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Friday, August 08, 2003

Big Brother Is Watching You

From his blimp:
Long associated with providing television shots at football games and selling tires, blimps could play a key role in homeland security, say military researchers, who envision dirigibles hovering over Washington, protecting the region.
...
This week, during a demonstration of blimps armed with cutting-edge sensor technology, a 260-foot airship drifted over the woods near Manassas, where a set of blue tarps was strung across the ground to represent a terrorist encampment.

The color-sensitive sensors aboard the blimp easily detected the tarps despite a thick canopy of trees. The location was outlined in red on a monitor. Inside a gray turret attached to the gondola's outer frame, a high-resolution camera turned its lens toward the terrain in question, verifying the find.


We all remember, of course, the blue tarps used by the 9/11 hijackers, and the bright red ones used by Timothy McVeigh. If only we had had super-creepy blimps flying all over the country back then!

It sounds to me like the blimps will do a good job of finding boats in storage and baseball fields in the rain. From a creepy standpoint, this matches the quickly-discredited terror futures market as far as I'm concerned.