Arthur C. Clarke once famously quipped that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So perhaps it was inevitable that the Pentagon’s extreme technology arm would eventually start acting like magicians — and try to create illusions on the front lines.
In its new budget, unveiled on Monday, Darpa introduced a new $4 million investigation into technologies that will “manage the adversary’s sensory perception” in order to “confuse, delay, inhibit, or misdirect [his] actions.” Darpa calls the project “Battlefield Illusion.” Of course.
“The current operational art of human-sensory battlefield deception is largely an ad-hoc practice,” the agency sighs as it lays out the project’s goals. But if researchers can better understand “how humans use their brains to process sensory inputs,” the military should be able to develop “auditory and visual” hallucinations that will “provide tactical advantage for our forces.”
Ultimately, the aim is to “demonstrate and assess the operational effectiveness of advanced human-deceptive technologies on military ground, sea, and airborne systems.”...[Full Article]
(Reuters) - The Pentagon's advanced research arm, the same group credited with developing the forerunner of the Internet in the 1960s, is working on many fronts to boost U.S. defenses against computer-generated attacks.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is building a virtual firing range in cyberspace -- a replica of the Internet on which scientists can test how successfully they can thwart feared foreign- or domestic-launched attempts to disrupt U.S. information networks
Called the National Cyber Range, it will also help the U.S. government train cyberwarriors and hone advanced technologies to guard information systems.
Reuters has learned that the National Cyber Range is expected to be fully up and running by mid-2012, four years after the Pentagon approached contractors to build it. It cost an estimated $130 million.
One of these companies is Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales and itself the target of what it called "a significant and tenacious" cyber attack last month.
Lockheed, the U.S. government's top information technology provider, was awarded a $30.8 million contract in January 2010 to continue to develop a prototype. Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory won a similar deal at that time.
This summer DARPA is to select one of them to operate a prototype test range during a yearlong test.
It will also apparently help train cyberwarriors such as those in the U.S. military's Cyber Command, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in June 2009 after he concluded the threat of digital warfare had outgrown existing U.S. defenses.
The cyber range actually will be a collection of "testbeds" that can carry out independent drills or be woven into one or more larger pieces, depending on the challenge.
The range is to test such things as new network protocols plus satellite and radio frequency communications...[Full Article]
To be in public is to be on camera, but most video footage is discarded, as only so much can be sorted and analyzed -- until now. DARPA has created a technology that can index and analyze video in real-time, marking the end of anonymity in public places.
In 2008, DARPA, the US military's elite group of pocket protector warriors, began soliciting the tech industry to develop technologies that would allow computers to sort through and index surveillance footage from the military's fleet of drones, satellites, and miscellaneous other super secret spy cameras. This was all part of the Agency's proposed Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) that would be able to describe specific human activities in real-time. This automated index would allow for searchable queries (i.e. "how often did an adult male taller than six-foot get in a car in the early morning between November 1st and December 22nd in this compound in Abbottabad?") or flag behavior such as when someone carries a large package towards a car on the side of a road in Basra, but walked away empty handed.
And it appears that DARPA has had some success to this end. Earlier this week, the military released a mandated contract announcement describing how the VIRAT system will be deployed into various military-intelligence video archives and systems. The contract will be fulfilled by Lockheed Martin for an unspecified amount. We haven't been given any detailed information on how this newtechnology works or how accurate it is, only that a belt-tightening defense industry is willing to invest in it...[Full Article]
Big Brother doesn’t just want to know where you are, he wants to know what you’re thinking. Short of implanting a device in your brain that divulges your every thought, the government has opted for the next best thing – behaviometrics – a new omnipresent surveillance technology developed for the US Air Force and destined to be used in law enforcement to “monitor suspicious behavior”.
The system revolves around a camera that tracks facial movements biometrically in order to build a psychological profile of the individual under surveillance.
“Huntsville, Alabama’s Photon-X, Inc. recently received an Air Force contract to develop such a camera,” reports Wired News. With one snap, the company claims, its sensor can build a three-dimensional image of a person’s face: the cornerstone of a distinctive “bio-signature” that can be used to track that person anywhere. With a few frames more, the device can capture that face’s unique facial muscle motions, and turn those movements into a “behaviormetric” profile that’s even more accurate.
