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Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
So, only one person wins the prize, even though it will almost certainly require the effort of an online community? This sounds like a breeding ground for betrayal.
Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.
What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?
What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?
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I wonder what the agenda here is. It's surely not something as simple as finding how many people jump in their cars and go driving.
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
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I think the best way to attack this problem would be to agree to donate the profits from the award to some worthy cause, letting people with the capability volunteer some time to a solution. Its a fairly complicated problem to solve for the amount of money given to solve it. Lets say a group of capable programmers united for lets say an open source project develop a website that takes in the coordinates in the format required for the contest. The trick is going to be figuring out who is telling the truth when it comes to submitted data... You may be able to assume that if a number set is entered often that it is a candidate to be the real location. The task obviously requires coordination of many life humans as I doubt anyone that can compete has access to satellite time to do an automated search. I am wondering how many people will attempt to put up fake balloon sites to either trick their competition or just get some publicity of tech people to come visit the site and take a GPS reading.
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Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's probably the point. DARPA wants to demonstrate empirically that mobile communications have reached the point where ordinary people can coordinate using ordinary technology to achieve what would historically have needed to be a fine tuned professional intelligence operation.
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).
In that case, you've just broken their experiment.
But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)
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This would have been a good stunt to get people to buy Motorola Droids so they can use the free google maps geolocation, etc.
I think there's a lot more to this.
What are they observing?
* Establish a geographically diverse target (10 balloons somewhere in the US).
* Observe how the organizers encourage people to work with them.
* Observe how they communicate with the search teams, coordinate efforts, and disseminate data.
This could be used to coordinate efforts between the military and civilians, should the need arise. In the sake of the great terrorism debate, what if a vehicle was known to be in the US, and it is expected to detonate a nuke on US soil. This kind of crowdsourcing would have a better chance of finding it than putting everyone in the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the road hunting.
Unfortunately, this is probably organized towards the handling and neutralization of civilian unrest inside the CONUS. It would:
* Identify civilians who can organize large groups to neutralize them.
* Identify communications routes that would need to be neutralized.
* Identify intelligence breaches that could be used by the dissidents.
So, it's all in how much you trust our government. Would they recruit the civilian population to assist in a time of need? Would they neutralize dissidents during a period of civil unrest?
I'm fairly confident I'm not on the stage 1 list (neutralize in the first hour), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the stage 2 list. I'd suspect the organizers who aren't LEO or government will be on the stage 1 list. The followers will be on the stage 2 list.
Who wants to play the game now?
If I happen to spot a red balloon, with a couple spooks camped out below it, I'm going to plink at it with a BB gun. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.