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:one can make a killing (Score:4, Interesting)
What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak, Mr Anderson?
What good is an umbrella when there are ATM cameras, store cameras, red light cameras, etc that the government can switch between in real time at will? That's your biggest threat, not a satellite camera. The satellite camera finds you and perhaps follows your car, although that will be unnecessary since you have a cell phone and On-Star and a GPS mapping system they can use to track you.
As someone's sig says, Orwell was an optimist.
kitware and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) (Score:3, Interesting)
Kitware was the company founded to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) [vtk.org], 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 [flickr.com]?
I might know someone on this project... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.