Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All - Hardcover

Holland Michel, Arthur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544972007 ISBN 13: 9780544972001

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2019

Synopsis

The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing use on American citizens

Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this system--and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare--allow operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before they happen.
In battle, Gorgon Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when this technology is deployed over American cities--as it already has been, extensively and largely in secret--it has the potential to become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens.
Drawing on extensive access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great promise while avoiding its many perils.

About this title

About the Author

ARTHUR HOLLAND MICHEL is a Peruvian-born writer and researcher. He has written about drones, artificial intelligence, culture, and immigration for Wired, Vice, Fast Company, Motherboard, Al Jazeera America, and an Oxford Research Encyclopedia, among other outlets. He is the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, a research institute that he co-founded at Bard College in 2012.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0544972007
• ISBN 13: 9780544972001
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336