ARGUS-IS: The New Tool Government Will Spy On Citizens With
The idea of being spied on by the government is upsetting but not unusual. We know that they monitor our activity on the internet and privacy has become harder and harder to achieve. Now we’re learning that the government has a spy drone that can see what phone you are using from more than 17,000ft in the air. ARGUS-IS is an airborne surveillance camera that can monitor 15 square miles at a time and sees things 225 times better than an iPhone camera. Isn’t that creepy?
“From 17,500ft the remarkable surveillance system can capture objects as small as 6in on the ground and allows commanders to track movements across an entire battlefield in real time.
‘It is important for the public to know that some of these capabilities exist,’ said Yiannis Antoniades, the BAE engineer who designed the system, in a recent PBS broadcast.
The aerospace and weapons company developed the ARGUS-IS array as part of a $18.5million project funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa).
In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes, guardian of the heifer-nymph Io and son of Arestor, was a primordial giant whose epithet, ‘Panoptes’, ‘all-seeing’, led to his being described with multiple, often one hundred, eyes.
Like the Titan of myth, the Pentagon’s ARGUS-IS (a backronym standing for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System) works by stringing together an array of 368 digital camera imaging chips.
An airborne processor combines the video from these chips to create a single ultra-high definition mosaic video image which updates at up to 15 frames a second.”
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the ZEIGIST was right!
Tewdrowos
January 30, 2013 at 7:49 pm
Thats not all they’re doing.
Patrice Abbott
January 31, 2013 at 3:04 pm
I remember my Afro-American history teacher trying to discuss this issue 30 years ago and almost all of my classmates laughed except for me.
My teacher mentioned the concentration camps for blacks, more laughter. They’re not laughing now.
Regina
February 2, 2013 at 3:57 am