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The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology
- brohee 7y agoI wonder how they stream 1.8 gigapixels to the ground, even with a low framerate that's serious bandwidth...
- marviel 7y agoI'd guess the optimization there is to tell the drone what "targets" they care about and to only stream back data within a cone of those targets
- codewritinfool 7y agoA while back this was talked about on a podcast - can't remember which one, and they said it took 1 photo per second. I'm not sure if they were being truthful or just saying it for illustration.
- jjtheblunt 7y agodifferent radio bands than civilians use, off satellite links
- NikkiA 7y agoAt the height they cruise the drone at, it's possible they piggyback onto a couple of dozen cell towers at a time using directional antennae.
- dmix 7y agoThis is great, I hope Gorgon Stare enters the modern lexicon. It's a adequately intimidating sounding name for an overreaching gov surveillance program that was intended for warfare zones and being applied to domestic citizens. Exactly like "Stingrays" from a couple years ago.
- m463 7y agoAll a terrorist would have to do is a few minor operations on domestic soil, then stand back and watch as the country folds in on itself. Like airport security x 1000.
- swagasaurus-rex 7y agoWas this not the stated mission of Osama Bin Laden, to bait America into a taxing war that would drain the economy and see Western civilization spend itself into bankruptcy?
- i_am_nomad 7y agoI think that was the goal he stated retroactively. Before the attacks, he seemed to legitimately believe he could conventionally destroy the US and unite the Umma with a long series of 9/11 style operations.
- dmix 7y agoThey're already doing it culturally in response to political wrongthink on the internet and elsewhere, which legions of trolls on 4chan et al regularly exploit for their own amusement. The same thing in the "homeland" security world would obviously result in a similar overreaction in a country where so many people are paid to be paranoid and overly sensitive to risk. But the deterrents and personal risks of messing with actual security services are so much higher which lowers the likelihood. Plus how many crazies have tried the "mass shootings to start a {cultural/race} war" thing and completely failed. Or all the groups from the 1970-90s preaching nonsense about the triggering of some symbolic event resulting in mass societal change or utopia (see: Branch Davidians). It always fails spectacularly. Same with ISIS. I wish people would stop trying those strategies, which always harms innocent people caught in between, while the overreaction just feeds into the group's now (self-fulfilled) victim complex which just further adds fuel to their sales pitch to the fringe, creating more conflict and overreaction.
- mindslight 7y ago
- jacobwilliamroy 7y agoI used to live next to a guy who would shoot all drones on sight. The world needs more people like him. Edit: so other people have pointed out firing ballistics into the air is actually really dangerous. Signal jamming the drone seems like a safer kind of direct action. Could also indirectly resist the military industrial complex by lobbying state and federal governments. That would be the safest way to bring down a drone.
- fludlight 7y agoBullets go up, then they come down and kill the neighbors' kids. Don't do this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire
- asark 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadeye_Dick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadeye_Dick
- mdorazio 7y agoIf you try to shoot drones with a rifle or handgun. In most cases you would use a shotgun with birdshot, which isn’t really dangerous beyond a few hundred feet unless it hits you in the eye. Still, never shoot at anything unless you’re sure of not hitting fragile things behind it, but fearmongering over shooting down drones isn’t very productive.
- fludlight 7y ago> isn’t really dangerous beyond a few hundred feet The overwhelming majority of the world lives less than a few dozen feet from their neighbors. Homes tend to cluster together even in the middle of nowhere. Now please, pretty please, stop encouraging people to discharge their firearms into the air.
- dillonmckay 7y agoI would love to see the stats for this claim.
- captaincrowbar 7y agoI keep wondering if the person who came up with the name was a Charlie Stross fan. Stross's Laundry Files novels feature a hybrid magical/technological device codenamed Scorpion Stare. It's a weapon rather than a surveillance technology, but it's also built into government surveillance systems as a hidden feature. And the technology behind it was discovered by dissecting actual gorgons (which are a real thing in the Laundryverse).
- cushychicken 7y agoStick an FPGA in a digital camera and vaporize whatever you like! Love it. Laundry Files are a great read. One of my all time favorites.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoWe best hope this drone doesn't have a basilisk module in the software then!
- archgoon 7y agoJust don't send him an email. :) http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/psa-gorgon-stare.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/01/psa-gorg...
- kefs 7y agoFrom a previous comment of mine: Gorgon Stare was featured in PBS Nova Rise of the Drones (2013) Skip to 30m mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s
- avip 7y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o&t=30m29s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o&t=30m29s
- jcims 7y agoThere's also an excellent RadioLab episode about it: https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/eye-sky https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/eye-sky If you didn't worry about all of the potential for abuse, the ability it provides to help solve crime is pretty compelling.
- MR4D 7y agoWow - I’d heard about the capability before, but actually seeing it in video is like watching Terminator - fun but eerie at the same time. Thanks for the great link (and also for automatically setting it to the 30 minute mark).
- brohee 7y agoThey say that they acquire one million terrabyte a day? Was it a journalist mistake? It sounds like really a lot for 2013, the budgets must be huge...
- bronco21016 7y agoI haven’t done any math on 1.8 billion pixel video feed but I agree. There’s not enough radio bandwidth even for one drone to beam down over a million TB/day.
- jandrewrogers 7y agoThe raw storage density of a high-end sensing drone was approaching a petabyte even back then, so it is a plausible number if you have a large drone fleet. This roughly matches available COTS flash storage in ultra-dense form factors at the time. Live streams are likely going to be an extract of the captured data but you can always pull the storage array when it lands.
