The Pentagon Wants TiVo (to Watch You)

[Ian David]

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.



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):
(PDF DOCUMENT)http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2006-02-Summer_Study_Strategic_Tech_Vectors_Vol_I_Web.pdf
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.

More:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/03/the_pentagon_wa.html