1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA

You could also install cameras pointing back towards Earth and basically have 24/7 coverage of everyone's movements similar to what Darpa's ARGUS-IS[1](2013) does except using a global network of satellites instead of drones and build the greatest video surveillance platform on the planet. Instead of covering a city for a limited time with a drone stuffed with an array of off the shelf cell phone cameras, you could have "persistent stare" for the entire planet. I wonder if the NSA has thought about that. [1] ▶ this video

Would a demo of what is possible at 4000 feet suffice? link (4min33sec) Or what was state of the art at DARPA in 2013? ▶ this video (4min40sec) Edit: Or more commonly available, just search for "Nikon Superzoom" on youtube, and watch some short demos there. And then imagine those pointed in all directions downwards, the videostream(s) saved to some small storage array, or even transmitted live to some ground station(s), indexed and overlaid on something like google maps, just better, with a time slider. Mark some car at some point (in time) and see where it moves...and so on. Edit: like THIS link (3min13sec) Edit: Oh! And something from 2016 about "The Surveillance Firm Recording Crimes From Baltimore's Skies" (7min29sec) link Another demo of the same thing from the same person/company in another town, also 2016: "The Eyes in the Sky That Catch Murders on Tape" link (5min) So why is this news?

Looks like they copied our ARGUS system, which can be mounted on drones to cover entire cities 24/7. link ▶ this video

This is a documentary clip from 2013 that shows what the cameras and systems in these blimps can do. Apparently the biggest breakthrough is their high bandwidth laser data communication system. The government should not have this much information asymmetry relative to the citizenry. ▶ this video ▶ this video

Nice :). Check that one as well, DARPA's 1.8 gigapixel camera for continous monitoring of, well, small cities from altitudes up to 20 000 feet. And something tells me that's not the real state of the art. ▶ this video

Something similar has been demoed publicly before by DARPA. ▶ this video I still don't see an argument here, just quotes from an editorial, can US intelligence agencies track everyone in the continental US sure, they can also enforce traffic using AGM-114's doesn't mean they do.

The existence of this system is rather odd then: ▶ this video Not that the level of surveillance that's becoming possible (and even expected) isn't deeply repugnant, I'm just not convinced it's quite as cheap as you make it out to be.

ARGUS-IS "ARGUS is an advanced camera system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras in a mosaic to video and auto-track every moving object within a 36 square mile area. ARGUS is a form of Wide Area Persistent Surveillance that allows for one camera to provide such detailed video that users can collect 'pattern-of-life' data and track individual people inside the footage anywhere within the field of regard." [0] ▶ this video [1] link

This is one of the exotic devices in DARPA's UPSIDE competition for exascale computing. This initiative seeks to find non-state (non-transistor) based approaches to computation: exploitation of nanoscale response properties of discrete components to perform some restricted, non-binary, forms of computation. Essentially, exotic ways to abuse silicon lithography to get analog computation. The idea, and this can be seen on DARPA's slides ( link ), is to get computation that is several orders of magnitude higher for their specialized sets of problems than what can theoretically be reached by traditional computing models even if Moore's law continues. DARPA would like to first apply this technology to ARGUS drone systems ( ▶ this video ) and related technology because streaming video can't be done to the ground, tracking and decision making must be done on board - yet traditional processing platforms can only track a few orders of magnitude fewer targets that what the military would like. In a more advanced phase, if memristor or coupled oscillator (etc) approaches to building inference models become possible, then programs written in DARPA's other initiative (Probablistic Programming) could be programmed into these exotic solid state devices to compute in a way more analogous to today's generic computation. And indeed, eventually the adoption of Probablistic Programming will train programmers to write code for quantum computers - while more complicated, replacing Probablistic Progra

I'm afraid this Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) is a real thing in the industry now, and not going away. It's even covered by the OGC [1], see their primer on the topic [2] DARPA ARGIS-IS is already deployed to UAVs[3] and actually gives you video, not jaggy-looking stitched DOP slideshows [4]. it looks like DARPA is way ahead of Northrop Grumman which tries to get into that market with more traditional expensive optical hardware, compared to DARPA's cheap phone camera array, yet with inferior results. [1] link [2] link [pdf] [3] link [4] ▶ this video [video]

Working with satellite data I can tell you that the maximum resolution data you are likely to get from a satellite is 0.25m resolution (i.e. a pixel is the size of a car wheel). And that's talking about likely military satellites - the public are lucky to get hold of 0.5m resolution. Also, clouds get in the way. A lot. For super high resolution imaginary like you are talking about, you need something like the ARGOS system [1]. This image was made by a slowly automatically rotating camera, but the ARGOS system seems to use a whole bunch of high resolution cameras, like a insects eye. The interesting thing about the ARGOS demo on NPR was the automatic object tracking. The system can track cars, and people, as they move around. You could go back through the data to follow a guy back to his house after he is identified as planting a bomb. Or more HN, posting something from an internet cafe. I really think that, as technology makes pervasive surveillance possible, we need laws to explicitly limit what the state or companies can do, at least domestically. It supprises me that people are so much more upset about the NSA gathering data, given that they willingly gave it to ad networks that want to use it to make bad decisions. The highest cost google ads are for loans, insurance, and other services where the provider makes more money if the user makes an inappropriate choice. Imagine if google put a googleX ARGOS on it's Loon baloons, and found some way to monetize it. We really need