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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.
"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.
Using traditional slashdot logic, I have arrived at the conclusion that this must be bad... somehow.
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.
I wonder if they offer cool tech for us regular citizens to watch over the authorities. Kinda doubt it.
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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.
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.
"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!"?
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.
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.
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?
... 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.
"People shoot at the Goodyear blimp all the time."
It would be scary to ride in the blimp.
Or he does, and had to wipe fingerprints off afterwards.