Everything You Need to Know About TrapWire, the Surveillance System Everyone Is Freaking Out About Just FYI, having waded through about a metric shit ton of conspiracy theories about TrapWire over the weekend, I think you've got it wrong when you say people are freaked out because they believe TrapWire was "secret." Pretty much every report I've read — including from the "I wear a platinum shield to bed" set — has had links to the very public patents and other documentation of TrapWire. What's freaking people out: 1) Bizarre, incorrect claims about facial recognition; and 2) Not-so-bizarre and potentially interesting claims about the fact that private CCTVs are now networked into a national surveillance system. The question with 2) is whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in, say, a private building with CCTVs whose feeds you think will never go beyond the doorman. If you DO have that expectation of privacy, and a court finds it "reasonable," but the government is tapping into that feed, that's a problem.
Combat Zones That See Combat Zones That See, or CTS, is a project of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [1] whose goal is to "track everything that moves" in a city by linking up a massive network of surveillance cameras to a centralised computer system.[2] Artificial intelligence software will then identify and track all movement throughout the city.[3] CTS is described by DARPA as intended for use in combat zones, to deter enemy attacks on American troops and to identify and track enemy combatants who launch attacks against American soldiers.[2] Civil liberties activists and writers of dystopian fiction believe that such programs have great potential for privacy violations, and have openly opposed the project.[2][4][5] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]
VIRAT Concept diagram of the VIRAT system, from the DARPA project solicitation[1] The Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program is a video surveillance project funded by the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).[2][3][4] The purpose of the program was to create a database that could store large quantities of video, and make it easily searchable by intelligence agents to find "video content of interest" (e.g. "find all of the footage where three or more people are standing together in a group") -- this is known as "content-based searching". [1] The other primary purpose was to create software that could provide "alerts" to intelligence operatives during live operations (e.g. The focus of VIRAT is primarily on footage from UAVs such as the MQ-1 Predator. Diagram of example operation using VIRAT system, (from the DARPA project solicitation[1]) The DARPA program manager for the VIRAT project is Dr. See also[edit]
AFRL's Gotcha Radar to Widen Stare "Gotcha" is the cute name for an experimental system that collects vast amounts of synthetic-aperture radar data from an aircraft circling an urban area and processes it into 3D video for real-time surveillance and forensic analysis. Now the US Air Force Research Laboratory is looking to identify potential sources for a Gotcha Spiral 2, a dual-band (X/UHF) radar system capable of staring at a city-sized area 10-20km in diameter and downlinking the data for ground processing. The key behind Gotcha is that data are collected in a single radar mode, then processed in a supercomputer to produce a range of products, including "super-resolution" 2D imagery, 3D video, ground moving-target indication and coherent change detection. Imagery can be viewed in near real-time, or an analyst can backtrack through the store of radar data to find out what led up to an event.