They like to watch

The Pentagon is trying to create urban total information awareness, called Combat Zones That See or CTS. They want a multi-camera system that can be deployed in urban combat zones, eventually having software automatically detect unusual activity.

On its face, this seems like a perfectly legitimate technological goal for protecting our military forces. The problem, unfortunately, is the seductiveness of a system like this for domestic use by law enforcement:

Though insisting CTS isn't intended for homeland security, DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] outlined a hypothetical scenario for contractors in March that showed the system could aid police as well as the military. DARPA described a hypothetical terrorist shooting at a bus stop and a hypothetical bombing at a disco one month apart in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, a city with slightly more residents than Miami.

CTS should be able to track the day's movements for every vehicle that passed each scene in the hour before the attack, DARPA said. Even if there were 2,000 such vehicles and none showed up twice, the software should automatically compare their routes and find vehicles with common starting and stopping points.

Do we want to live in a surveillance society? It won't be the America we were taught about in school. More importantly, this will destroy the American way of life in such a way as to hand a victory to the “terrorists”.

(via Atrios' Eschaton.)

kherr @ 23:52 CDT | link | tech