Eyes in the Sky
The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens. "Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon developed a godlike surveillance device that will someday be used over every major city on the planet. This new technology--and its most powerful iteration to date, Gorgon Stare--can track thousands of moving targets at once over vast areas, following you backward and forward in time to expose where you came from and where you're going. With a little help from AI, it will even predict crimes before they happen. In wartime, this formidable tool has saved countless lives; it can be similarly transformative in peacetime. But if misused, it could become the most nightmarish visual surveillance system ever created. Drawing on extensive access within the agencies, labs, and companies that created Gorgon Stare and other weapons like it, [this book] reveals how a top-secret team of scientists devised an unprecedented way of watching everything, how the technology has already been deployed in American skies, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its potential perils."--Dust jacket.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
9mentions
8people
2019–2020years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Life imitates art when it comes to tech; it's a hydra of an ouroboros[1] eating its own tails with its many heads. We did this to ourselves?
It’s already happening in India and China. I’m sure it’s happening here too, with an added startup component with the example of Clearview AI. The big companies get in on the action too:
‘There are many companies that offer facial recognition products and services, including Amazon, Microsoft and FaceFirst. Those companies all need access to enormous databases of photos to improve the accuracy of their matching technology. But while most facial recognition algorithms are trained on well-established, publicly circulating datasets — some of which have also faced criticism for taking people’s photos without their explicit consent — Ever is different in using its own customers’ photos to improve its commercial technology.‘[2]
'In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.'
It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.'
'In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)'[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/millions-people-upload...
- There’s an excellent book on this surveillance technology and the ramifications called Eyes in the Sky. Talks about the military’s development of Gorgon Stare and many of the domestic startups using the similar technology to watch us.
- Take a look at Eyes in the Sky, it's an interesting read. https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare-ebook/dp...
- This wouldn’t make a difference.
Read Eyes In The Sky or just generally about WAMI (wide area motion imagery): https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449....
There will have to be legislation around use and access in order to have any real protection.
- The movie Enemy of the State[1] came out in 1998. It showed a kind of worst-case scenario of Echelon, taking real capabilities and stretching them beyond what was possible (there aren't surveillance cameras everywhere, even today, especially not that can be remotely accessed, though we're getting there; also, satellites or drones can't be retasked instantly[2])
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDgIpSFtUos
[2] ETA: Agreed, Eyes in the Sky is a great book detailing Gorgon Stare, but that requires pre-deployment of drone(s) and only became operational this decade. I agree it's situational irony that people saw Enemy of the State as a roadmap rather than as a cautionary tale.
- You should read eyes in the sky: https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Sky-Secret-Gorgon-Stare/dp/05449...
For some background about gorgon stare and WAMI (wide area motion imagery): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare
Bizarrely enemy of the state directly provided the inspiration.