This new technology is the next step up from DARPA’s infamous gait analysis program, which purported to be able to identify terrorists by the way they walked. The program was widely savaged at the time as being an outrageous example of paranoia gone mad.
A video demonstration of the technology that features on the Photon-X website shows a number of different measurements changing when the subject alters his facial expression from a smile, to a frown, to an angry look.
“The motion of a subject’s face is correlated to a uniform facial muscle model, and the motion of each muscle is quantified. Using the Behaviometrics Analysis System, it is possible to quantify simple data that describes the linear motion of all of the facial muscles in realtime and then interpolate this data using a psychological profiling system,” states the website.
In plain language, the movements of the muscles in your face will alert Big Brother, through the process of “behavior analysis,” to your presence as a suspicious individual who may be engaging in the act of thought crime, or God forbid, planning a public protest.
This will then be used to keep tabs on “insurgent operations,” which sounds like something that might be done by the US military in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in fact we learn that the technology is also destined to apply to “law enforcement, banking, private corporations, schools and universities, casinos, theme parks, retail, and hospitality,” meaning that the “insurgent” could be you walking through a shopping mall.
The system is also designed to help humanoid robots detect people or objects, meaning that your suspicious activity could trigger a friendly visit from an android who will then interrogate you regarding your intentions.
George Orwell never dreamt up anything like this. In comparison, the potential for this new breed of technology to be used as a tool in the construction of a high-tech prison grid that constantly tracks the behavior, movements and even thoughts of an individual, makes the world of 1984 look like a walk in the park.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
To be in public is to be on camera, but most video footage is discarded, as only so much can be sorted and analyzed -- until now. DARPA has created a technology that can index and analyze video in real-time, marking the end of anonymity in public places.
In 2008, DARPA, the US military's elite group of pocket protector warriors, began soliciting the tech industry to develop technologies that would allow computers to sort through and index surveillance footage from the military's fleet of drones, satellites, and miscellaneous other super secret spy cameras. This was all part of the Agency's proposed Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) that would be able to describe specific human activities in real-time. This automated index would allow for searchable queries (i.e. "how often did an adult male taller than six-foot get in a car in the early morning between November 1st and December 22nd in this compound in Abbottabad?") or flag behavior such as when someone carries a large package towards a car on the side of a road in Basra, but walked away empty handed.
And it appears that DARPA has had some success to this end. Earlier this week, the military released a mandated contract announcement describing how the VIRAT system will be deployed into various military-intelligence video archives and systems. The contract will be fulfilled by Lockheed Martin for an unspecified amount. We haven't been given any detailed information on how this newtechnology works or how accurate it is, only that a belt-tightening defense industry is willing to invest in it...[Full Article]
Boston Dynamics' 'Cheetah' robot will be developed with a flexible spine and head. The company hopes it will eventually be able to sprint at speeds approaching 70 mph.
Boston Dynamics
The Atlas, a human-like droid, will be able to walk through rough terrain, crawl and use its hands.
AP/Saxon
A tiny, drone aircraft designed to mimic a hummingbird, known as the "nano-hummingbird," on display during a briefing at the AeroVironment facility in Simi Valley, Calif.
A Massachusetts engineering firm known for creating futuristic military robots has received multimillion dollar contracts to develop two more battlefield bots for the Department of Defense.
Boston Dynamics, which in 2008 unveiled a four-legged robot called BigDog, has been tapped by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research and development arm of the DOD, to create a human-like robot and an agile, robotic Cheetah that developers said will eventually be able to run 70 mph.
The human-like bot, Atlas, will have two arms and legs, but no head, and be able to walk and jog upright, climb, squeeze through narrow alleyways and use its hands, Boston Dynamics said.
The Terminator-like droid would represent a step forward from Boston Dynamic's current anthropomorphic robot, known at PETMAN, which is used to test chemical weapons protection suits for the Army.
