If they succeed, DARPA will be able to follow your car everywhere you go – even if you get into downtown Manhattan’s traffic – making movies with car chases absolutely pointless. If Steve McQueen were alive, he would be very sad today.
The new radar is called Multipath Exploration Radar, and combines three-dimensional urban maps with a Ku-band radar running at frequencies high enough to resolve vehicle details. This makes the MER capable of fixing a target on anything that moves on the ground. The system will depend on unmanned air vehicles, bouncing their radars on ground and buildings and comparing the patterns with 3D maps. The result would be a complete picture of the movement in a city. Once they nail the chasing of one vehicle, DARPA wants to enable multiple target tracking.
Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, citizen. [New Scientist]
Shane
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 11:28 AMWhile I agree on the issue of freedom, the potential for the reduction in high speed chases and even possibly illegal street racing and dangerous driving (such as high speed vehicles in residential areas) has to be of high merit.
The system itself could (as has been described here) be used to alert police to potential issues increasing there response time, while also providing them with the means to track suspect vehicles more safely rather then engage in a high speed pursuits, which people know that police will tend to call off if the perceived safety of the community is compromised.
Knowing that you are been tracked regardless would put a dampener on most peoples efforts, add to that police helicopters and other traditional tracking mechanisms and I think this kind of tool would be invaluable.
Know, if they could identify the and target individual vehicles (such as using their license plat numbers etc), then we are onto another issue altogether.
The ability to tag a “target” that is seen as performing illegally and the ability to target a “known” vehicle, two completely different arguments.
I for one, as it stands, have no issue at this time with the idea.