Big Brother Gets a Brain

[Dave Monroe]

The Pentagon's Plan for Tracking Everything That Moves
Big Brother Gets a Brain
by Noah Shachtman
The Village Voice, July 9 - 15, 2003

The cameras are already in place. The computer code is
being developed at a dozen or more major companies and
universities. And the trial runs have already been
planned. 

Everything is set for a new Pentagon program to become
perhaps the federal government's widest reaching, most
invasive mechanism yet for keeping us all under watch.
Not in the far-off, dystopian future. But here, and
soon. 

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. [...] 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. 

... Its architects at the Pentagon say it will help
protect our troops in cities like Baghdad [...]. But
defense experts believe the surveillance effort has a
second, more sinister, purpose: to keep entire cities
under an omnipresent, unblinking eye. 

This isn't some science fiction nightmare. Far from
it. CTS depends on parts you could get, in a pinch, at
Kmart. 

"There's almost a 100 percent chance that it will
work," said Jim Lewis, who heads the Technology and
Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, "because it's just connecting
things that already exist." 

As currently configured, the old-line cameras speckled
throughout every major city aren't that much of a
privacy concern. Yes, there are lenses
everywhere—several thousand just in Manhattan. But
they see so much, it's almost impossible for snoops to
sift through all the footage and find what's
important. 

CTS would coordinate the cameras, gathering their
views in a single information storehouse. The goal,
according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense
contractors, is to "track everything that moves."

"This gives the U.S. government capabilities Big
Brother only pretended to have," said John Pike,
director of Globalsecurity.org, a defense think tank.
"Before, we said Big Brother's watching. But he really
wasn't, because there was too much to watch." 

CTS could help soldiers spot dangers as they navigate
perilous urban areas, Pentagon researchers insist.
That's not how defense analysts like Pike see it. The
program "seems to have more to do with domestic
surveillance than a foreign battlefield," he said,
"and more to do with the Department of Homeland
Security than the Department of Defense." 

"Right now, this may be a military program," added
Lewis. "But when it gets up and running, there's going
to be a huge temptation to apply it to policing at
home"—to keep tabs on ordinary citizens, whether or
not they've done something wrong.

[...]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0328/shachtman.php

Obligatory Bentham invocation therein as well ...

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