And if they do, I'm sure the Democrats would never grant them retroactive immunity for them anyhow. Sure, Bush, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama did just that for the telcos with FISA [cough] reform, but the two situations are completely different. For some reason. But isn't technology swell? The great Walter Pincus:
[S]ome insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.
"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems," according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.
During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.
"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public," he said.
Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait -- in other words, human identification.
Of course, the volume of data is so great that it's hard to analyze -- hence the contract for working out how to index it.
And it's not like they can put Predators up over the whole country; I'm sure they can cover only selected cities like, oh, Denver or Minneapolis....
Not to be foily, of course.
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October 2002
During October 2002 the entire Greater Wash Area was under surveillance in search of the beltway sniper. It seems all that video was archived. Wonderful.
Masterpiece Theatre-Contemporary has a 5-part series on about
the surveillance society in Great Britain, The Last Enemy. The government is trying to implement TIA (Total Information Awareness--yes, just like our TIA--only more so).
All the episodes are available on the web site the Monday after the initial broadcast and will remain available until November 9. They can be viewed in their entirety or broken into chapters.
The writer said that initially he thought he had gone too far in indicating the tracking cameras could pick up audio--then learned that some now can do so.
Dystopian.