scientia est potentia

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002275.html

Mini-Sensors for "Military Omniscience"

Spotting insurgents, sorting out friend from foe b it's beyond tough in
todaybs guerilla war zones. So tough, that no single monitor can be counted
on to handle the job. The Pentagon's answer: build a set of palm-sized,
networked sensors that can be scattered around, and work together to b
detect,
classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants under foliage and in urban
environments.b
 Itbs part of a larger Defense Department effort to establish
b
military omniscienceb
 and b
ubiquitous monitoring.b


The military has been working on gadgets for a while, now, that can be left
behind in a bad neighborhood or a jihadist training site, and monitor the
situation. These Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano-Sensors (CLENS) would be an
order of magnitude smaller than previous surveillance gear of its type -- just
60 milimeters long, and 150 grams.

Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, also wants the monitors to take up
a 10,000th of the power of previous sensors. That would give the CLENS enough
juice to keep watch over an area for up to 180 days.

The way they'd keep watch would be different, too. Not as a individual
sensors, but as a network of monitors, communicating with ultra wideband
radios. The same frequencies could be used as a kind of radar, to track
objects and people within the sensor net.

"The best way to learn about an adversary b what hebs done, what hebs
doing, and what hebs likely to do - is through continual observation using as
many observation mechanisms as possible. We call this persistent
surveillance," Dr. Ted Bially, head of Darpa's Information Exploitation
Office, told a conference last year. "Webve learned that occasional or
periodic snapshots donbt tell us enough of what we need to know. In order to
really understand whatbs going on we have to observe our adversaries and
their environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week, week-in and week-out."

According to its recently-released budget, Darpa hopes to hand over its new,
minature, persistent sensors to Special Operations Command by the end of
fiscal year 2007.

UPDATE 8:50 AM: Speaking of military omniscience, Darpa's "Combat Zones That
See" effort, meant to network together an entire city's worth of surveillance
cameras, gets $5 million in next year's budget.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
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