Death Metal tips news about how defense contractor Raytheon is adapting military-style surveillance packages for use aboard blimps at public events like the Indy 500. "Until recently, Raytheon's eye-in-the-sky technology was used in Afghanistan and Iraq to guard American military bases, working as airborne guards against any oncoming desert threat. Using infrared sensors and a map overlay not unlike Google Earth, the technology scans a large area, setting important landmarks (say, the perimeter of a military base), and constantly relays video clips back to a command center. If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera — all from a mighty-high 500 feet." Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is shopping it around to police departments and other organizations that might want to keep an eye on large gatherings of people.
But seriously, this is horseshit. The only bad guys they catch will be the ones up in
the nosebleed section sitting alone with their girlfriends who are discretely giving them
head or playing "bouncy-horse" [break.com] on their laps.
If there are terrorist attacks in a stadium, I think video footage BEFORE the gun or bomb noise would typically be of greater interest than the footage after. It'll take about 0.5 seconds for sound to travel the 500 feet up to the airships.
Thus all that fancy expensive tech might end up giving you just lower res pics before the camera zoomed and focused in and got videos of everybody except the culprits.
How expensive is that system going to be?
If it's in the millions and I was seriously going to be monitorin
So much of what is sold as Protection these days is all about catching people AFTER the fact.
How many total FAILS do we need to see that buses still get bombed and innocent Brazilians still get shot in the head no matter how many security cams you hang up?
The truth is that the real terrorists don't care if they are caught, and this type of situation will not prevent sneaking weapons or explosives into a stadium, or prevent someone half a mile away from dropping a 8 or 10 mortar rounds into an event before t
So much of what is sold as Protection these days is all about catching people AFTER the fact.
That's because doing things that would catch them BEFORE the fact are kinda frowned upon. You know, things like checking luggage and searching people before they board flights, searching the belongings of people coming into the country, listening to conversations overseas and so on. Hell, people are pissed that they have to show friggin ID before boarding a plane!
So make up your mind. Do you want to catch these guys BEFORE an attack or AFTER?
No, people frown upon gestapo style security theater bullshit like the liquids ban and telling people that it is illegal for them to know what is and is not illegal.
Real security isn't nearly so annoying despite being far more thorough. It's also easily twice as fast as the security theater we have now.
Hell, people are pissed that they have to show friggin ID before boarding a plane!
As they should be, checking ID to board a plane does nothing for safety, everyone of the 911 hijackers had ID. And these new "Real ID" cards will only give people a false sense of safety, they'll only be good until someone cracks them, which is only a matter of tyme.
Do you want to catch these guys BEFORE an attack or AFTER?
"Anyone who will give up a little liberty for safety will never get nor deserve either." From Benjamin F
...I think video footage BEFORE the gun or bomb noise would typically be of greater interest than the footage after.
It'll take about 0.5 seconds for sound to travel the 500 feet up to the airships.
Thus all that fancy expensive tech might end up giving you just lower res pics before the camera zoomed and focused in and got videos of everybody except the culprits.
but the after-footage will be useful for broadcasting over and over again, putting the general public into a state of panic, so politicians and corporations can exploit their fears and get away with even more wasteful spending.
"The airship is great because it doesn't have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness," says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon's Integrated Defense division.
Oh, okay. As long as we don't feel like we're being watched, everything's all right then.
Excuse me? Isn't the whole idea of a good spy not to make the targets feel like they're being watched? Is it okay for foreign agents to get copies of classified documents as long as we don't feel like they're doing it?
Blimps and airships have featured in many works of dystopian fiction. Especially alternative time-line "soviets won" type works. So I think he could be wrong about that one.
Ahh, but blimps have also been used in utopian fiction, and in reality they have both previously been used for both good and bad purposes, just like airplanes, trains, cars, and video recording devices of all kinda.
Most peoples perception of whether a blimp is good or bad relies almost entirely on it's markings and previous experiences with those markings, the Goodyear blimps(s) have been used and seen as passive, non-threatening for years, how would you tell if it's a "good" or "bad" Goodyear Blimp? A smal
Most peoples perception of whether a blimp is good or bad relies almost entirely on it's markings and previous experiences with those markings, the Goodyear blimps(s) have been used and seen as passive, non-threatening for years, how would you tell if it's a "good" or "bad" Goodyear Blimp?
