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DARPA Sponsors Surveillance Technology To Predict Future Behavior
The dizzying speed of the growth of the surveillance state and the increasing sophistication of the tools used to build it are paid for in large measure by funds doled out by the Army’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At The New American we have chronicled the various projects sponsored by the über-secret research and development arm of the military. One of the newest technologies being pursued by DARPA will not only widen the field of vision of government’s never-blinking eye, but it purports to predict the behavior of those being watched.
Forbes reports that DARPA has contracted with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to develop “an artificial intelligence systemthat can watch and predict what a person will ‘likely’ do in the future using specially programmed software designed to analyze various real-time video surveillance feeds. The system can automatically identify and notify officials if it recognized that an action is not permitted, detecting what is described as anomalous behaviors.”
Deployment of the devices is anticipated at “airports and bus stations,” but there is little doubt that should these predictive monitors prove successful, they will be installed right there next to the red light cameras already mounted at nearly every intersection in America.
Forbes also reports that “Carnegie Mellon is one of 15 research teams and commercial integrators that is participating in a five-year program, started in 2010, to develop smart video software.”
Several aspects of this “Minority Report” come-to-life sound substantially similar to another contest of sorts being concurrently sponsored by DARPA at a secret campus near George Mason University in Virginia.
In a statement announcing the progress of the research, DARPA spokesmen Mark Geertsen said the goal of the project was “to invent new approaches to the identification of people, places, things and activities from still or moving defense and open-source imagery.”
