The Pentagon Wants a 'TiVo' to Watch You

An anonymous reader writes "Danger Room, a Wired blog, today cites a study of future electronic snooping technologies from Reuters, written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it. 'The ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.'"

America:Bringing -F-r-e-e-d-o-m-F-r-o-m- Car Bombs

[nick_davison]

For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.

The irony being that the vast majority of car bombs reported in the media these days are in the last place these very same people "improved." Indeed they are a direct consequence of that improving.

Those that don't study history are doomed to repeat it. It's got to be even more embarassing when you created that screwed up history and prove to the world you still haven't learned.

Re:Wouldn't It Be Easier Just To...

[sabernet]

Dammit, should have used the preview button.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

Re:Wouldn't It Be Easier Just To...

[Anomolous Cowturd]

We could stop poisoning ourselves with floride, mercury, lead, aluminum and arsenic.

Flouride in water supplies is beneficial. The others aren't.

The entire pharmaceutical industry could decide to stop fucking everyone over and make the secrets of real whole health known. Simple cures for cancer, diabetics, and other diseases are well known to naturopaths.

Bullshit. Bull shit. Bovine excrement. Quackery. Pseudoscience. Fraud. Snake oil. No doctor on earth would hold back a cure for cancer or diabetes if such a thing existed. Bullshit artists preying on the terminally ill, peddling eye-of-newt potions and magical crystals, are the lowest form of life on the planet.

Re:We do it already

[dbIII]

If i were trying to fight the Iraqi (or other) insurgency i sure as hell would want a tool like this.

In that sort of situation you'll get a lot of footage of guys in masks stealing cameras. Over Lebanon the Israeli forces borrowed or bought drones to film from above.

Appease who?The voices in your head?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm no fan of Bush or his policies, but despite their idiocy, they aren't nearly as stupid as appeasement."

Except they weren't the terrorists, they weren't attacking you, the evidence was fake, it was only voices in your head telling you they were a threat.

So what are you appeasing? The voices in your head?

Look, just because someone isn't helping you, doesn't mean they are attacking you.
*Not* attacking people that are *not* attacking you is PERFECTLY NORMAL BEHAVIOR, it's not appeasement.

So why the hell don't you go after Bin Laden? Remember him?

Not new

[hcdejong]

The military have been doing this (in a more limited fashion) for years. AFAIK it started with analogue VCRs being coupled to JSTARS radar output. With the VCR, they could track radar contacts (vehicles) over a longer period of time (hours).
For this sort of surveillance to be useful, you'd have to have 24/7 overhead coverage, either radar or optical. That's not something they're going to be able to sneak into a non-battlefield area (i.e. the US). Also, JSTARS coverage of the entire US would be prohibitively expensive.

Re:Wouldn't It Be Easier Just To...

[Monsuco]

We could grow hemp to make paper and cardboard instead of destroying rain forests, but no, that'd be too difficult.

Amazing thing is, most paper is made from trees we farm. That is right, you can grow trees just like you grow carrots and they can be farmed for paper.

We could introduce a host of new technologies into the automotive industry that would increase the mileage of automobiles by up to 50%, such as GEET's and better engines with fewer moving parts, but then what would happen to the ass hats making money off of the patents?

Well the automotive industry has. Gas mileage is good advertising and they know what sells.

We could build a bunch of nuclear reactors to fuel energy-distribution technologies that would revolutionize the world for a fraction of the cost of the Iraq War.

People ph3ar the nukes. We didn't go in Iraq for oil, otherwise we would have invaded Saudi Arabia or Kuwait instead, as they have more oil.

We could introduce Organics recycling into urban neighborhoods, cutting the amount of garbage going into dumps by over half.

Why bother. All the trash that the USA would produce in 1,000 years (and this doesn't even account for decomposition) could be contained in a 300 foot area the size of long island. We are not running out of space to put garbage, that is a myth invented by the media as a result of a garbage ship that wasn't allowed to dump garbage in one landfill. Also, when we are done with landfills, we can drain the methane out of them (produces energy) and then cover them with topsoil and use them as a park or golf course. Garbage crisis, my ass.

We could stop poisoning ourselves with floride, mercury, lead, aluminum and arsenic.

We aren't poisoning ourself. Otherwise we would be dieing in droves now wouldn't we. We have a lot of government oversight and have very clean air, clean water, and clean living conditions. Pretty much no chemicals are harmful in trace amounts which are inevitable, it is just having too much. Take DDT, it is rather harmless in reasonable quantities, the problem was people used massive amounts of it. If used in sane quantities it could help solve malaria problems (there's a real problem for you) in Africa, but people have the OMG CHEMICALS! OH NOZ! additude.

The entire pharmaceutical industry could decide to stop fucking everyone over and make the secrets of real whole health known. Simple cures for cancer, diabetics, and other diseases are well known to naturopaths.

The reason they create drugs is to make money off of them. There is no incentive to research new drugs or find new cures to diseases if they were to just give those secrets away. Why spend money on R&D just to give it away? You do not want the drug companies to stop researching new drugs because it is abundantly clear the government is not as good at it as they are considering the government only finds about 1/5 of all the drugs discovered in a year. The rest are discovered by drug companies. As for naturopathic medicine, it would be nice, if only it worked. Unfortunitly this is the real world.

The problem is money; we have a banking system which is designed to propagate a predatory cutthroat society.

Your right, we should instead redistribute all the wealth, like North Korea, we could go communist. Capitolism works best. If you ph3r big brother, you want laissez-faire.

Re:Wouldn't It Be Easier Just To...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You guys may laugh. That's because there was a disinfo effort to make this seem ridiculous.

http://fluoridealert.org/ [fluoridealert.org]