I suddenly got this vision of an Evil Goodyear Blimp; black and red covered in spikes, with ominous smoke/fog trailing along behind it. Yup with that one you'd just know that it was up to no good.
You make a good point, but I'd like to chime in that one thing about big brother is precisely to make us feel watched. If you make people feel watched all the time, they will internalize the surveillance and they will watch themselves and you won't even have to watch them. Panopticon.
As long as I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The problem is in the abuse of this, like the footage that came out of the police using their night surveillance equipment to spy on individuals having an evening with a lady in their penthouse.
So as long as abuse is monitored and actively discouraged, what's wrong with being watched while you're in public?
[quote]As long as I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.[/quote]Simply because you "don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy" doesn't mean that this type of surveylence is reasonable.
I guess maybe you might be worried about false positives (e.g. toy guns or whatever), but false positives tend to be resolved easily.
If by easily you mean they are arrested and searched and spend 3 - 4 months or more fighting with a legal system that doesn't want to let go because that would mean admitting they made a dumb mistake?
The problem with surveillance is, it WILL be abused. Just think of the political uses. You happen to be mayor, governor, or senator, incumbent in a pretty close race. Oh, wait, sweet. We can just put a surveillance team on the challenger, and wait for SOMETHING to happen. If the candidate doesn't do something illegal, immoral, or unethical, one of his aides or advisors will. Sweet. Just think of the possibilities!!
I could give you hundreds of other potential abuses without trying very hard. Just use
You should be worried about pinko commies... Nationalizing banking, insurance, healthcare, education, car manufacturing, transportation, your corner store.;) Just face it dude, they won... Oh wait, I have to go get these damn kids off my lawn.
More seriously though, even the russians are shaking their heads at what's going on. Germans who are old enough to remember too.
Seriously though, in the entire history of modern stadiums, is there really enough of a threat to warrant constant surveillance of that kind? How many millions of people go to stadiums each year for games and races, and how many are killed, blown up, stabbed, or raped, 0.01%?... if that? And are these blimps really going to prevent that from happening again? I doubt it.
The eye-witnesses combined with the usual surveillance (guards, cameras, at the gates, ticket centers, etc) is likely quite sufficient in tr
The fact that this is in yro makes it sound like someone thought it would be a privacy issue, but I don't see why. The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc., where they don't have any expectation of privacy. Viewing from 500 feet and at a high angle, with a field of view wide enough to take in the whole crowd, they're not going to be able to identify individuals. They propose zooming in to a particular region if there are gunshots or something, and maybe then, if the angle is appropriate, they could get some kind of view of an individual's face, although it seems unlikely. What makes surveillance like this scary is if it (a) goes into places where you do have an expectation of privacy (like the Obama administration's plans to read email that crosses international borders), (b) is ubiquitous (as it is in the UK), (c) raises the prospect of aggregating data in creepy ways (like being denied health insurance because you buy too much vodka with your preferred customer card at Albertson's), or (d) forces us to take the government's word that it isn't going to be used more than they said (like the Bush administration's wiretaps). The blimp concept doesn't seem to lend itself to any of these.
The idea is to use it on crowds of people at sports events, etc
The problem isn't the sporting event, it's the "etc."
These things are expensive. They're not going to sit there just for Superbowl Sunday or whatever. They'll be used for as much surveillance as they can get away with. Whether it's a good idea or not. Think 'mission creep'.
The problem is, what do they do with it the other 300 plus days that this is not used for an outside sporting event ?.. Of course they use it.. perhaps under the pretext of "training",. but it would be used, and abused you can count on it.
There are several open UAV platforms out there now, including planes, helicopters, and quadrocopters. Any sizable and stable remote controlled aircraft is a candidate, but the quadrocopters are probably your best bet for video surveillance.
Well applying laws to everyone would make everyone equal, and as we all know equality is the same as communism. And communism is against freedom, which is unAmerican. Therefore, in the spirit of freedom, only those people who deserve it are allowed to be free.
Raytheon is a for-profit corporation in a country where everything is for sale including the country. They are just trying to make a profit off of the pop-fear of domestic terrorism.
Try to change the culture of "profit first" above anything else and educate the masses if you want to never see programs like this again.
