Mon

Oct 8
2007

Peter Brantley

Peter Brantley

Sensing Wars

There has been rampant speculation about the motivations and trajectory of events surrounding a recent and very mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria.

AviationWeek is now reporting the intriguing use of highly advanced foreign sensing appropriations that subvert the actual sensed environment of these networks.

The U.S. version of the system has been at the very least tested operationally in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last year, most likely against insurgent communication networks. The technology allows users to invade communications networks, see what enemy sensors see and even take over as systems administrator so sensors can be manipulated into positions where approaching aircraft can't be seen, they say. The process involves locating enemy emitters with great precision and then directing data streams into them that can include false targets and misleading messages that allow a number of activities including control.

This is not an unexpected cyberwarfare approach, but its implications for civil sensing networks should not go un-remarked. It draws into question our assuredness that public data will always accurately represent what it claims to. It points out the desirability of architecting for sensing integrity, with the recognition that almost any (or perhaps all) engineering can be subverted. I think the critical question is: How can we engineer transparency into the actual operation of public sensing networks?

Another fascinating commentary in the AvWeek article is the suggestion that critical government agencies, such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), are confronting a need for more informed intelligence generation due to the burgeoning rise of data production, something I have written about previously, in The Sensing Earth.

The AviationWeek article sez,

"There are always indications the North Koreans are doing something they shouldn't," Vice Adm. Robert Murrett, director of the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency (NGA), told Aviation Week & Space Technology in response to a question about the shipment of nuclear materials from North Korea to Syria, which were subsequently bombed. "They are a high priority. We work as a key element . . . on the trafficking of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and high-interest arms shipments anyplace."

It's part of a growing NGA role in spotting the proliferation of weapons technology "which may be coming from East Asia to the Middle East . . . that we don't want to cross borders." Other crucial boundaries for surveillance include the borders in all directions in Afghanistan and Iraq -- which includes Syria and Iran -- as well as semi-governed areas such as the Horn of Africa. The use of automation to aid rapid analysis is improving, but that's being balanced by the fact that "the sheer volumes of data we are ingesting now . . . continue to increase by a couple of orders of magnitude on an annual basis," he says.

Addressing this cogently, Rick Luce, the University Librarian at Emory Univ., and formerly at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a recent National Science Foundation report on Infrastructures for Cyberscholarship [pdf]:

Typically, when hypertext browsing is used to follow links manually for subject headings, thesauri, textual concepts and categories, the user can only traverse a small portion of a large knowledge space. To manage and utilize the potentially rich and complex nodes and connections in a large knowledge system such as the distributed web, system-aided reasoning methods would be useful to suggest relevant knowledge intelligently to the user.

As our systems grow more sophisticated, we will see applications that support not just links between authors and papers but relationships between users, data and information repositories, and communities. What is required is a mechanism to support these relationships that leads to information exchange, adaptation and recombination - which, in itself, will constitute a new type of data repository. A new generation of information retrieval tools and applications are being designed that will support self-organizing knowledge on distributed networks driven by human interaction.


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Comments: 3

  Alex Tolley [10.08.07 09:58 AM]

Star Trek(TOS): "Court Martial".

  NY NJ [10.08.07 11:13 AM]

Just imagine - what we now consider hi-tech warfare and the growing fears we currently have - what military hi-tech will be like during our great grand children's lives when their generation is ruling the planet.

  Ross Stapleton-Gray [10.09.07 06:51 PM]

"...what military hi-tech will be like during our great grand children's lives when their generation is ruling the planet."

The escapee from Wal*Mart Labor Camp #1007 was quickly detected as she attempted to scramble over the fence; in fact, her 'escape' had been known hours earlier, when the idea had finally resolved in her cerebral cortex, picked up by the neurosensor grid in the breakroom... allowing her to actually break for the wires had already been approved up four levels of management, including at the head office for the North American region in Dubai, as a test of the physical barriers...

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