Hacker News Reader

Comment by achille | Hacker News Reader

Some context: ARGUS was critical in winning the war in Iraq. It was the critical centerpiece of Task Force ODIN, and they set it up in hotspots to monitor 24/7.

Once a roadside IED bomb was detected, they rewound the video, tracked the person who setup the bomb, then tracked that person back to the supplier for the IED/Financials. ODIN killed about ~3000 in Iraq and at least ~1000 in Afghanistan See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1142211...

Argus is now obsolete, they had a replacement RFP back in 2009. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/new-army-camera-prom...

Also a quick note, the aircraft had a 274 mbit/s uplink for streaming the live feeds.

Edit: Fixed 27/7

View on HN

From what I remember what was critical in 'winning the war' in Iraq was the Sunni awakening when the military agreed to let local tribes take care of business in exchange for political power because they were tired of being murdered by foreign militants and sheltering them out of fear. In a few weeks Anbar province was totally cleared out using on the ground regular intel no flashy space camera.

Impressive. Can't wait until it's put into day to day life for tracking UPS / DHL deliveries.

Or marihuana smokers and dealers. But not alcohol or tobacco sellers.

Yeah, that guy who dealt marihuana on rollerblades in NYC could get tracked in a sting operation which would also catch most of his customers. All they'd have to do is to "tail" him with such a device over a month.

Right now, it would be way too expensive to devote such a system to catch one dealer, but the scary thing is that systems like this could surveil and process entire regions/neighborhoods as a batch, and the expense of doing so is driven by the cost of communications and processing power. However, we know those costs are going to go down. From this, we should be able to estimate the time when large metropolitan police departments will be able to afford such capabilities.

That gives a concrete deadline for interested parties who wish to act.

EDIT: To clarify -- that would be a deadline for when it will be too late not a deadline for when to safely act by!

The war in Iraq was not won since nobody knows what the goal was.

That's the fun part. Anybody can come up with whatever reason they want!

> Argus is now obsolete, they had a replacement RFP back in 2009.

Scary. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same thing in infrared? What would it take to surveil the entirety of the US coastline and borders, for example?

Of course! There are multiple birds/sensors with SAR, IR, and multispectral capabilities always surveying various parts of the world. Organizations like NGA (formerly National Imagery and Mapping Agency to give some context) are very keen to using such geospatial data and provide resources in acquiring certain types of unclassified data sets:

https://www1.nga.mil/ProductsServices/Pages/PublicProducts.a...

> Of course! There are multiple birds/sensors with SAR, IR, and multispectral capabilities

I don't mean just taking pictures of them all. I mean to do the equivalent of Argus -- real-time 12 frames/second surveillance of the entirety of the borders and coasts of the continental United States of America. Just having the birds with the cameras is only a fraction of that task.

Is 27/7 an exaggeration or a mistype or a phrase I have never heard?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com