DARPA WANTS ALL-​​SEEING BLIMP

Conspiracy freaks, hold on to your tin hats. Darpa may have pub­licly aban­doned its creepi­est pro­grams, like Total Information Awareness. But the agency, hold­ing its every-18-months conference this week in Anaheim, still has a project to make you run full speed into your bunker.
Darpa is starting the planning for a blimp, three times the size of Goodyear's, that would keep watch over an entire city.
Sitting at 70,000 feet above groud, the ISIS (short for "Integrated Sensor is Structure”) air­ship would use a giant, flex­i­ble radar anten­nae to give, in the words of Darpa pro­gram man­ager Larry Correy, a “dynamic, detailed, real-​​time pic­ture of all move­ment on or above the bat­tle­field: friendly, neu­tral or enemy.“
“We will apply this tech­nol­ogy to track peo­ple emerg­ing from build­ings of inter­est and fol­low them as they move to new loca­tions,” added Darpa’s Paul Benda. “Imagine the impact it will have if ISIS tracks the move­ment of indi­vid­u­als for months. Hidden webs of con­nec­tions between peo­ple and facil­i­ties will be revealed.“
Such a sys­tem is meant to keep tabs on urban bat­tle­grounds abroad, of course. But, like Darpa’s “Combat Zones That See” project, there’s no rea­son ISIS couldn’t float over New York or Chicago or Kalamazoo.
For now, hold off on buy­ing that one-​​way trip to a secluded Caribbean island. ISIS is futur­is­tic, even by Darpa stan­dards. At the moment, the agency is only study­ing the fea­si­bil­ity of the air­ship. Darpa won’t even begin solic­it­ing research pro­pos­als until 2005.
A key prob­lem to tackle: how to store energy for the blimp. Correy fig­ures ISIS will need bat­ter­ies ten times lighter than today’s cells to stay aloft. Building the airship’s enor­mous radar anten­nae as large as the ship itself is going to be a huge chal­lenge, as well. The light­est space anten­nae weight 20 kilo­grams per square meter. For ISIS to work, that’ll have to drop at least seven-​​fold.
THERE’S MORE: Darpa invented the Internet. And now, the agency wants to reboot it, Government Computer News reports. Darpa is look­ing for ways to dra­mat­i­cally revamp the Internet Protocol, which for­wards infor­ma­tion from one com­puter to another, and assigns us all a place on the uber-​​network.
“Im not advo­cat­ing throw­ing out the Internet Protocol com­pletely, but we must absolutely have some mech­a­nism for assign­ing net­work capa­bil­i­ties to dif­fer­ent users and that capa­bil­ity has to scale to large num­bers of devices auto­mat­i­cally,” Darpa’s Col. Tom Gibson said. “The com­man­der wants to be able to send a mes­sage and have it deliv­ered, com­pletely, accu­rately and on time.”

March 12th, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.