LA Times Backed by the Pentagon's research arm, Monrovia firm AeroVironment has developed the Nano Hummingbird, an experimental miniature drone that could one day do reconnaissance by landing on a window ledge.
A pocket-size drone dubbed the Nano Hummingbird for the way it flaps its tiny robotic wings has been developed for the Pentagon by a Monrovia company as a mini-spy plane capable of maneuvering on the battlefield and in urban areas.
The battery-powered drone was built by AeroVironment Inc. for the Pentagon's research arm as part of a series of experiments in nanotechnology. The little flying machine is built to look like a bird for potential use in spy missions.
The results of a five-year effort to develop the drone are being announced Thursday by the company and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Equipped with a camera, the drone can fly at speeds of up to 11 miles per hour, AeroVironment said. It can hover and fly sideways, backward and forward, as well as go clockwise and counterclockwise, by remote control for about eight minutes...
AeroVironment Develops World's First Fully Operational Life-Size Hummingbird-Like Unmanned Aircraft for DARPA. For more information visit: www.avinc.com/nano
Ground surveillance is a mission normally performed by human assets, including Army scouts and Marine Corps Force Recon. Military leaders would like to shift this mission to unmanned systems, removing troops from harm’s way, but unmanned systems lack a capability that currently exists only in humans: visual intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this problem with Mind’s Eye, a program aimed at developing a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems.
Humans perform a wide range of visual tasks with ease, something no current artificial intelligence can do in a robust way. They have inherently strong spatial judgment and are able to learn new spatiotemporal concepts directly from the visual experience. Humans visualize scenes and objects, as well as the actions involving those objects and possess a powerful ability to manipulate those imagined scenes mentally to solve problems. A machine-based implementation of such abilities is broadly applicable to a wide range of applications, including ground surveillance.
The joint military community anticipates a significant increase in the role of unmanned systems in support of future operations including jobs like persistent stare. By performing persistent stare, camera-equipped unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) would take scouts out of harm’s way. Such a capability, however, would not constitute a force multiplier because human analysts would have to interpret streaming video from these platforms to detect operationally significant activities. A truly transformative capability requires visual intelligence, enabling these platforms to detect operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner.
DARPA has contracted with 12 research teams to develop fundamental machine-based visual intelligence: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Inc., Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/CALTECH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, State University of New York at Buffalo, TNO (Netherlands), University of Arizona, University of California Berkeley and University of Southern California. These teams will develop a software subsystem suitable for employment on a camera for man-portable UGVs, integrating existing state of the art computer vision and AI while making novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.
DARPA has also contracted with three teams to develop system integration concepts: General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot and Toyon Research Corporation. These teams are taking a collaborative approach to developing architectures incorporating newly-developed visual intelligence software onto a camera suitable as a payload on a man-portable UGV.
The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm wants to trick out troops’ brains, from the areas that regulate alertness and cognition to pain treatment and psychiatric well-being. And the scientists want to do it all from the outside in — with a gadget installed inside the troops’ helmets. “Remote Control of Brain Activity Using Ultrasound,” the Defense Department’s Armed with Science blog promises.
It’s the latest out-there project in the military’s growing arsenal of brain-based research. In recent months alone, the Pentagon’s funded projects to optimize troop’s minds, prevent injuries and even preemptively assess cognitive ability and vulnerability to traumatic stress. Now, Darpa’s funding one lab that’s trying to do it all — from boosting troop smarts to preventing traumatic brain injuries...
WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports.
The investigations have included employees of the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which deal with some of the most sensitive work in intelligence and defense — among other organizations within the Defense Department...
American scientists have developed 'artificial' blood that could soon be used to treat wounded soldiers in battle.
The genetically-engineered blood is created by taking cells from umbilical cords and using a machine to mimic the way bone marrow works to produce mass quantities of usable units of red blood cells.
Known as 'blood pharming' the programme was launched in 2008 by the Pentagon's experimental arm, Darpa, to create blood to treat soldiers in far-flung battlefields.
The firm Arteriocyte, which received $1.95 million for the project, has now sent off its first shipment of O-negative blood to the food and drugs watchdog in the US, the FDA...
