Military surveillance

Military surveillance offers a crucial entry point into the study of surveillance. Historically, the importance of military organizations in state formation meant that many techniques of surveillance that would later migrate into the civilian sphere would bear the imprint of military origins. Moreover, military campaigns were instrumental in developing forms of discipline, communication and surveillance that were to have far-reaching implications for whole societies. Thus, both technologically and organizationally, military models and innovations informed new forms of social, commercial and industrial organization that mobilized principles of surveillance, coordination and control. More recently, scholars have argued that since the post Cold War era societies of the Global North have entered a state of perpetual war preparedness. Moreover, the post-war consolidation of a military-industrial complex in the US has stimulated a multitude of technological innovations with surveillance application. In recent times, technological advancement propelled by military surveillance fantasies have envisaged digitized battle and ‘virtuous war’ where casualties are eliminated and hostile forces rapidly subdued through superior command of information and high-tech weaponry. The blending and blurring of such fantasies through entertainment and media networks and into domestic policing domains has raised considerable concern about the dehumanizing consequences of remote killing, and the social implications of the militarization of everyday life

Embodied Space in Google Earth: Crisis in Darfur

A tool of military surveillance to �love at a distance�? (Caroline Bassett, 2006). Google Earth, a culmination of remote sensing satellite technologies, mega database and 3D animations, is open to both kinds of critique. This paper focuses on the latter, on how the human faculty for compassion might be aligned with and elicited from the ways we search and apprehend the swirling visions of earth that Google Earth makes available. Haraway�s idea that new kinds of �prosthetic� vision constitute �active perceptual systems� resonates strongly with Hansen�s description of the digital image as a new kind of image that is produced through the process of searching rather than from passive viewing. My discussion of the Google Earth site,�Crisis in Darfur, investigates the subversive possibilities of compassion in opening up an aesthetic and yet mundane space of respite from the regimes of power inherent to Google Earth, a website with an undeniable prehistory of military surveillance

Coverage and Connectivity Issue in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are an emerging area of interest in research and development. It finds use in military surveillance, health care, environmental monitoring, forest fire detection and smart environments. An important research issue in WSNs is the coverage since cost, area and lifetime are directly validated to it.In this paper we present an overview of WSNs and try to refine the coverage and connectivity issues in wireless sensor networks

Feature Extraction and Object Classification in Video Sequences for Military Surveillance

A detecção e reconhecimento de objectos requer um sistema de aprendizagem que possa identificar automaticamente um grupo de objectos, independentemente dos dados de entrada. Para que este tipo de identificação seja possível, este sistema precisa analisar previamente um grande grupo de dados para que possa memorizar pontos de interesse de diferentes objectos. Esta é a chamada fase de treino e é o primeiro passo em todos os processos de detecção e reconhecimento de machine learning. Embora já existam muitos modelos que realizam a detecção e reconhecimento de um grande grupo de objectos, um dos objetivos deste projeto é especificar esta identificação para um grupo pequeno e especial de objetos. Isto torna-se possível usando transfer learning, que é um processo que usa o conhecimento adquirido, por um desses modelos, na resolução de um problema e aplica-o para solucionar uma questão diferente. Basicamente, tira proveito do resultado do processo de extração de características e utiliza-o para aprender a identificar outro tipo de objetos. A extração de características é um grupo de processos com o objetivo de simplificar grandes grupos de dados, criando pequenos conjuntos de informações não redundantes. Esses pequenos grupos são mais fáceis de controlar, descrevem totalmente o conjunto de dados original e, ao usá-los, os recursos necessários para analisar um grande conjunto de dados são reduzidos. Neste contexto, os dados a serem analisados ​​serão capturados por uma câmara implementada num ponto estacionário ou num veículo. Quando se lida com a captura de informação visual é normal que um grande número de dados seja gerado. Por isso, é importante analisá-lo com eficiência e identificar informações que são relevantes. Esta dissertação é realizada no âmbito militar, uma vez que os objectos a serem automaticamente identificados são tanques, armas, pessoas e veículos (carros e camiões), alcançando, assim, vigilância territorial.Object detection and recognition requires a learning system that can automatically identify a group of objects independently of the input data. To be able to perform this kind of identification, this system needs to previously analyze a large group of data, so it can memorize special features of different objects. This procedure it's called training and it's the first step in all the detection and recognition processes of machine learning. Although there are already many models that perform detection and recognition for a large group of objects, one of the goals of this project is to specify this identification into a small and special group of objects. This will be achieved by using transfer learning, that is a process that uses the knowledge gained by one of these models while solving one problem and applies it to a different one. Basically, it takes advantage of the feature extraction procedure outputs and use them to learn how to identify other kind of objects. Feature extraction is a group of processes with the goal of simplifying big groups of data by creating small sets of non-redundant information. These small groups are more manageable and can fully describe the original data set and, by using them, the resources necessary to analyse a large set of input data are decreased. In this context, the data to be analyzed will be captured by a camera implemented at a stationary point or in a vehicle. When dealing with the capture of visual information, it's normal that a large number of data is generated. So, it's important to analyze it efficiently and achieve relevant information identification. This dissertation focuses in military uses, therefore these operations are going to be used to automatically identify objects in the military field, that is, tanks, guns, people and vehicles (cars and trucks), achieving territorial surveillance

Hyperspectral data classification improved by minimum spanning forests

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)Remote sensing technology has applications in various knowledge domains, such as agriculture, meteorology, land use, environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and mineral exploration. The increasing advances in image acquisition techniques have allowed the generation of large volumes of data at high spectral resolution with several spectral bands representing images collected simultaneously. We propose and evaluate a supervised classification method composed of three stages. Initially, hyperspectral values and entropy information are employed by support vector machines to produce an initial classification. Then, the K-nearest neighbor technique searches for pixels with high probability of being correctly classified. Finally, minimum spanning forests are applied to these pixels to reclassify the image taking spatial restrictions into consideration. Experiments on several hyperspectral images are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)Remote sensing technology has applications in various knowledge domains, such as agriculture, meteorology, land use, environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and mineral exploration. The increasing advances in image acquisition techniques have all102117FAPESP - FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULOCNPQ - CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICOFundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)2011/22749-8307113/2012-

A Paranoid State: The American Public, Military Surveillance and the Espionage Act of 1917

"A Paranoid State" examines the influence of middle to upper class anxieties through military intelligence officers' investigations of the American public in the First World War. Products of their past, Military Intelligence Department officers built upon a history of espionage activities in the Philippines and in episodes of strikebreaking at the turn of the century. On a massive scale for the first time in U.S. history, agents of military intelligence conducted a campaign of surveillance upon American citizens. These military officers were influenced by a larger movement in American society during the First World War, as evidenced by Congress' passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts and thriving vigilante organizations such as the American Protective League. While historians argue that the Wilson administration took advantage of the war-induced anxieties to eliminate major socialist and radical groups, such as the Wobblies, the argument offered here is that without the political paranoia that was pervasive among American elites and the middle-class those extreme actions may not have been successful