- manjana 7y ago> It’s a way of seeing everybody all the time. Fundamental to liberal democracy is the ability to have sacrosanct private spaces. That is where the life of civil society exists. It is where our own personal lives exist, where we are able to pursue our dreams and passions. And it is often where we hold power to account. When you uncover those spaces, you fundamentally put all of those things at risk. Are satellite surveillance not already a threat in this sense? I have heard such images have a resolution down to 1 cm.
- maroonblazer 7y agoBostrom makes a compelling argument that we may find ourselves needing to rethink this assumption of privacy in the name of preventing bad actors from wiping out civilization. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
- salawat 7y agoI disagree. His paper comes off more as whataboutism, or a call toward paying more attention to underlying issues of poor ethical/moral fabric underlying society today; particularly and most obviously illustrated in the tech industry today. Yes. Our ability to effect the world is amplified greatly from what it has ever been before; but before abandoning essential liberty, perhaps we should take a moment to collect ourselves, sit down, and realize that if we're willing to give up everything, then civilization is already lost; therefore, the proper direction is not further breakdown or restriction of liberties, but a revival of the collective cilized spirit that hitherto has graced our ancestors in bringing us to this point. Technology and our bewitchment by it, and the power conferred through it's use are things tempered by prudence and an active sense of obligation to those around us, and those we'll be leaving behind to carry on after us. I'm incredibly alarmed at the willingness to embrace the sacrifice of essential liberty nowadays... It's mind boggling.
- harshreality 7y agoHi there, John Stuart Mill. Bostrom's argument is not at all that bad people do bad things so therefore we need total surveillance. It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end. Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
- Animats 7y agoHalf-meter resolution from a drone - big deal. Digital Globe can do better from orbit.[1] Integration of all the imagery from ground-based surveillance cameras is a bigger threat to privacy. At half a meter, about all you can do is find fires and follow cars. [1] https://platform.digitalglobe.com/earth-imaging-basics-spatial-resolution/ https://platform.digitalglobe.com/earth-imaging-basics-spati...
- varjag 7y agoDigital Globe follows terminator, while a drone can provide a live feed.
- cameldrv 7y agoIt was a revolutionary technology when it was deployed in Iraq. You had roadside bombs going off constantly. The workflow was: 1. Bomb goes off 2. Plane lands, disk packs taken off, loaded into computer 3. DVR type interface, zoom to the time/place where the bomb went off. 4. Rewind. Observe some guys messing around with something on the side of the road. 5. Draw a box around their truck. 6. Run the tape forward. Computer automatically tracks the truck. Observe where truck goes back to. 7. Run the tape backward. Observe where truck came from. 8. Kick down two doors that night. 9. Integrate this with your mobile phone tracker. Observe all phones that came to either of the two addresses within a time window. 10. See what other places these phones went to. Find places that are common to multiple bombings. Repeat. 11. You now have the leadership chain. Roadside bombs essentially stopped being a problem. This was attributed to the "Anbar Awakening", but my belief is that it was essentially due to these two technologies.
- 01100011 7y agoI dunno, this seems pretty powerful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJLr0KMsRAA
- alexanderthe- 7y agoFor some context on the ancient greek definition of the "Gorgon Stare", read: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/fear/dread-gorgon https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/fear/dread-gorgon
- runjake 7y agoARGUS-IS, which is the successor to GORGON STARE, adds DVR capabilities. So your feed catches a VBIED detonation and analysts can zoom in and rewind the footage and find the safe house from which the VBIED departed. This can be done at effectively metropolitan scale. IIRC, both these systems are being tested domestically. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
- godelski 7y agoI remember a RadioLab episode[0] that talked about using small planes to do similar things. Planes that were flying at high up so you won't hear or really notice them. They go through how they solved a crime in Mexico by tracing where the crime happened and stepping pictures back to find where the shooter originated from. The CIA and FBI have been doing this for a long time too. Its use is just getting more wide spread. Then I want people to consider Planet [1](formally Planet Labs). Their goal is to get a picture of Earth every day. They currently have 14 satellites that get 0.72m resolution (sample)[2]. That's easily enough to see a car. The 3m[3] seems good enough to do what they describe in the RadioLab episode. Honestly it is only a matter of time before Planet or another company gets sub 100cm resolution AND has a constant view of the globe. While this product is transformative in many different ways and can do a lot of good for humanity (seriously, it can do a LOT of good) I have ZERO doubt that it will be used to track people. It really isn't a matter of inventing technology, it is a matter of how much to spend (inventing more will make it cheaper). So I think we should think very carefully about this technology. I'm extremely concerned with privacy but at the same time I do not think we should prevent the march of innovation (even if you really could). But we've seen how it has been used. We see how it IS being used. But I want people to also think how it WILL be used as technology gets better. This isn't a conversation for tomorrow. We do have to think about it now and decide how we want to handle these things. I'm not entirely sure how it should be handled. But the idea that the US, Russia, China, or even NK could have access to constant monitoring of the entire planet is a scary idea and well past Orwellian. I think we're far from a constant monitoring being feasible, but we're at least close enough where the idea is realistic (where it isn't sci-fi anymore). Side note: I wonder how much more difficult it would be to be a spy if this technology existed. [0] https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wnycs-radiolab/e/eye-in-the-sky-39430699 https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/wnycs-radiolab/e/eye-in-the... [1] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/ https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/ [2] https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/skysat_rotterdam.jpg https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/skysat... [3] https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/planetscope_sanfrancisco.jpg https://www.planet.com/assets/images/products/imagery/planet...