Probably a bad idea. This is known in the military as the "Great Squad Leader in the Sky" syndrome (a phrase coined by David Hackworth, one of the greats of small-unit combat), and has been since Vietnam. Leadership from a helicopter overlooking a combat zone sounded like a great idea; at last, the commander could see everything. In practice, it works very badly.
Piping vast amounts of imagery back to a command center is popular with commanders and politicians, but not with grunts. It's useful for finding enemy activity, but not much help once the enemy has been engaged.
It turns out that the technology the people on the ground really like is small robots. Sending in a robot first in urban warfare is very popular with the troops. Nobody likes going into a possible ambush or booby trap several times a day. Eventually the odds catch up with you.
"If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera."
Note to self: if ever wanting to defeat the system, remotely or have a friend, set off a string of fire crackers somewhere else while I carry on unwatched.
"Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is..." hoping customers won't be put off by a system that falls for the equivalent of "Look! Elvis!"?
Combine this technology with the techniques used in the DIY Arduino Blimp Drone project discussed here before, add some offensive capabilities, and create our own surveillance droids [wikia.com] to you know, keep the neighbor's kids off our lawn.
Using high-tech blimps to spy on sporting crowds is a fantastic idea to fill the gap until our intelligence services work out some way to get their own people into the crowds of these events, but to do that they would need to crack the intelligence crown jewels and figure out how and when these events will be held. It's great the things that government and the military industrial concept can achieve that a lesser mind might be tempted to do on the cheap.
And to the NSA guy sneering at this post, why aren't you doing something about bin Laden instead? He's on the Afgani-Pakistan border. Everyone knows it. The Daily Show event did a live cross from there. Or don't you guys get cable?
FP (Score:3, Funny)
There aren't going to be any terrorist attacks.
You just throw money at congressmen.
But seriously, this is horseshit. The only bad guys they catch will be the ones up in the nosebleed section sitting alone with their girlfriends who are discretely giving them head or playing "bouncy-horse" [break.com] on their laps.
Even if there are attacks (Score:3, Interesting)
It'll take about 0.5 seconds for sound to travel the 500 feet up to the airships.
Thus all that fancy expensive tech might end up giving you just lower res pics before the camera zoomed and focused in and got videos of everybody except the culprits.
How expensive is that system going to be?
If it's in the millions and I was seriously going to be monitorin
Bang! Pop. Crash. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, bits of flaming blimp raining down on a crowd would be pretty terrifying in itself. Remind me to take a tinfoil umbrella.
That's bad in itself. (Score:3, Funny)
It would be scary to ride in the blimp.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So much of what is sold as Protection these days is all about catching people AFTER the fact.
How many total FAILS do we need to see that buses still get bombed and innocent Brazilians still get shot in the head no matter how many security cams you hang up?
The truth is that the real terrorists don't care if they are caught, and this type of situation will not prevent sneaking weapons or explosives into a stadium, or prevent someone half a mile away from dropping a 8 or 10 mortar rounds into an event before t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So much of what is sold as Protection these days is all about catching people AFTER the fact.
That's because doing things that would catch them BEFORE the fact are kinda frowned upon. You know, things like checking luggage and searching people before they board flights, searching the belongings of people coming into the country, listening to conversations overseas and so on. Hell, people are pissed that they have to show friggin ID before boarding a plane!
So make up your mind. Do you want to catch these guys BEFORE an attack or AFTER?
Re: (Score:3)
No, people frown upon gestapo style security theater bullshit like the liquids ban and telling people that it is illegal for them to know what is and is not illegal.
Real security isn't nearly so annoying despite being far more thorough. It's also easily twice as fast as the security theater we have now.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, people are pissed that they have to show friggin ID before boarding a plane!
As they should be, checking ID to board a plane does nothing for safety, everyone of the 911 hijackers had ID. And these new "Real ID" cards will only give people a false sense of safety, they'll only be good until someone cracks them, which is only a matter of tyme.
Do you want to catch these guys BEFORE an attack or AFTER?
"Anyone who will give up a little liberty for safety will never get nor deserve either."
From Benjamin F
Re:Even if there are attacks (Score:5, Funny)
...I think video footage BEFORE the gun or bomb noise would typically be of greater interest than the footage after.
It'll take about 0.5 seconds for sound to travel the 500 feet up to the airships.
