveillance equipement, not called in the survaces of some private blimp.
Call me silly, but I think something like this would have been far more effective if they had just shut up about it. I mean, I am not all for big brother, but if they are gonna do it, it's going to be far more effective if no one knows about it.
You are one of them authority questioning liberal manhating feminist anarchistic Stalinistic satanists aren't you.
The Long Now Foundation
"If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera."
Note to self: if ever wanting to defeat the system, remotely or have a friend, set off a string of fire crackers somewhere else while I carry on unwatched.
"Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is..." hoping customers won't be put off by a system that falls for the equivalent of "Look! Elvis!"?
Combine this technology with the techniques used in the DIY Arduino Blimp Drone project discussed here before, add some offensive capabilities, and create our own surveillance droids to you know, keep the neighbor's kids off our lawn.
Agreed. Also, anyone seriously criminal would just shoot at the blimp, possibly from miles outside the stadium.
Surveillance isn't ubiquitous in the UK.
Not unless you're one of those folks who think UK=England, and England=London. Of which there are quite a few.
(Actually I've never quite understood why people mix up the UK and England as being synonymous, any ideas?)
Mind you I accept there is too much surveillance over here.
And the drone would be cheaper.
Just getting a blimp to the site would cost more and require way more advanced planning and advanced notice.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You DO KNOW that the Superdome rumors were ALL proven false don't you?
And you DO KNOW it has a DOME, rendering blimps ineffective, don't you?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The only bad guys they catch will be the ones up in the nosebleed section sitting alone with their girlfriends...
I believe the scenario is Alfred Hitchcock's:
The crowd at a tennis match is following the action.
Back and forth, back and forth, their heads and bodies constantly on the move, bobbing, twisting, in unison with the play.
All but one....
The killer is in the crowd, but he is not truly part of the crowd, and that is a subtle and important distinction.
It can be a useful - practical - distinction.
Something you can see, something you can act on.
So ? They will just raise taxes to pay for it. Remember folks, its 'for the children'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Using high-tech blimps to spy on sporting crowds is a fantastic idea to fill the gap until our intelligence services work out some way to get their own people into the crowds of these events, but to do that they would need to crack the intelligence crown jewels and figure out how and when these events will be held. It's great the things that government and the military industrial concept can achieve that a lesser mind might be tempted to do on the cheap.
And to the NSA guy sneering at this post, why aren't you doing something about bin Laden instead? He's on the Afgani-Pakistan border. Everyone knows it. The Daily Show event did a live cross from there. Or don't you guys get cable?
Just getting a blimp to the site would cost more and require way more advanced planning and advanced notice.
Huh? Blimps are already often at these sites. If you decide to hold a convention in Paris, and someone comes up with a plan involving putting cameras on the Eiffel Tower, how much money do you allocate to getting the Eiffel Tower to Paris?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
... it's illegal in the US to fly an airship less than 1000 feet above a gathering of people, or less than 1000 feet above the highest obstacle within 2000 lateral feet of the airship.
Like a football game or political rally, you can be expected to be monitored by police, event security and the media.
blimps have been at football games with cameras for 49 years. The idea of using blimps for anti-terrorism purposes is not scary nor is it that big of a news story.
"People shoot at the Goodyear blimp all the time."
It would be scary to ride in the blimp.
By chance, in many cases Goodyear or some other company is already sending a blimp to many of these kinds of events. I'm sure they wouldn't mind mounting some equipment on it for a small fee...
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
not *them*, us! :D
Requiem for the American Dream
ps. I hear there's more futurama in the pipeline, yay \o/
Requiem for the American Dream
There are less than 5 Goodyear camera blimps in the US.
So your definition of "many" is rather flawed.
No one is proposing to use existing blimps.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You have a point, but I don't think the problem is so much the 'for profit' bit as the 'country for sale' bit. Government in bed with (selling out to) corporations is textbook fascism. Politicians who love their country would not be selling it out to the highest bidder. Then again, politicians tend to love power not their country.
Bottom line here is that there are great constitutional safeguards against this. The people just forgot that *they* are the government (you know, government of the people bit) so they just let the buffoons on the hill do whatever they want without demanding any accountability.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I must have missed the announcement... when did Slashdot add the new Your Rights Outside section?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Riots. Tend to happen every big soccer game.
Someone tried to remove the profit motive once. Soviet Russia, called it was I think.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How come this didn't get sold to North Korea? I can already see the implementations there. Gatherings of one or more persons on a street corner are illegal. Actually maybe this thing needs a !NK and !2people tag.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yes, however they have increased security, and increased security, and they still happen.
So, basically the result is, they add some of these blimps to soccer games, riots still happen, their choice of action now is to add more blimps, riots still happen, so they add more... as well as adding more regular security, eventually people stop going because it's no longer entertaining or pleasurable, or people bring bigger weapons/motivation and turn attacking blimps and guards into the riot, people end up going just to attack the security, or the "games" go underground, where they become even more dangerous.
They'd probably be better off having a sort of mosh pit, regular seating for the passive observers, some caged no-mans-land for the people who take it far too seriously, but then who decides who goes where? Or you could drug everyone as they enter, or make them wear electric collars... fun stuff...
The point was "profit first, above anything else", not removing the motivation for profit. There are higher priorities than profit.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
intimidating.
It may not be for most people but when the watchers can follow everybody many will think differently.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Minnesota consists of the Twin Cities and... well... nothing much worth noting.
I don't know, I like the North Shore. I haven't yet but I'd like to check out the Boundary Waters as well.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
"...In other news, Goodyear and Raytheon announced a partnership that promises to increase national security by 107% over the next 8 years. The new system, designed by Raytheon, is expected to be in service once final miniaturization is completed. Currently, Raytheon is testing new light-weight designs with great success. The newest design attaches to the nose piece of the Goodyear blimp..."
http://www.feldmanbd.com/GoodyearBlimpCrash.jpg
He said essential liberty for a little temporary safety, don't mix it up.
I don't recall the exact phrase but it still applies. I bet the Gestapo and KGB would of loved these technologies. Some may, no will, say but the US won't abuse them however history has shown the government or people in the government will abuse them. I doubt many slashdotters lived through J Edgar Hoover's reign of the FBI but he vary much abused his power. Even less lived through McCarthyism and Mccarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee or the Hollywood Blacklist. As late as the 1970s the US government were forcibly sterilizing American Indian women as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
No, I do not trust government, I fear government more than anything else, including those "terrorists" the government wants to protect us from.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
...how does it detect a weapon with a silencer? Or stop a bomb with a remote detonator/timer?
I don't understand whats wrong with *knowing* that there might be a riot at the game and then making the personal choice whether to go or not.
We make choices like this all the time... the foods we choose... the media we feed ourselves and progeny. etc etc etc. Hell, watching Bill O'Reilly comes with the risk of learning (through example) to be hateful and indignant, if not outright intolerant. Do we need a blimp to keep him safe? No. It's your choice to interact or not. Same w/ the stadium in the case of the 'riots' previously mentioned...
Now as for the shootings and bombings... I'm still waiting for that to be worth my worry.