Thursday, November 8, 2012

7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/president-hunt-you/?pid=1620&viewall=true                    

7 Technologies That Will Make It Easier for the Next President to Hunt and Kill You
















Sensor Fusion

The military can listen in on your phone calls, and can watch you from above. But it doesn't have one thing -- one intelligence-collection platform, as the jargon goes -- that can do both at once. Instead, the various "ints" are collected and processed separately -- and only brought together at the final moment by a team of analysts. It's a gangly, bureaucratic process that often allows prey to slip through the nets of military hunters.
The exception to this is the Blue Devil program. It outfits a single Beechcraft King Air A90 turboprop plane with a wide area sensor, a traditional camera, and eavesdropping gear -- all passing information from one to the other. The electronic ear might pick up a phone call, and tell the camera where to point. Or the wide area sensor might see a truck moving, and ask the eavesdropper to take a listen. Flying in Afghanistan since late 2010, the system has been "instrumental in identifying a number of high-value individuals and improvised explosive device emplacements," according to the Air Force, which just handed out another $85 million contract to operate and upgrade the fleet of four Blue Devil planes.
There's a second, more ambitious phase of the Blue Devil program, one that involved putting a lot more sensors onto an airship the size of a football field. But that mega-blimp upgrade never made it to the flight-testing phase, owing to a series of bureaucratic, financial and technical hurdles. But the idea of sensor fusion is not going anywhere. And, let's be honest: If one of these surveillance arrays catches you in their web, neither are you.
— Noah Shachtman

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