No big surprise that DARPA, the military’s blue-sky research arm, is the agency behind the lofty five-year program called Insight. The agency’s goal is to replace “largely manual exploitation and … chat-based operator interactions” with a system that mines different inputs, including drone footage and on-the-ground intel, and quickly stitches together the data to identify potential threats.
What DARPA’s calling “a next generation ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] exploitation and resource management system” would be faster than human analysts, but it’d still rely on their input. DARPA wants an interface that’s adaptable, letting users provide context and pick the best surveillance combo for a given situation.
The Pentagon’s been investing in super-powered surveillance for years now, and DARPA wants Insight to capitalize on the rapid growth in the recon field. The program will incorporate brand new spy cams, like ARGUS-IS, a 1.8-Gigapixel camera that tracks over 100 square miles in real time. And ongoing DARPA projects might be rolled into the Insight system too. The agency’s solicitation cites a handful, including the recently launched PerSEAS, a program to design complex algorithms that can somehow spot threats based on little more than “weak evidence.”
It’s the Information Awareness Office by another name. The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA). This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social network analysis, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant. This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats". Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.
Their logo says it all: the New World Order’s pyramid and all-seeing eye. It is the total tracking, total control, and total tyranny program.
Comments
Great Carnivore on crack.
The tone of the piece is very ominous and civil liberties groups may be seeing this as Big Brother on our doorstep.
My feel however, is that: first, this is totally consistent with DARPA's mission. They have a decades-long mission to develop systems to keep us in front of the bad guys. Second, we have most of these data gathering systems bought and paid for via DOD anyway. "Someone" needs to be smart enough to make these systems earn their keep and use the massive data feeds to keep us safe. I'd never bet the four services could do it on their own anyway. Third, DARPA is one of this country's finest think-tank inventions. Dr. Dugan is nothing short of brilliant herself and the overall work of this organization is just really cool.
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