SILC - the Search for Insurgent Leadership and Caches

Free Republic ^ | 2/5/2006 | Southack

[Southack]

Find Zarqawi! Find IEDS! This proposal is for civilian activists to use unclassified satellite imagery to locate buried IED caches, insurgent hotspots, and Al Qaeda leadership.

This project is analogous to the SETI project that lets civilians Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence on their home computers, but rather than searching through radio signals, home computer users will volunteer to search the most recent commercial satellite imagery of Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Indonesia, Lebanon, and the Phillipines for potential Al Qaeda leadership "safe houses," foot-trodden trails in mountains, or disturbed dirt that may indicate a recently buried weapons cache, etc.

Positive suggestions for image resources, management of volunteers, valuable search clues, et al are encouraged for this thread.

Please, positive suggestions, only (everyone already knows that there are problems with any new idea, no need to point out the obvious).

[Southack]

[Southack]

Image of Baghdad shown above...along with a proposal for civilian interaction.

[Experiment 6-2-6]

Look to the skies...

[Rokke]

I think I see Waldo.

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

"Image of Baghdad shown above...along with a proposal for civilian interaction."


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[Fedora]

Interesting idea. Maybe the satellite imagery could be integrated with other types of information useful for tracking--analysis of patterns in cybernetworks, financial networks, locations of weapons suppliers, etc.--anything that would leave a trail.

[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #2

Hmm... an interesting idea. Who is going to take information from users and maintain the database of suspected sites?

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[GOPJ]

Great idea.

[Steel Wolf]

Perhaps the MI list may have some ideas?

[alwaysconservative]

Great idea; thanks for the ping! (On a related note, I notice that FR's folding@home team is in the top 300 in the world. Woo-hoo!)

[ASA Vet]

I'm sure they would, most of them physically improbable.

[Smokin' Joe]

Neat idea.

[Marine_Uncle]

Perhaps a noble idea. But what Intel agency would open their doors, e.g. allow interaction with the civilian world, to contribute. Our military, NSA, CIA, other gov., under commercial contract and internal already do what you are suggesting.
Plus lets face it. Many large features easy to recognize, ID, are already targeted for investigation. Take the photo you show above. At the available resolutions, how would you spot anything of interest? Especially to untrained eyes. What information could be extracted from this photo of what appears to be north of the capital area on the Tigris. One can barely see the color of vehicles. The resolutions simply are not applicable for what you may be suggesting IMHO.

[TXnMA]

"Please, positive suggestions, only (everyone already knows that there are problems with any new idea, no need to point out the obvious)."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Limiting comments on a half-baked idea to only positive ones serves no good purpose.

Thanks for working on ways to help with our war on terror, but -- to cite one of Ted Key's old "Hazel" cartoons*, "Are you sure you've thought this idea through?"

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As someone with a 'smattering of knowledge' of photointelligence analysis (including the experience of writing and applying my own "convolutions", (AKA "spatial filters") I question the basic premise of your idea.

Unless you are going to provide (unclassified) analysis tools (as SETI does) merely providing detailed overhead imagery to untrained "lookers" will produce mostly false alarms. And, unless you provide extensive training, a detailed photo such as the one you provided wil produce only confusion in untrained examiners.

For example, in addition to:

• A smoke plume from a petroleum fire (the obscuring effect of which can be minimized via a suitable "equalization" algorithm)
• Clear evidence of the precision (and lack of collateral damage) in our "Shock & Awe" attack on Saddam's palaces (including one near-perfect 'bullseye')
• A good look at the trench network from which an Iraqi shot (and hit) one of our Bradleys with a RPG (and who was then "hosed" by that Bradley and its teammate)
• Three helicopters
• Numerous AAA sites

...what else, of military import, do you see in the bandwidth-hogging photo you posted? And what do you think a totally untrained, unequipped observer would detect -- and report?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Very seriously, FRiend, I appreciate your thoughts on helping in the war effort -- but I fear that overhead imagery analysis by the untrained masses is worse than unhelpful... Keep it up, though; your next one may be a "bullseye"!

(Apologies in advance: I simply couldn't think of a way to evaluate your idea adequately without sounding patronizing...)

.

* (Hazel, the maid, speaking to two young boys, one of which is sitting atop a "rocketship" made from a nail keg with a large firework inside it -- and the other, who is about to light the fuze...)

[Smokin' Joe]

Correct me if I am wrong, please, but while this might be of limited value in the urban areas, there is a lot of desert out there which may or may not yield significant caches of weapons.

While there are folks who do this for a living, that does cover a lot of turf.

I can see the parallel between scouring images of the desert and looking through the aerogel for dust particles.

Is it possible that civillians, using the NASA model for their program could assist in the location of caches out there? There are multiple redudancies built in.

It is not so much a question of what would be obvious to the trained interpreter, as using the trained interpreters to check the 'hits' reported by the multitude. This would free up some of those assets to look at other hotspots.