With our UAVs flying over battlefields relying on stateside pilots and analysts to scrutinize the video feeds, couldn't we harness the power of the Internet to allow civilians who already pore over Google Earth photos to spot interesting defense-related installations to contribute to the war?
Strategypage writes about the Google Earth angle:
[The] millions of Google Earth users that pore over the satellite images often discover things that intelligence agencies miss. The intel experts don't like to dwell on that, but the phenomenon is acknowledged. The "wisdom of crowds," so to speak.
Our professionals are surely far more talented on an individual basis, but quantity matters, too. As long as it remains the wisdom of the masses and not the conceit of an individual, of course.
UPDATE: I might be way off, here, in thinking that quantity must mean gray matter rather than silicon:
Since the most common video is digital, it's possible to translate the video into numbers, and then analyze those numbers. Government security organizations have been doing this for some time, but after the fact. It's one thing to have a bunch of computers analyze satellite photos for a week, to see if there was anything useful there. It's quite another matter to do it in real time. But computers have gotten faster, cheaper and smaller in the last few years, and programmers have kept coming up with more efficient routines for analyzing the digital images.
Of course, the programming solution may be best suited to the real-time problem of watching video feeds--which I didn't think was appropriate for a citizen-based program of poring over the pictures our drones and satellites provide in abundance.
