Politics: Chilling

Fellow blogger Noah Schactman scores the cover story in this week's Village Voice. Schactman's excellent DefenseTech blog offers an insightful round up of the defense industry with a focus on watchdogging. Noah hit a grand slam with his exposition on Combat Zones That See (CTS), a DARPA program now being tested which will link feeds from remote cameras into a central database for the first time:

The military is scheduled to issue contracts for Combat Zones That See, or CTS, as early as September. The first demonstration should take place before next summer, according to a spokesperson. Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.

Of course, the nice folks at DARPA (who also employ the convicted felon Admiral John Poindexter to run the Total Information Awareness program) and some of DARPA's partner's on the contract don't appear to have their stories straight regarding the application of CTS:

This assumes, of course, that CTS has anything to do with urban combat. If it does, it'd be a surprise to some of the businesses bidding for the CTS contract.

"The primary application is for homeland security," said Tom Lento, a spokesman for the Sarnoff Corporation.

"The whole theme here is homeland security," added Northrop Grumman's De Witte.

Strat disagreed. "DARPA's mission is not to do homeland security," he said.

In a presentation to industry, DARPA noted, "CTS technology will be demonstrated only within the observable boundaries of government installations where video surveillance is expressly permitted, and operational deployment areas outside the United States where it is consistent with all local laws."

But in an interview, Strat did admit that "there's a chance that some of this technology might work its way" into domestic surveillance programs.

In the test at Fort Belvoir this year the aim is to track 90 percent of all of cars within the target area for any given 30-minute period. The paths of 1 million vehicles should be stored and retrievable within three seconds. A year after that, CTS is supposed to move on to testing in an urban combat setting, where it will gather information from 100 mobile sensors, like drone spy planes and "video ropes" containing dozens of tiny cameras.

Apart from the in-home parenting potential for this product which I clearly see since I've been a father for all of 4 days, this is a terrifying development.