A "Manhattan Project" on Surveillance Systems

It appears to be extremely difficult to infiltrate the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to gather the intelligence necessary to thwart attacks on Canadian and other NATO forces in Afghanistan. It is very frustrating to see our soldiers and others picked off like artificial ducks in a shooting gallery.

It is surely time that Canada and its allies (primarily, of course, the United States) launched another Manhattan Project, but this time around (instead of atomic weapons) the focus should be on the development of a spatially and temporally continuous surveillance system. We appear to already have the basic elements of such a system in the form of Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), atomic magnetometers, reconnaissance satellites, night vision capability, GPS tracking systems, explosive sniffing technology, etc. Indeed the existence of such technologies is an indication of how much effort is already being expended upon improving our surveillance capabilities. Also of concern is the associated collateral damage in the form of invasion of privacy and the possibility of terrorists piggy-backing on the technology, as they do with the Internet.

The loss of our soldiers to IEDs and ambushes, and the recent swarming attack on a prison in Kandahar resulting in the escape of hundreds of captured terrorists/Taliban, underline the need for a concerted and coordinated research effort to develop the surveillance technology which will enable us to tackle what is becoming the major threat to democratic societies in the 21st century. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda are proving more adept than we in adopting networked warfare. Recent successful assaults on Canadian military and humanitarian aid targets seem to indicate a new strategy to focus on a particular nation with a view to undermining morale in that country's population, and so force its government to withdraw its forces and aid programs. We saw that happen in the case of Spain. Other countries, such as Germany, are reluctant to commit their troops to operations in those southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban and its allies are particularly active.

Just as the development of the atomic bomb convinced the Japanese that it was folly to continue its war, so the Taliban and other enemies of freedom-loving countries must be convinced that there is no place to hide. When such enemies are repeatedly caught red-handed when preparing to attack our forces, their numbers may drop dramatically as their support base dwindles.

One downside of such a scenario is pretty obvious: With such a technology in the hands of dictatorships such as China, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma), the chances of their overthrow by local dissidents are greatly reduced. On the other hand, intervention by the UN or NATO may be made easier to sell if the use of surveillance technology proves to be the key to success in Afghanistan and the number of casualties drops.

Probably even more challenging to develop than the technology are the conceptual and software tools to analyze and understand the spatial patterns which are detected. When is a cluster a group of picnickers or an IED planting squad? Or when several clusters are observed, which is the one preparing an ambush? Of course, similar challenges have arisen when trying to pick out a suicide bomber in a crowd. The answers to such questions would be easier to come by if the images were photos rather than blips on a screen.

My suggestion may be asking for the impossible on the scale envisioned. We are after all still waiting for the panacea of fusion energy after over 50 years.

See Wikipedia article on "Surveillance" and a Business Week article on "The State of Surveillance".