From The Register:
Wired reports that the Marines successfully spoofed infrared imagery, producing the appearance of a legitimate combat engagement. Only a surprise confession by a Navy medic (or “corpsman”) attached to the unit led to the true events being uncovered.
I’m not posting this as a pro- or anti- war statement; it’s just that the idea of staging a scene specifically to feed misleading information to surveillance devices is fascinating to me, especially when done by individuals rather than a national security service. It’s like stage magic, but with a murderous twist - look at it from one angle (or one device) and you see the illusion, but up close you see what’s really going on. What else are people going to try and mislead - fixed surveillance cameras? Telephone dialled number logs? News cameras? Cellphone cameras? Can you edit a cellphone video without it being obvious to the viewer? Can you control the appearance of a scene to a third party’s cellphone, perhaps by limiting that person’s movement, or controlling their attention? Has this already happened?
The mind boggles.
From the Wired article:
The aptly named Pioneer is one of the military’s original UAVs — during the first Gulf War, a Pioneer recorded a video of a group of Iraqis waving white flags and surrendering to the unmanned vehicle, apparently having learned that bombers came right after the UAVs.
It’s a reasonable thing to do, but somehow surrendering to an unarmed, unmanned vehicle - that can’t stop to pick you up - sounds crazy.
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