A
state of the art spy system that is housed in a drone and can record
every moving object across an entire city from an altitude of 20,000
feet represents the next level of Big Brother surveillance.
The 1.8 billion pixel ARGUS-IS surveillance camera,
otherwise known as the Area Persistent Stare, has been developed by BAE
Systems as part of a contract with the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA).
Using 368 five megapixel cell phone cameras, the system
can be fitted to an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and is eventually planned to
be incorporated into the developmental solar eagle drone that will be
able to stay airborne for years at a time.
The clip above features the creator of ARGUS, BAE
Systems’ Yiannis Antoniades, describing how the system is equivalent to,
“having up to 100 predators look at an area the size of a medium sized
city at once,” and how it can track every moving object across an area
of 15 square miles, right down to people walking down the street and
even birds flying in the sky and objects as small as six inches on the
ground.
“Everything that is a moving object is being
automatically tracked… You can see individuals crossing the street. You
can see individuals walking in parking lots. There’s actually enough
resolution to be able to see people waving their arms or what kind of
clothes they wear,” said Antoniades.
The system can store one million terabytes of video per
day, 5,000 hours of HD footage, while broadcasting live streaming
footage to a ground station. ARGUS can “zoom in and see tremendous
detail.”
Details of the project, which was initiated in 2007,
have only recently been released thanks to a government gag order being
lifted, but the sensor itself is still classified and cannot be shown on
camera.
Antoniades refused to discuss whether the system had
been deployed in the field but stated, “I’m not at liberty to discuss
plans of the government, but if we had our choice, we would like ARGUS
to be over the same area 24 hours day, 7 days a week,” adding that
drones would be a “perfect platform” for the sensor.
“We’re moving towards an increasingly electronic society
where our movements are going to be tracked,” said Mary Cummings of the
MIT Humans and Automation Lab.
Experts predict that there will be 30,000 surveillance drones in American skies by 2020 following a bill passed last year by Congress that permits the use of unmanned aerial spy vehicles on domestic soil.
“Now, consider this technology in the context of extra-judicial drone strikes initiated by artificial intelligence assessment parameters that automatically determine if you are a threat or not, and you can see how dangerous drones armed with these imaging systems will become,” writes Max Slavo.
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