Thus all that fancy expensive tech might end up giving you just lower res pics before the camera zoomed and focused in and got videos of everybody except the culprits.
but the after-footage will be useful for broadcasting over and over again, putting the general public into a state of panic, so politicians and corporations can exploit their fears and get away with even more wasteful spending.
Parent
Not quite right (Score:3, Interesting)
The only bad guys they catch will be the ones up in the nosebleed section sitting alone with their girlfriends...
I believe the scenario is Alfred Hitchcock's:
The crowd at a tennis match is following the action.
Back and forth, back and forth, their heads and bodies constantly on the move, bobbing, twisting, in unison with the play.
All but one....
The killer is in the crowd, but he is not truly part of the crowd, and that is a subtle and important distinction.
It can be a useful - practical - distinction.
So
Re: (Score:2)
Irritating line from TFA (Score:5, Insightful)
"The airship is great because it doesn't have that Big Brother feel, or create feelings of invasiveness," says Lee Silvestre, vice president of mission innovation in Raytheon's Integrated Defense division.
Oh, okay. As long as we don't feel like we're being watched, everything's all right then.
Excuse me? Isn't the whole idea of a good spy not to make the targets feel like they're being watched? Is it okay for foreign agents to get copies of classified documents as long as we don't feel like they're doing it?
Re:Irritating line from TFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Blimps and airships have featured in many works of dystopian fiction. Especially alternative time-line "soviets won" type works.
So I think he could be wrong about that one.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh, but blimps have also been used in utopian fiction, and in reality they have both previously been used for both good and bad purposes, just like airplanes, trains, cars, and video recording devices of all kinda.
Most peoples perception of whether a blimp is good or bad relies almost entirely on it's markings and previous experiences with those markings, the Goodyear blimps(s) have been used and seen as passive, non-threatening for years, how would you tell if it's a "good" or "bad" Goodyear Blimp? A smal
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody ever suspects the Goodyear blimp
Re: (Score:2)
Most peoples perception of whether a blimp is good or bad relies almost entirely on it's markings and previous experiences with those markings, the Goodyear blimps(s) have been used and seen as passive, non-threatening for years, how would you tell if it's a "good" or "bad" Goodyear Blimp?
I suddenly got this vision of an Evil Goodyear Blimp; black and red covered in spikes, with ominous smoke/fog trailing along behind it. Yup with that one you'd just know that it was up to no good.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You make a good point, but I'd like to chime in that one thing about big brother is precisely to make us feel watched. If you make people feel watched all the time, they will internalize the surveillance and they will watch themselves and you won't even have to watch them. Panopticon.
I'm okay with surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as I don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
The problem is in the abuse of this, like the footage that came out of the police using their night surveillance equipment to spy on individuals having an evening with a lady in their penthouse.
So as long as abuse is monitored and actively discouraged, what's wrong with being watched while you're in public?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I guess maybe you might be worried about false positives (e.g. toy guns or whatever), but false positives tend to be resolved easily.
If by easily you mean they are arrested and searched and spend 3 - 4 months or more fighting with a legal system that doesn't want to let go because that would mean admitting they made a dumb mistake?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem with surveillance is, it WILL be abused. Just think of the political uses. You happen to be mayor, governor, or senator, incumbent in a pretty close race. Oh, wait, sweet. We can just put a surveillance team on the challenger, and wait for SOMETHING to happen. If the candidate doesn't do something illegal, immoral, or unethical, one of his aides or advisors will. Sweet. Just think of the possibilities!!
I could give you hundreds of other potential abuses without trying very hard. Just use
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So as long as abuse is monitored and actively discouraged, what's wrong with being watched while you're in public?
Who's watching the watchers?
Falcon
This is great! (Score:4, Funny)
Considering the fact that we've had so many problems with stadium slaughterings and bombings.
oh wait... i ate too much scramby eggs w/ sarcasm on the side.
Lol @ excessive response to lesser problems.
Re:This is great! (Score:5, Funny)
Lol @ excessive response to lesser problems.
Something must be done to combat terrorism.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do this.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You should be worried about pinko commies... Nationalizing banking, insurance, healthcare, education, car manufacturing, transportation, your corner store. ;) Just face it dude, they won... Oh wait, I have to go get these damn kids off my lawn.
