DARPA Contract Hints At Real-Time Video Spying 73
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."
Re:Not very scary (Score:1, Informative)
Learn to read. The article refers to streaming video from unmanned reconnaissance vehicles, not satellite images.
But you are right. They are already implementing intrusive monitoring on a grand scale. This is just more of the same.
Re:Cloudy (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Sadly, even that is not likely to work. If this article from wayyy back in 2000 is any indication [uq.edu.au], they can see through clouds, smoke, etc.
Grant, not Contract (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:kitware and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) (Score:1, Informative)
By the way, Kitware [kitware.com] also develops CMake, the build system used by Second Life [secondlife.com] and KDE.
Re:Verizon protects from being tracked by GPS phon (Score:3, Informative)
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...