02 July 2003

It is gray here as the moisture from Tropical Depression Bill sweeps over the southeast corner of the United States. The folks on the radio are predicting an eighty percent chance of rain. I don't want to go to work today. The Boss is back and the madness will begin all over again down at the Ministry of Health. He is always feisty when he has been away, suspicious that we have been plotting against him in his absence. But of course, you are only paranoid when they are not actually out to get you, the saying goes, and the Boss undoubtedly has his reasons.

I finished breakfast with some apprehension. NPR is talking about the new Arnold film, the third iteration of The Terminator, this one called "The Rise of the Machines." The reviewer says it is not as pretentious as the sequel to The Matrix, thank goodness. But I don't need any more of that today. I glanced at the latest edition of Newsweek in the mail yesterday and the picture on the cover is striking. Below the teaser for the inside stories on the "Hunt for Saddam" and "Snoop Dogg Unplugged" is an attractive lesbian couple. They are billed as partners Lauren Leslie and Elizibeth Neal Jones. They are both absolutely gorgeous. According to the interior notes on this issue, editor Mark Whitaker indicates that the Supreme Court decision striking down sodomy is going to have some huge consequences. There is an alternate cover with two absolutely gorgeous guys, and I am just happy to have received the one with Lauren and Liz.

The High Court decision may have come just in time. You never know who is going to be peering into your bedroom.

Michael Sniffen of the Associated Press reported from Washington this morning about an ominous new development. It was so scary that I went out on the balcony to see if he or some other Pentagon contractors were lurking there. Michael is possibly on to something hot. He says the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is developing an urban surveillance system to fuze data from video cameras through computer analysis to "track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city."

DARPA is calling the program ``Combat Zones That See,'' as if they were autonomous zones of intelligence. It is intended to help protect U.S. troops and fight in cities overseas. Operation Sidewinder is continuing this morning in Baghdad, and everyone has their nerves on end. We could use this application there. But of course there are issues. The usual privacy advocates are already hysterical about it, saying that the unclassified technology could easily be adapted for other surveillance applications. Like what Luaren and Liz are up to.

The project's centerpiece is innovative computer software capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag. Or the drivers and passengers by face. According to the unclassified briefs I have seen, the program can also provide instant alerts upon detecting a vehicle with a license plate on a watch-list, or make associative searches of months of records to locate and compare vehicles spotted near potential targets.

DARPA is into this associative technology up to its neck. The Agency hit a hot button when news spread of the software it was developing that scanned multiple databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide. Admiral Poindexter, the former National Security Advisor who took the fall for the Iran-Contra affair was in charge of it, and that was enough to the conspiracy nuts. One of the internet sites devoted to the relentless spread of innuendo claimed there was a shadowy plot behind it all. Poindexter was encouraged to leave the Syntek corporation and work on the Government side on the DARPA project Genoa. That was where all this began, the development of a surveillance device combining cutting-edge search engine, sophisticated information harvesting program and a "peer-to-peer" file sharing system. Imagine it as a MilSpec Google-meets-Napster application for instant analysis of electronic data. The point was to sift through the mountain of electronic data to predict terrorist attacks.

In the course of sifting through everything you could find a remarkable amount of information about any of us, which is where the problem comes in. Like the Boss, you are only paranoid if they are not really out to get you. The creation of a computerized diary of everything a person says, sees, hears, reads or touches might be possible. It might be used against Lauren and Liz. And it might also be the only way to root out the bad guys, make associations with sleeper cells, deflect the Big Operation that still seems to be planned to happen right here in the Homeland. I don't want to die just because I work at the Ministry, after all, and I think no one does.

Which is where I come in to this particular movie. I had a job offer dangling from one of the local big-time contractors that had a part of the DARPA action to develop Genoa as a system for counter-terror applications. I didn't take the job, but the applications of this totally unclassified technology keep popping up. Some have very useful attributes. Tomorrow I was supposed to go up to the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab to see a demonstration of how a variant of the software can be adapted to do health surveillance.

This version of the automatic data base searches is tailored to look at pharmacy sales, hospital admissions and a myriad of sales and demographic data to create alerts of a possible health event in development. Call it a health weather system. The beauty of the system is that it would recognize that people are self-treating or reporting to the emergency room long before a harried health-care professional could get to the end of their shift and file a report. On paper. It is an adaptation of the business software that permits Total Asset Visibility and permits the razor-thin profit margins that have enabled Sam Walton to drive most of the Mom n' Pop retailers out of business all across America.

I have been saying for a while that if the WalMart can track all of its inventory automatically- all the transactions, inventory draw-down, filing re-orders and the like- we ought to be able to have a computer program to do something similar for security purposes. Obviously I was neither prescient nor alone in that view. And now here it comes. Britain has aggressively installed cameras to monitor most big urban areas. Face-recognition technologies were used at the last Super Bowl. According to Michael Sniffen, software is coming that is supposed to be able to analyze video footage and identify ``what is normal (behavior), what is not'' and discover ``links between places, subjects and times of activity.'' This application is the first integration of a multi-camera surveillance system capable of automatic analysis of live video. Imagine the traffic-ticket cameras they have been installing all over town not just looking at the plates on your car and whether you crowded the yellow light. In addition to all that, the system could tell where you are going and who is with you in the car and link that back to your credit card to see what you had for lunch and with whom. And other cool applications, too.

The system reportedly will be tested first down at Ft. Belvoir, Va., near George Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Then they will try it overseas. But it is undoubtedly coming to a city near you soon.

The sixth anniversary of the reversion of Hong Kong to China was marked by protest over the new security directives. The police in there said attendance at the demonstration marking the introduction of new security procedures in the former Crown Colony peaked at 350,000. The organizers of the event, the Civil Human Rights Front, claimed more than 500,000 were there. That would make it the largest demonstration on Chinese soil since Tiananmen Square. The PRC could use some recognition software to track these rabble-rousers. Maybe they can leverage the DARPA project.

Word is that the contractors are eager to bid on a system which could link the existing forty million surveillance cameras with what is to come. DARPA expects there to be three hundred million of the cameras in use by the year after next. This isn't science fiction and it isn't that hard. No anti-gravity devices are required. Hell, it isn't even that expensive. They spend $175 million just to do Terminator 3.

George Orwell was just a little optimistic on his timeline. If I see Big Brother down at the Ministry today I'll say "Hi!" for you. While that is still necessary. Pretty soon he will be able to know you love him automatically.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra