Re The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <ross.stapletongray () gmail com>
Date: Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 2:31 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard
of
To: DAVID FARBER <dave () farber net>
Cc: ip <ip () listbox com>


The NGA is a more recent incarnation of various previous pieces of the
Intelligence Community, so while it's a fairly recent creation (Nov. 2003),
it was created from existing agencies/offices, e.g., it was a renaming of
NIMA (National Imagery and Mapping Agency), which had itself been created
from a slew of other pieces in 1996, including the Defense Mapping Agency
(a DoD agency) and the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC, a
CIA office in the Directorate of Science and Technology when I was there).
My guess is that the NGA has the single greatest overlap with the
unclassified world of any of the intel agencies, as well, in that it
provides tools for mapping use for all the government and for the private
sector, and would be a huge consumer of open-source intelligence in all the
commercial imagery, maps, etc. When Google does a lot of the
ground-pounding for you, it would pay to be open to absorbing all those
free data.

In my experience, the NGA has also been fairly open about talking about the
IT needed to support its mission; I briefly worked for Sue Gordon, the
deputy director of NGA, on a little task force looking at CIA information
management issues in the 90s, and think highly of her.

A couple of other data points related to the article:

DARPA has a project related to drone detection (Aerial Dragnet), on the
idea that a few well-placed platforms could monitor all of the drone
activity in a city-scale area; I would guess that the solutions they come
up with will range outside of imagery realm, though, though optical
detection is probably a part of the mix:
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/aerial-dragnet  While this would
complement/supplement what the NGA might do, it would likely end up being
somebody else's baby if ever deployed, I would guess.

The very first mass-scale imagery crowd-sourcing effort occurred during WW
II, and is an off-again, on-again project of mine to investigate and do
something with... in 1943 the British Admiralty solicited, via radio
broadcast, photos and postcards of the European Atlantic coast... they got
some 7 million or so, many of which are now sitting in storage at the
Imperial War Museum, and which were used to build the models and maps
required to plan the D-Day invasion.  Some more background on that nascent
effort/future project... contact me if this catches your fancy:
http://normandysnaps.org/

Ross

Ross Stapleton-Gray, Ph.D.
Stapleton-Gray & Associates, Inc.
Albany, CA










On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 8:55 AM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> *From: *Suzanne Johnson <fuhn () pobox com>
> *Subject: **The Multibillion-Dollar U.S. Spy Agency You Haven’t Heard of*
> *Date: *July 5, 2017 at 11:38:32 AM EDT
> *To: *"DAVID J. FARBER" <farber () gmail com>
>
> note:  access to this story may require registration (free).
>
> ...clip
>
> In 2016, unbeknownst to many city officials, police in Baltimore began
> conducting
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/>
> persistent aerial surveillance using a system developed for military use in
> Iraq.
> Few civilians have any idea how advanced these military eye-in-the-sky
> drones have become. Among them is ARGUS-IS, the world’s highest-resolution
> camera with 1.8 billion pixels. Invisible from the ground at nearly four
> miles in the air, it uses a technology known as “persistent stare” — the
> equivalent of 100 Predator drones peering down at a medium-size city at
> once — to track everything that moves.
>
> With the capability to watch an area of 10 or even 15 square miles at a
> time, it would take just two drones hovering over Manhattan to continuously
> observe and follow all outdoor human activity, night and day. It can zoom
> in on an object as small as a stick of butter on a plate and store up to 1
> million terabytes of data a day. That capacity would allow analysts to look
> back in time over days, weeks, or months. Technology is in the works to
> enable drones to remain aloft for years at a time.
>
> ...clip
>
>
> http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/20/the-multibillion-dollar-u-s-spy-agency-you-havent-heard-of-trump/
>
>
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