CITY-​​SNOOP PROGRAM RETURNS?

Back in the sum­mer of 2003, I wrote a lit­tle story for the Village Voice on the Pentagon’s plan to track every­thing that moves in a city. Since then, there hasn’t been much word from the Defense Department about “Combat Zones that See,” or CTS. A planned demon­stra­tion at Ft. Belvoir never came about or was kept very quiet. Last year, Congress moved to yank funds from the program’s bud­get.
But now, CTS may be on the way back, if Tony Tether — the head of Defense Department far-​​out research arm Darpa — has his way. The agency’s pro­posed 2006 bud­get calls for $20 mil­lion over three years for CTS. It’s part of an expanded, $340 mil­lion push by Darpa to develop tech­nolo­gies for urban bat­tles (see Falluja, Najaf, etc.)
Here’s what Tether told the Senate Armed Services com­mit­tee last week about CTS:

We need a net­work, or web, of sen­sors to bet­ter map a city and the activ­i­ties in it, includ­ing inside build­ings, to sort adver­saries and their equip­ment from civil­ians and their equip­ment, includ­ing in crowds, and to spot snipers, sui­cide bombers, or IEDs (impro­vised explo­sive devices). We need to watch a great vari­ety of things, activ­i­ties, and peo­ple over a wide area and have great res­o­lu­tion avail­able when we need it. And this is not just a mat­ter of more and bet­ter sen­sors, but just as impor­tant, the sys­tems needed to make action­able intel­li­gence out of all the data. Closely related to this are tag­ging, track­ing, and locat­ing (TT&L) sys­tems that help us watch and track a par­tic­u­lar per­son or object of inter­est. These sys­tems will also help us detect the clan­des­tine pro­duc­tion or pos­ses­sion of weapon of mass destruc­tion in over­seas urban areas. There was a recent inci­dent in Iraq where one of our UAVs [unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles] spot­ted some insur­gents fir­ing a mor­tar. Then the insur­gents climbed back into their car and drove away. The good news was that the UAV was able to track the car so U.S. heli­copters could go after it and destroy it. The bad news was that, at one point, some of the pas­sen­gers got out. Then we had to decide whether to fol­low those indi­vid­u­als or the car because we sim­ply did not have enough cov­er­age avail­able. If wed had other sen­sors avail­able, we would have had a bet­ter chance of get­ting all of those insur­gents.
If we could quickly track-​​back where a vehi­cle came from, it would greatly help us deal with sui­cide car bombers. It is dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to deter the bombers them­selves, just as you can­not deter a mis­sile that has already been launched. But, one key to deter­rence that has been miss­ing is reli­able attri­bu­tion, or a return address. If we knew where the car came from, using, for exam­ple, RSTA [recon­nais­sance, sur­veil­lance, and tar­get acqui­si­tion] sys­tems that allowed us to quickly trace the car car­ry­ing the explo­sives back to the house or shop it came from, we could then attack that place and those people.

CTS is one of a bunch of Darpa urban ops pro­grams that skates the fine line between creepy and cool. The agency would also like $10 mil­lion to build robotic, fly­ing spies that weight less than 10 grams and are just two inches across. The “Home Field” pro­gram would “develop net­worked video and LADAR [laser radar] pro­cess­ing tech­nol­ogy that rapidly and reli­ably updates a 3D model of an urban area. [Such an] urban­scape will pro­vide 3D sit­u­a­tional aware­ness with suf­fi­cient detail and accu­racy to remove the ‘home field advan­tage’ enjoyed by oppo­nents.” Meanwhile, the “Pre-​​Conflict Anticipation and Shaping” (PCAS) could help American coun­terin­sur­gents pre­dict where con­flicts might boil up next.

The project will com­bine com­pu­ta­tional social sci­ence mod­el­ing and sim­u­la­tion, sce­nario gen­er­a­tion, evo­lu­tion­ary pro­gram­ming, plan­ning, and mul­ti­player gam­ing. When inte­grated, these tech­nolo­gies allow com­bat­ant com­man­ders and senior deci­sion mak­ers to under­stand and antic­i­pate the societal/​regional indi­ca­tors that pre­cip­i­tate insta­bil­ity and con­flict within an area of respon­si­bil­ity, then mit­i­gate the impact of that insta­bil­ity… The goal of PCAS’ more pow­er­ful societal/​regional mod­els is an inte­grated per­spec­tive encom­pass­ing, in a con­sis­tent way, all the dimen­sions of social change.

March 18th, 2005 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.