Computer warfare, a foreboding theme of Science Fiction for many years, it even became a Star Trek episode.
When you remove the human element,
dehumanize the reaction to pain and death from war, it becomes just a game. A very deadly one, and this is where we find ourselves today. GPS tracking, remote controlled drones, and now VADER....
Ph.D. Octopus, War and Dehumanization
Wiz,April 8, 2010, in reference to explicit videos released by WikiLeaks:
...."the comment by Julian Assange, who released the videos, was most pertinent: “’Their desire was simply to kill,’ he said. “Their desire was to get high scores on that computer game.’” And that is exactly what this video felt like. A video game. This was more true than, perhaps Assange even realized. The Army has long recruited and trained soldiers using video games, and it is of course likely that the soldiers themselves, like most of us, have played role-player type video games in which shooting at random digital images.
Its dehumanization by digitalization, by technological separation. Combined with a pretty extensive de facto policy of dehumanization by traditional forms of racism, nationalism, and, xenophobia, it creates a toxic mix. The blame here, obviously, goes high up. Put any person through elaborate systems, both technological and environmental, designed to dehumanize the enemy and this is what you’ll get."....
Video and more
Your information is being gathered, analyzed, categorized, processed and shared.
Beware..
UPDATE - and JUST IN TIME
Pentagon Looks to Double Its Unmanned Air Force
..."The congressionally mandated Aircraft Procurement Plan 2012-2041 is, of course, filled with conjecture. Any number of factors — fiscal, strategic, industrial or technological — could change unexpectedly, sending ripples through the Pentagon’s carefully-laid plans, currently projected to cost around $25 billion per year. ...
....the military believes it can make do for the next three decades with air fleets roughly the same size as today’s — with just one big exception. The robot air force will double in just the next nine years."...
One Brain, Hundreds of Eyes: Darpa Plots Manhunt Master Controller
..."The Pentagon’s bleeding-edge research shop, Darpa, announced this week that it awarded a $14 million contract to defense contractor SAIC to build Insight, its system-of-systems effort to mashup snooping sensors that’ll find human prey on the battlefield. ...
...(given the wonderful acronym, “Vader”)..."
..."A system this complex, you can’t just dump in Iraq or Afghanistan. So Darpa is looking to set up an “incubator” — a sort of virtual world, where all these sensors and sensor-integrators can be tested out first. The pixelized place will pit the system against a battery of simulated sensor data and information collected from real world threats to see how it performs at tracking threats. Once it’s finished in the virtual world, it’s moves to meatspace testing at the Army’s National Training Center in Ft. Irwin, California. Only then would it go to an honest-to-God war zone."
I've read that the military has a large presence in Second Life, and Linden Labs sold license and hardware to the Navy in August of 2010.
Second Life Wiki -Military_Lands
From the July/2008 Dark Government Blog
IARPA Trolls Online Gaming
...."No word on what world that will be in, but we already know that the CIA has a presence in Second Life and that IARPA has investigated Linden Lab’s world as well. (”U.S. Project Reynard Mines Data Looking for Virtual Spies,” Virtual Worlds News, February 25, 2008)
One can only wonder what IARPA will do once “baseline behaviors” are mapped! But apparently there’s no need to fret since “the government understands that ‘applications of results from these research projects may ultimately have implications for privacy and civil liberties,’ so ‘IARPA is also investing in projects that develop privacy protecting technologies,’” Secrecy News reports.
We bet they are! But as Strobel points out, “IARPA’s ancestry is a wee bit interesting”:
In the beginning,...."
Read the whole article
Someone was very clever in naming this project, don't you think?
from the WIKI:
Reynard
..."Reynard, an anthropomorphic red fox and trickster figure."...
And from Wired, February/2008
U.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft
By Ryan Singel, Author - February 22, 2008
"Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.
The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."....
Watch - StarTrek, A Taste of Armageddon
Computerized Warfare
