The Air Force has a fancy new camera technology, called "Gorgon Stare," which can "transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town." Too bad it's basically useless!
Yes, that's right, the Air Force has a new toy:
The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users.... Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [says] "Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we're looking at, and we can see everything."
How great is that? They'll never know what we're looking at, because we're looking at everything!
Except that... we still don't actually have the capacity to actually look at everything.
Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.
And even if we could, we still would have no clue what we're looking at!
Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence—eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.
Hurrah! We've built a $17.5 million machine, the main purpose of which is to produce functionally indecipherable data in quantities well beyond our capabilities to process it (a.k.a. "reality"). Who do they have designing this shit? Borges?
[WaPo; image via Getty]
Send an email to Max Read, the author of this post, at max@gawker.com.
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