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by themenace 3584 days ago
Today we can confidently guess that THIS is the secret groundbreaking military technology that "60 Minutes" was alluding to in 2008.

Reporter Bob Woodward (known for breaking much of the Watergate story that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation) claims that the US military has a new secret technique that's revolutionary. The following is what he said in his interview[1] with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in September 2008:

Woodward: This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders [in Iraq].

Pelley: What is this? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of taking out just the ... leadership?

Woodward: It is the stuff of which military novels are written.

Pelley: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?

Woodward: Yeah.

The bits of info from Woodward, the timeline of the development of military aerial camera systems (such as Angel Fire), the claimed capability to locate people -- it all fits. This is the revolutionary advance in military capability they are talking about.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415...

1 comments

Couldn't satellites do this during the cold war? What's different?
Persistence. A satellite in GEO is nigh on useless for high resolution persistent imaging. A satellite in polar is even more useless for persistence.
Added to that, there seems to be real-time tagging of people and objects.
Yea there is tagging of people, objects but that's software applied to high resolution images. Collecting those high resolution images is the real challenge here; seeing how pixels change from frame to frame once you have the imagery isn't (well, it used to be certainly but we've got better). You claim this is real-time... Are you sure this processing isn't applied after the fact?
Ubiquity.