The only way to win the war on terror is to track everyone, and everything, that moves.
That, according to ISR Journal, is the conclusion of an influential group of Pentagon advisers, the Defense Science Board. "Technologies that can identify people by unique physical characteristics fingerprint, voice, odor, gait or even pattern of iris must be merged with new means of 'tagging' so that U.S. forces can find enemies who escape into a crowd or slip into a labyrinthine slum," says a DSB study, completed over the summer.
The global war on terrorism cannot be won without a Manhattan Project-like TTL [tagging, tracking, and locating] program, briefing charts summarizing some of the studys findings say...
This tagging and tracking could be used for:People or groups such as enemy leaders or sympathizers, nuclear weapons or explosives experts, and terrorist paymasters.
Things such as weapons of mass destruction, materials or components, precision machinery, pharmaceutical plants, specialized instruments, pathogens and seed stocks or vehicles.
Activities such as recruiting, financial transactions, Internet activity, pathogen genome sequencing or organizational activity or meeting.
How much would it cost to bring these sci-fi technologies to the real world? Doesn't matter, the Board declares. "Cost is not the issue; failure in the global war on terrorism is the real question."
Long-time Defense Tech readers will find this whole thing terribly familiar. Last year, Pentagon mad science arm Darpa introduced a plan to use security cameras to monitor an entire city at once. The program will receive $4 million in the fiscal year '05 budget. And Mayor Daley is trying to do something similar in Chicago.
Like the Darpa effort, the DSB plans to track all these irises, and all this Internet activity, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where insurgents have a nasty habit of melting away into the background. But, of course, if these technologies were ever successfully developed, the temptation to use it to track enemies of the states here at home would be mighty strong, too.
