New DARPA Surveillance System Brings Big-Brother to Life

[CuttingEdge100]

Futuristic security surveillance system brings Big Brother to life
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/45590

Researchers are looking to develop an intelligent image system that can monitor large areas, perhaps miles wide, identify potential threats based on the correlation of events and anomalies it detects, and issue timely alerts with few false alarms.

Such a surveillance system is at the heart of what researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency calls a Persistent Stare Exploitation and Analysis System (PerSEAS) that can automatically and interactively discover intelligence from optical or infra-red devices in the air on drones, for example, or spread over urban, suburban, and rural environments.

DARPA said it envisions two major applications for such a system. Perhaps most important, the first would use the system in a near real-time mode to receive alerts and warnings to react to and avert disasters. For example, if it notices a number of activities that were out of the usual, such as the gathering of lots of soldiers and trucks it could alert local authorities.

The second would be to use the data gathered from the system to use archived data from the system to analyze events, such as an attack to determine the movements and origins of the entities involved in the event, DARPA said. For both types of applications DARPA said the PerSEAS system ideally could receive or generate cues from/to other sensor systems to identify places or people of interest for additional details.

Specifically the PerSEAS system will gather data from sensors and feed the data into an intelligent software engine supporting algorithms that discover relationships and anomalies that are indicative of suspicious behavior, match previously learned threat activity, or match user defined threat activity should also be incorporated, DARPA stated.

What are your opinions?

Personally, every new DARPA creation seems to make me cringe more and more. It seems that nearly every creation of theirs seems to all revolve around the same theme, how to be able to spy on as many people as possible 24/7 in the most invasive manner possible.


CuttingEdge100

 

[kv1at3485]

Cool.

 

[Lindley]

DARPA's purpose is to push forward new defense technologies. By definition, a defense technology could be used against our own citizens as easily as it could against our adversaries. That's just a fact of life.

Those of us whose job it is to take such pie-in-the-sky outlines and figure out how the heck it can actually be done don't have the luxury of being paranoid about it.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Lindley,

Yeah, the problem is every idea they push lately it seems the defense establishment and intelligence agencies pursue it. At the rate we're going in 5 years the American Public won't have any form of privacy to speak of

 

[Lindley]

You underestimate the time required to actually make any of these technologies practical. DARPA doesn't pay for easy problems.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

You overestimate the time it takes...

 

[Chaos Descending]

I'm guessing he's got a better idea of how long it take than you do.

Just a hunch based on comments in Post #3, especially the part that starts with "those of us".

 

[The Fatman]

Lindley,

Yeah, the problem is every idea they push lately it seems the defense establishment and intelligence agencies pursue it. At the rate we're going in 5 years the American Public won't have any form of privacy to speak of

That's the problem with the US Constitution having no specific or guaranteed right of Privacy, only an implied one.

Not that I ever expect it to happen, but that is why every election, I write my local senator and congressman and explain my feelings and encourage them to draft privacy legislation.

 

[strongmind]

Lindley,

Yeah, the problem is every idea they push lately it seems the defense establishment and intelligence agencies pursue it. At the rate we're going in 5 years the American Public won't have any form of privacy to speak of

The War on Terror bogeyman which replaced the Russian bogeyman is being used to justify this and of course to siphon off trillions of $$$ in "defense" spending.

Only 25000 people worldwide have been killed by terrorists over the last 10 years.Compare this with the 3 million killed by the USA military.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Foley0402,

The 4th Amendment sort of does cover that. It basically says people should be safe from unreasonable search and seizures, unless there is a probable cause of a criminal act and unless a search warrant is issued.


CuttingEdge100

 

[The Fatman]

Foley0402,

The 4th Amendment sort of does cover that. It basically says people should be safe from unreasonable search and seizures, unless there is a probable cause of a criminal act and unless a search warrant is issued.


CuttingEdge100

right, sort of. Like I said, it's implied. But, when there is no specific language, it leaves things wide open to interpretation and indirectly leads to technologies like this.

 

[USS Mariner]

Dann Arky is probably getting his spiked football pads and tinfoil hats ready as we speak. For those of you who don't know him, he's been writing about and making videos about the government and military "plans" to enslave us and transhumanize everyone via globally networked biochip implants.

It sounds ludicrious on paper, but if you've ever watched his "They Want Your Soul" video from '06, it scares the shit out of you, not only because he's done his research, but the fact that he's a brilliant video creator.

Of course, his entire point is hinged on the supposition that the entire government would actually work together on something of this scale.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Foley0402,

right, sort of. Like I said, it's implied. But, when there is no specific language, it leaves things wide open to interpretation and indirectly leads to technologies like this.

What wording would you have used?


U.S.S. Mariner,

It sounds ludicrious on paper, but if you've ever watched his "They Want Your Soul" video from '06, it scares the shit out of you, not only because he's done his research, but the fact that he's a brilliant video creator.

