[Infowarrior] - The Pentagon Wants TiVo (to Watch You)

[Richard Forno]

The Pentagon Wants TiVo (to Watch You)
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/03/the_pentagon_wa.html

I always love how the Pentagon, after spending billions of dollars on Rube
Goldberg contraptions, suddenly discovers that useful things might actually
exist in the commercial sector. And so yet another Pentagon advisory panel
has picked up on this fact.Poltergeist_041505_big

Reuters yesterday reported on a recently issued study on future technologies
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:

    William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need
to track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than
the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.

    "It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the
know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a
telephone interview.

So, after reviewing the available technology, what specific types of things
do they suggest the military needs? Well, one example, is the Pentagon wants
TiVo, according the report (available as a PDF here):

    To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed,
to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and
diversity. Furthermore, 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.

Much of the report comes as little surprise: the science advisers want to
move away from Cold War-era weapons and toward technologies that can be used
in urban conflicts. Small sensors, finding better ways to use data, and an
emphasis on increasingly popular "influence operations" all figure big.

-- Sharon Weinberger