Soldiers fighting future battles in crowded urban areas will be able to launch hummingbird-sized unmanned nano aerial vehicles — or NAVs — capable of carrying sophisticated sensors and flying through open windows in buildings to report back on enemy positions.
A new project partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ( DARPA) called the Nano Aerial Vehicle (NAV) program aims to develop an extremely small, ultra-lightweight aerial vehicle for urban military missions that can fly both indoors and outdoors and that is capable of climbing and descending vertically as well as flying sideways left and right...
At the moment the tiny robot - a sheet just half a millimetre thick, scarcely thicker than a piece of paper - only folds itself into a boat, like a child's toy, or a "paper glider" plane shape. But it is anticipated that in future it will be used to create full-sized cars and aircraft that morph as they move, or robots that can "flow" like mercury into small openings, or multipurpose military uniforms that can adapt to different environments.
Researchers at the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) launched the project in 2007 in conjunction with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a small sheet of stiff tiles and "joints" of elastomer, “studded with thin foil actuators and flexible electronics. The demonstration material contains 25 total actuators, divided into five groupings. A shape is produced by triggering the proper actuator groups in sequence,” according to a statement by Robert Wood, the head of the Harvard research team...
Soon, keeping your head down won’t be enough to stump high-tech security cameras, thanks to Pentagon-funded researchers developing mini-cameras that can nab threats by hunting down — and scanning — their eyeballs.
A team of electrical engineers at Southern Methodist University (SMU), led by Professor Marc Christensen, first created the cameras with funding from Darpa, the Pentagon’s research agency. Called Panoptes, the devices use low-resolution sensors to create a high-res image that can be captured using a lightweight, ultra-slim camera. Because they don’t use a lens, the cameras were originally designed for miniature drone sensors and troop helmet-cams.
Only a year later, the Pentagon is giving SMU another $1.6 million, to merge the cameras with active illumination and handheld Pico projection devices. This allows photos captured on small devices to be transformed for large-format viewing. Whereas the first goal of the program was to create slim cameras with the power of a lens, the latest technology “lets us do even more than what a lens could do,” Christensen told Danger Room.
“This platform is really just the base, upon which we’ll focus on different applications,” Christensen said. “Now, we’re enhancing resolution even more, so the images are a 3-D map with even better, more accurate details.”
The new devices will yield a robust 3-D image that’ll be useful for seeing in caves and dark urban areas, and for the creation of versatile “non-cooperative” iris-detection security cameras...
Earlier this month, a British Army sniper Corporal Craig Harrison broke the world’s record for super-accurate shooting, taking out a pair of Taliban machine gunners from a mile-and-a-half away. It was a one-in-a-million feat — one performed under “perfect” conditions, Harrison says: “no wind, mild weather, clear visibility.”
Darpa, the Pentagon’s way-out research arm, is hoping to use lasers and advanced optical systems to make other snipers Harrison-accurate, even when the winds are howling. The agency is looking for 15 ultra-precise sniper scopes to put in shooters’ hands by next year.
The “One Shot” program originally aimed to give snipers the power to hit a target from 2000 meters away in winds as high as 40 miles per hour. In the first phases of the three year-old program, shooters used prototype rifles dressed with lasers and fancy computer hardware to do damage from 1100 meters away in 18 mile-an-hour winds. The scope-mounted lasers can “see” wind turbulence in the path of the bullet and feed the data to computers, enabling real-time calculation of – and compensation for – the wind-blown trajectory.
The program is just one of several high-tech hardware upgrades the U.S. military is pursuing for its snipers. Plans are also in place to make bullets that can change course in mid-air and a stealth sniper scope that would make shooters all-but-invisible...
Our old friends at DARPA - the US military research bureau - have broached another intriguing and mildy upsetting scheme this week. This time the Pentagon boffins want nothing less than some kind of automated witch-finder technology able to finger "increasingly sophisticated malicious insider behavior" in the USA.
According to the US National Counterintelligence Strategy, “Trusted insiders ... are targeting the US information infrastructure for exploitation, disruption, and potential destruction”.
