- NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - U.S.
spy agencies are looking at new technologies that might help them score
more successes in tracking individuals, after their long and, so far, fruitless
searches for high-profile fugitives like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
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- "There are certain infrastructure elements or entities
that we can find through our sensors, but this is a real challenge to find
an individual person," Lt. Gen. James Clapper, director of the National
Imagery and Mapping Agency said on Thursday.
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- To find one person requires a mixture of all the different
types of intelligence, with spies on the ground probably the most important,
he told reporters at an intelligence conference.
-
- "There are some potential phenomena, scientific
phenomena, technical phenomena that are being looked at in terms of the
ability to track individuals through individual signatures," he said.
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- "There is a lot of work being done on it that is
classified that we're not real interested in revealing what the technical
approach might be for fear of compromising it," Clapper added.
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- NIMA, which analyzes satellite imagery and produces maps,
sent about 90 people to the Gulf during the Iraq conflict, helping identify
targets using unmanned Predator drones and Global Hawk planes.
-
- The agency has a "cadre of people who basically
stare at the same target day in and day out for months and years,"
Clapper said.
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- 'SHORTENING THE WAR'
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- The greater use of precision-guided munitions in the
Iraq war compared with the first Gulf War placed a "high premium"
on the agency's analysis of imagery and maps, he said.
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- "We were credited ... with actually shortening the
war," he said.
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- Increased collaboration with the National Security Agency,
which eavesdrops on electronic communications worldwide, resulted in "the
elimination of a lot of bad people," Clapper said, declining to identify
them.
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- As the amount of imagery grows more voluminous, NIMA
wants to find a way to automate the recognition of what sites are, "leaving
the more ambiguous challenges to the eyeball and the mind of the analyst,"
he said.
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- NIMA is supporting post-war U.S. efforts in Iraq with
infrastructure projects, such as providing snapshots of how many fertilizer
or cement plants are active, and views of the state of the electrical generation
system, Clapper said.
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- In his presentation at the conference, Clapper on Wednesday
showed photographs of a warehouse full of maps that did not get used during
the Iraq war and troops standing around paper maps held on the ground with
orange traffic cones.
-
- He wanted to illustrate the agency's desire to get away
from hard copy, Clapper said on Thursday. "Hard copy maps are out
of date before the ink dries."
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- NIMA wants to send maps electronically to those who use
them and have users print them out the way they want, to the scale they
want, he said.
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