Today we can confidently guess that THIS is the secret groundbreaking military technology that "60 Minutes" was alluding to in 2008.<p>Reporter Bob Woodward (known for breaking much of the Watergate story that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation) claims that the US military has a new secret technique that's revolutionary. The following is what he said in his interview[1] with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in September 2008:<p>Woodward: <i>This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders [in Iraq].</i><p>Pelley: <i>What is this? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of taking out just the ... leadership?</i><p>Woodward: <i>It is the stuff of which military novels are written.</i><p>Pelley: <i>Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?</i><p>Woodward: <i>Yeah.</i><p>The bits of info from Woodward, the timeline of the development of military aerial camera systems (such as Angel Fire), the claimed capability to locate people -- it all fits. This is the revolutionary advance in military capability they are talking about.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415771.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415...</a>
You could do serious damage with this. You could follow CEO's,government officials etc and detail everything they do and who they meet with. Nothing stopping that company from using the images they have stored to compile information on whoever they want in the area. Great technology thats super easy to abuse to devastating effect in a myriad of ways. No one really cares about that though .
As we reach a point where the science fiction genre can be merged with fiction, I would just like to point out my appreciation for the many authors that spent the time to open the cans of worms and tell stories of their implications. This article makes me thinkof Daniel Suarez's Influx. And only a decade ago, I thought it was weird that Neal Stephenson's snow crash had an entire subclass of people delivering pizzas, but now with Uber eats and foodera, except that they deliver anything and everything.
The video was eye-opening for me to how sophisticated imagery and image tracking has become from my little explorations into neural nets, openCV and others.<p>One book I was recently browsing "Crime Analysis Systems: Using Computer Simulations and Geographic Information Systems" published in 2008, and this video, make me think the combination of predictive analytics and their toolset, along with surveillance will lead to large neural nets sifting through traffic, pedestrian and vehicular live and historical footage, trying to forecast a crime or public disturbance, and dispatch prophylactic police personnel.<p>Minority Report without the time-traveling mentats!<p>I am sure every police department would like this, if they don't already have it. PSS, Ross McNutt's company sells the tech to domestic and international buyers.<p>I will not even address the privacy concerns, since they are so ubiquitous and immediate in today's consciousness.
This video confirms so many of my concerns about surveillance. The problem, of course, is that nothing i just watched received any sort of rigor. Despite knowing no identities, and confirming nothing about the vehicles in question, an entire narrative is presented without any shred of evidence. For all we know, this "drug deal" may well have been a carpet cleaner with inconvenient timing who can expect to have his house raided next week.<p>In fact, let me take that a step further. What evidence do i have that this was even a murder? I'll assume in this case it is, but can i independently confirm that? Of course not. Worse still is the logical skip: "well now that i have shown you this, here are some colorful lines demonstrating a ton of other related behavior that you should totally extrapolate nefarious connections from." The scope of narratives that can be taken out of context, or outright invented using these videos is terrifying.<p>Power indeed.
Does anybody remember the old Manhunter games from Sierra? They used a very similar idea of replaying a timeline multiple times to track a bunch of suspects as they interacted throughout an event. What was a clever but abstract sci-fi game mechanic has suddenly become reality.
Same story, as told by Radiolab last year:<p><a href="http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/" rel="nofollow">http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/</a>
Context is important here. Before jumping to the obvious logical conclusion "Cameras in all the skies would prevent all the murders," remember how messed up a place like Juarez is: A murder happened in plain daylight. Home common would you suppose that is in other locales? And once it's known that cameras are in the sky, how many of the remaining murders would continue to take place outdoors?
It seems all those paths are still drawn by humans, I think. It still takes a lot of watching those images and putting points on them before they could really start an investigation.<p>Of course if this agency has access to the cellphone towers, it could allow them to draw those points, but I don't know if towers are always triangulating the positions of all cellphones in an area at any given time.
There is a scene in Homeland where Saul is captured, in that video objects are "tagged" as combatants (triangles), <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MWxgfUWyA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MWxgfUWyA</a> ... I find remote sensing technology like that to be entirely operational (domestic and foreign) at this point.
I know how anti-surveillance HN is, but I would like to make a case this could be an amazingly good thing.<p>The cost of crime to society has been estimated to be on the order of $300 billion/year (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/</a>). But that doesn't include numerous indirect costs. E.g. decreased property values, white flight and the various issues it causes, people staying indoors or making sacrifices due to fear of crime, etc.<p>One of the biggest things is that bothers me about our society, is children are not allowed to go outside anymore. People blame electronics, but it's almost entirely due to parents that fear their kids being outside of their eyesight. Look at the incredible map on this article, on how much range children have lost over time: <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-...</a> And it's almost entirely due to fear of child abductors and crime, although other issues like increased automobile traffic play a part. I find this incredibly sad.<p>A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact.<p>I too, find the idea of being watched constantly creepy. So I propose some restrictions. They should require a warrant to get the data from the surveillance machines, and only be allowed to use it for a particular case. It should be entirely air gapped. It should be deleted after a week. And it should ideally be stuff like this surveillance drone, which can't make out individual faces, just movements to see where people have gone.<p>We are looking at a society that is surrounded by sensors anyway. Surveillance cameras on businesses are becoming nearly universal now they are so cheap, and everyone walks around with a microphone in their pocket. Soon all cars will have insurance mandated dashcams, not to mention self driving cars loaded with sensors. All that stuff seems much creepier than a drone, as it can't make out the faces of individuals and what they are doing or saying.
I think this is our future, whether it's dystopian or not.<p>Technology is eventually going to make it impossible to really prevent "Persistent aerial surveillance". What requires an expensive small blimp today might become the size of a ping pong ball (or wide area flock of them) and come out of a 3D printer tomorrow.<p>So who will be using such tech? Governments and private entities alike - we can try to legislate against either but technology will probably overpower the legislation quickly.<p>So what is the impact of this sort of technology? Maybe it's not all George Orwell. Your bike was stolen on Third St at 1pm? Roll the video back or forwards to know exactly where the thief is. Someone shot up a nightclub and rushed out in a crowd? automated video analysis caught them.<p>Yes it sounds scary if it were a monopolized power, but eventually I don't think government will be able to hold monopoly on it.