DARPA aren't having any of that, hence their new and sinisterly named Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination (SMITE) project. The warboffins state:
We define insider threat as malevolent (or possibly inadvertent) actions by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information and information systems and sources.
Can software catch a cyberspy’s tricky intentions, before he’s started to help the other side? The way-out researchers at Darpa think so. They’re planning a new program, “Suspected Malicious Insider Threat Elimination” or SMITE, that’s supposed to “dynamically forecast” when a mole is about to strike. Also, the code is meant to flag “inadvertent” disclosures “by an already trusted person with access to sensitive information.”
“Looking for clues” that suggest a turncoat or accidental leaker is about to spill (.pdf) “could potentially be easier than recognizing explicit attacks,” Darpa notes in a request for information. But even that simpler search won’t be easy. “Many attacks are combinations of directly observable and inferred events.” Which is why SMITE’s program managers are interested in techniques to figure out “the likely intent of inferred actions, and suggestions about what [that] evidence might mean.” That goes for “behaviors both malicious and non-malicious.”
Step one in starting that process: Build a ginormous database to store all kinds of information on would-be threats. “The next step is to determine whether an individual or group of individuals is exhibiting anomalous behavior that is also malicious.” That’s a toughie — something anomalous in one context might be perfectly normal in another. One possible solution, the SMITE paper adds, could be detecting “deceptive” activities, which are a sign of cyberspying. Or cheating on your taxes. Or carrying on an office affair. Or playing World of Warcraft on the job. Depending on the situation...
Software systems could one day analyze everything from blurry war-zone footage to the subtle sarcasm in a written paragraph, thanks to two unassuming scientists who are inspired by biology to make revolutionary strides in intelligent computing.
Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, both computer science professors at New York University, are the brains behind “Deep Learning,” a program sponsored by Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency. The idea, ultimately, is to develop code that can teach itself to spot objects in a picture, actions in a video, or voices in a crowd. LeCun and Fergus have $2 million and four years to make it happen.
Existing software programs rely heavily on human assistance to identify objects. A user extracts key feature sets, like edge statistics (how many edges an object has, and where they are) and then feeds the data into a running algorithm, which uses the feature sets to recognize the visual input.
“People spend huge amounts of time building these feature sets, figuring out which are better or more accurate, and then refining them,” LeCun told Danger Room. “The question we’re asking is whether we can create computers that automatically learn feature sets from data. The brain can do it, so why not machines?”
The computer systems will be inspired by biology, but not modeled after it. That’s because researchers still aren’t entirely sure how animals are able to turn inputs — an object, a movement, a sound — into usable information. Ten years ago, a study at MIT helped answer the question. Researchers rewired ferret brains, so that the optical nerve fed into the auditory cortex, and vice versa. But the ferrets still saw and heard normally, leading the team to conclude that brain function depends on the signal — not the area.
Brains also display plenty of abstraction when it comes to identifying specific inputs: LeCun was inspired to create his algorithmic layering approach, called “a convolutional network,” by the 1960s research of David Hubel and Torstein Weisel. The two used cats to demonstrate how the brain’s visual cortex relies on abstractions to create complex representations of a given visual input.
In other words, LeCun said, “There’s some sort of learning algorithm within the brain. We just don’t know what it is.”...
With every new Darpa venture, it seems more like military machines are becoming human. Or humans are becoming military machines. Or some compu-human teamwork fusion of the two.
The latest step follows up on previous research into automaton storytellers and mind-reading computers with a call for new ways to create machines that have complex, layered thinking and reasoning abilities. You know, kind of like those of the human brain.
The agency just released a request for proposals that would further Darpa’s mission to create thinking computers. These "deep learning" machines would take in, process. and interpret complicated data or sensory inputs that might overwhelm delicate human synapses. The system would be especially helpful, the agency says, in stressful war-time situations – or when military staffers get really bored. "The training of humans is both expensive and time-consuming. Human performance also varies due to individuals’ capabilities and training, fatigue, boredom, and human attentional capacity," Darpa sighs...
The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.