I've never seen the video "They Want Your Soul", but yes it does sound ridiculous

 

[The Fatman]

Foley0402,

right, sort of. Like I said, it's implied. But, when there is no specific language, it leaves things wide open to interpretation and indirectly leads to technologies like this.

What wording would you have used?

I was never good at legalese, but I want something absolute (similar to the first amendment). Maybe a very simple rider to the 4th amendment saying something along the lines of "In all matters, the right to privacy in ones home and affairs shall not be infringed". If you can convince a grand jury surveilance is necessary, I'm all for it. but the warrantless wiretaps, and traffic cameras that time your distance between lights and mail you a speeding ticket, or this theoretical big brother monitoring system... these should be absolutely illegal.

 

[kv1at3485]

I'm guessing he's got a better idea of how long it take than you do.

Just a hunch based on comments in Post #3, especially the part that starts with "those of us".

It's also speaks of a saner opinion that he's not jumping to the "zero privacy" conclusion every time something along these lines comes out, as if suddenly cameras appear in your bathroom.

...and traffic cameras that time your distance between lights and mail you a speeding ticket...

Speed a lot?

Technically speaking, this can probably already be done. Automatic toll highways work alone these lines already.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Lindley,

Those of us whose job it is to take such pie-in-the-sky outlines and figure out how the heck it can actually be done don't have the luxury of being paranoid about it.

Paranoid is not accurate in this case. This device could seriously erode privacy for a lot of people all at once. Paranoia defines an irrational fear, this fear is rational.

However you illustrate a good point, the people who develop these ideas don't seriously weigh the downsides of their developments. That is actually a problem.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Joshua Howard]

The age of the individual is over; this is the age of the collective. It brings us good things; year round access to tropical fruit, Star Trek forums, TV shows, and cell phones. It also brings us bad things; a world where every inch of ground on earth is owned by someone, watched by someone, and where a person's entire life can be destroyed or ruined by the tip of a pen and the touch of a button in a matter of seconds. We are evolving into the Borg.

As I see it, this sort of thing is one reason why it is important that, in time, we discover a way to start colonizing new planets. The citizen's ability to secede and lay down new roots is a critical player in curbing corruption in the ranks of leadership.

 

[Lindley]

Paranoid is not accurate in this case. This device could seriously erode privacy for a lot of people all at once. Paranoia defines an irrational fear, this fear is rational.

If you want to find a reason to be afraid of something, you always can.

I still think that increased computer responsibility for detecting terrorist threats is a good thing for privacy. The government is going to be looking for those threats either way; far better, privacy-wise, for a computer to do it than a human. The computer is able to dismiss anything it sees which isn't germane to the mission. In fact, the computer doesn't even "understand" what it's seeing in any real sense; it just transforms the input and does some math. A human rifling through that same data could come up with all sorts of things you might not want them to know.

The real trick is going to be getting the false alarm rate down while keeping the threat detection rate adequate. It's one of those problems that's a lot easier to pose than to solve.

I'm not saying your concerns aren't valid, but they're misdirected. You should be campaigning for privacy legislation, not against technological progress.

If you had your way, internet search engines like Google would never have been allowed to exist because they're a massive threat to privacy. Hell, the Internet itself was invented by DARPA's immediate predecessor, ARPA. That's a threat to privacy to.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Lindley,

You do realize that a government with that kind of power over it's citizens (and yes, the ability to know everything about everybody qualifies), should that government become corrupt (which since 2001, one could argue it has) a government can be more dangerous than the terrorists can be. Far more resources, far more knowledge, and governments have legitimacy -- something terrorists will never have.

I do believe in privacy legislation, and I am a strong advocate for it. However, if the government has the means to secretly spy on everybody, privacy-legislation isn't particularly effective. How do you protect privacy when you don't even know it's being violated?

Yes, I think in some cases certain applications of technology needs to be regulated. I'm not saying I'm opposed to all technology, or all scientific progress, but some doors are probably better left closed, and not all applications of technology are good.

If a group of scientists figured out a way to make bio-weapons that could selectively target and eliminate certain ethnic-groups, I think it would be perfectly acceptable to consider what they were doing to be evil and repugnant and to make such developments illegal.

I think these large-scale mass-surveillance systems DARPA is developing right now are far more invasive of privacy than the internet. These systems would allow them to place miles of area under nonstop surveillance. They could monitor every person and everything that moves. Identify faces, behavior patterns, and to the best of my knowledge, many of these electro-optic sensors work in both the visual and infrared light-range, IR-sensors can even see through walls. This data of course could be collected and used to help chronicle the life-story of all those monitored.

Yes, I'm aware the Internet was created by DARPA's predecessor, ARPA. I'm aware DARPA/ARPA in the past did some good things such as develop the Internet. Lately, they are simply going too far. Every creation made by them seems to be geared towards figuring out ways to spy on people in ever greater detail in the easiest manner possible.

I know absolute privacy, just like absolute safety is impossible. I understand there needs to be a balance. This is not a balance, this is a surveillance gone-wild, privacy-be-damned, free-for-all.


CuttingEdge100