Drone flights leave US awash in data
As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.
As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up.
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 Barack 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.
They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularised for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.