Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.
A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field.
But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.
Government agencies are still having trouble making sense of the flood of data they collect for intelligence purposes, a point underscored by the 9/11 Commission and, more recently, by President Obama after the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound passenger flight on Christmas Day.
Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.
Is too much data a good thing? What constitutes "data" anyway? Without context, are you really looking at anything useful? We probably need to solve a lot of the underlying conceptual issues first, before we just start sticking more cameras in the air, eh?
By: Brant
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Yet another demonstration of the difference between "data" and "intelligence".
The good news is that modern technology SHOULD enable the video streams to be intelligently analyzed, with multiple feeds being mashed up according to time-stamp in order to paint a bigger overall picture.
While I was at JRTC teaching the units that rotated through how to utilize our UAV footage, one thing I made sure the folks that we attached to learned very quickly: Just because you can see something happening, doesn't mean that you have the foggiest clue what it MEANS.
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