Darpa's Radar To Follow Your Car Everywhere

If they succeed, DARPA will be able to follow your car everywhere you go—even if you get into downtown Manhattan's traffic—making movies with car chases absolutely pointless. If Steve McQueen were alive, he would be very sad today. The new radar is called Multipath Explotation Radar, and combines three-dimensional urban maps with a Ku-band radar running at frequencies high enough to resolve vehicle details. This makes the MER capable of fixing a target on anything that moves on the ground. The system will depend on unmanned air vehicles, bouncing their radars on ground and buildings and comparing the patterns with 3D maps. The result would be a complete picture of the movement in a city. Once they nail the chasing of one vehicle, DARPA wants to enable multiple target tracking. Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, citizen. [New Scientist]

Well I saw this coming long ago,I was thinking the Uk would probably get there first though interesting...

Source
gizmodo.com...

Another excuse to install more microwave radiation, pay for more expensive maintenance contracts on 100 year old flying wings and monitor you.

Can't they just do this with scalar em grids anyway?

Cheer up, they probably will be too poor to pay for it in a couple of years.

We haven't seen the bottom economically.

Of course they might make it a priority! Like going into Iraq...

I wonder at what height these unmanned air vehicles will be flying at. Once spotted will they be the target of people taking 'pot shots' at them. Talk about big brother watching over us. Maybe everyone should paint their cars the same color as the roads they travel on. Make targeting harder.

reply to post by Australian


Better yet,we could write F U or draw targets symbols on top of our cars as a way to say hello lol

Originally posted by UMayBRite!
Cheer up, they probably will be too poor to pay for it in a couple of years.

We haven't seen the bottom economically.

Of course they might make it a priority! Like going into Iraq...

The sad thing is,that's probably true.Who know's where will we be in the next couple of years??

This should be fairly easy tech to beat if, 1. It's used on it's own and not in conjunction with other tech (although it will, that will be a problem) and 2. You actually know that you are being followed in such a way.

Basically it would be a pretty simple mater to disguise you vehicle from this Ku-band radar... The way I understand it is that these frequencies are high enough to resolve particular details about your vehicle and thus presumably giving the system a 'fingerprint' of you vehicles characteristics - this fingerprint can either then be followed through the streets, or simply searched for later if it is still in an area of coverage (I'm also assuming that this system will be capable of monitoring many vehicles - more than a human operator can cope with)...

So what do you do? You simply have a variety of ways to alter you Ku-Band radar 'fingerprint' All that would be is a variety of materials that either reflect or absorb the Radar energy, and you have them in such a way as you can reconfigure them quickly! Even something like tin foil hastily taped to the various exterior panels would give a drastically altered radar return - of course to human eyes it would look very very strange that is the simple principle - there would be a whole bunch of better ways of doing it.

While the government and its various agencies research lots of wild things all the time, I have a hard time believing they are anywhere close on something as sophisticated as what people are suggesting this system could do.

But let's assume they will at some point, then even so it wouldn't be overwhelming difficult to defeat. In some of my graduate work I was on a project involving passive and active forms of jamming. The passive forms weren't actually "passive" in the sense of materials (or paints), they were mechanical in nature (as opposed to electrical). The electrical jamming was so easy, radar and satellite transmitters being so weak in output strength they were to confuse. I'm sure they've made progress in the 25 years since I worked on that project, but the basics remain the same.

Of course, whoever was trying to scan your area would know the area was being "defended", so one should jam with care.

John