US Navy 'PANDA' tech to sniff out 'deviant' sailors

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/12/us_navy_panda/

US Navy 'PANDA' tech to sniff out 'deviant' sailors

Keeping the oceans true blue

By Lewis Page b" Get more from this author

Posted in Government, 12th November 2009 15:45 GMT

US Navy Intelligence is soon to deploy radical new computer monitoring
software able to sniff out "deviations" among hundreds of thousands of
sailors at sea on the world's oceans.

Rather than some kind of Orwellian porn-enforcement system for use on the
USN's own matelots, however, the so-called Predictive Analysis for Naval
Deployment Activities (PANDA) technology will instead be used to sift a
global plot of worldwide shipping movements to identify vessels acting in a
menacing fashion.

"With tens of thousands of ships on the world's oceans every day, it is very
difficult to identify behaviour that may indicate a threat," said Rich
Dickinson, PANDA honcho at Lockheed Advanced Technology Labs, providing the
kit. "We believe PANDA provides a great improvement for [maritime domain
awareness] by automatically detecting deviations and alerting operators to
them."

The idea is that the Office of Naval Intelligence will deploy PANDA at its
National Maritime Intelligence Centre in Maryland, where the new tech will be
able to monitor tracking information covering much of the watery globe.

As well as information fed in by US warships, monitoring stations, patrol
aircraft and so on, the US intelligence community is also known to make
extensive use of radar spy satellites able to scan vast swathes of ocean from
orbit and pick out any ships. (Such satellites often need more power than can
be provided by solar panels, meaning that they are one of the main users of
nuclear energy in space.)

Monitoring every track on the Big Plot for suspicious behaviour - or
"deviations", as Lockheed terms such actions - would be impossibly
manpower-intensive, however. That's where PANDA comes in, using
"pattern-based learning technologies, historical data, and track monitoring"
to pick out potentially threatening ships engaged in possible WMD smuggling
or whatever.

Given the acronym, readers will be unsurprised to note that the agency
originally behind PANDA* is none other than DARPA, the Pentagon tech bureau
where, should you be applying for a job as a lab assistant, you don't have to
be hunchbacked - but it helps. The PANDA roll-out to naval intelligence
represents a move to Phase III by the project, meaning actual working kit as
opposed to design studies and trials. Phase IV, if approved, would see the
tech fully scaled up and handed over to the Navy.

Lockheed ATL announced the decision yesterday. There's a pdf presentation on
PANDA from DARPA here. B.

* We would offer for consideration: Overwatch Maritime Naval Intelligence
System for Collation and Identification of Enemy Nautical Tactics
(OMNISCIENT).