More seriously though, even the russians are shaking their heads at what's going on. Germans who are old enough to remember too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though, in the entire history of modern stadiums, is there really enough of a threat to warrant constant surveillance of that kind? How many millions of people go to stadiums each year for games and races, and how many are killed, blown up, stabbed, or raped, 0.01%?... if that? And are these blimps really going to prevent that from happening again? I doubt it.
The eye-witnesses combined with the usual surveillance (guards, cameras, at the gates, ticket centers, etc) is likely quite sufficient in tr
Oops (Score:5, Funny)
When I read the title, I thought this was about donut-eating cops.
Never mind.
People being monitored!? (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting? (Score:2)
not a privacy issue (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not a privacy issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem isn't the sporting event, it's the "etc."
These things are expensive. They're not going to sit there just for Superbowl Sunday or whatever. They'll be used for as much surveillance as they can get away with. Whether it's a good idea or not. Think 'mission creep'.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Surveillance isn't ubiquitous in the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
Surveillance isn't ubiquitous in the UK.
Not unless you're one of those folks who think UK=England, and England=London. Of which there are quite a few.
(Actually I've never quite understood why people mix up the UK and England as being synonymous, any ideas?)
Mind you I accept there is too much surveillance over here.
Black Sunday? (Score:2)
There was a book with a movie followup about putting a bomb in a blimp over the super bowl.
Looks like it just got easier to do that.
Who watches the watchers?
Good old Raytheon (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if they offer cool tech for us regular citizens to watch over the authorities. Kinda doubt it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several open UAV platforms out there now, including planes, helicopters, and quadrocopters. Any sizable and stable remote controlled aircraft is a candidate, but the quadrocopters are probably your best bet for video surveillance.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
:-) You're absolutely right. Everything they have, we handed to them on a silver platter.
Peace out, dogg
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Raytheon is a For-Profit Corp. No Surprise Here! (Score:2)
Raytheon is a for-profit corporation in a country where everything is for sale including the country. They are just trying to make a profit off of the pop-fear of domestic terrorism.
Try to change the culture of "profit first" above anything else and educate the masses if you want to never see programs like this again.
What happens when you shoot the blimp? (Score:2)
Doesn't this make the blimp an obvious target for anybody who really wants to do mischief?
Re: (Score:2)
"Great Squad Leader in the Sky" syndrome (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably a bad idea. This is known in the military as the "Great Squad Leader in the Sky" syndrome (a phrase coined by David Hackworth, one of the greats of small-unit combat), and has been since Vietnam. Leadership from a helicopter overlooking a combat zone sounded like a great idea; at last, the commander could see everything. In practice, it works very badly.
Piping vast amounts of imagery back to a command center is popular with commanders and politicians, but not with grunts. It's useful for finding enemy activity, but not much help once the enemy has been engaged.
It turns out that the technology the people on the ground really like is small robots. Sending in a robot first in urban warfare is very popular with the troops. Nobody likes going into a possible ambush or booby trap several times a day. Eventually the odds catch up with you.
Look! Over there! (Score:5, Insightful)
"If a gun fires or a bomb is detonated, the airships can detect the noise and focus the camera."
Note to self: if ever wanting to defeat the system, remotely or have a friend, set off a string of fire crackers somewhere else while I carry on unwatched.
"Though the technology is expensive, Raytheon is..." hoping customers won't be put off by a system that falls for the equivalent of "Look! Elvis!"?
I propose we (Score:2)
Bravo the Military Industrial Complex! (Score:4, Funny)
Using high-tech blimps to spy on sporting crowds is a fantastic idea to fill the gap until our intelligence services work out some way to get their own people into the crowds of these events, but to do that they would need to crack the intelligence crown jewels and figure out how and when these events will be held. It's great the things that government and the military industrial concept can achieve that a lesser mind might be tempted to do on the cheap.
And to the NSA guy sneering at this post, why aren't you doing something about bin Laden instead? He's on the Afgani-Pakistan border. Everyone knows it. The Daily Show event did a live cross from there. Or don't you guys get cable?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I read this and facepalmed,
So we know this AC doesn't wear glasses.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
And the drone would be cheaper.
Just getting a blimp to the site would cost more and require way more advanced planning and advanced notice.