They'll probably never spot Snooki, but Air Force surveillance sleuths might learn a thing or two from the production techniques of reality television. Photo: U.S. Air Force
Earlier this year, one of America's best-known defense think tanks went looking for ways to get the most out of the U.S. military's spy drones. To do it, that august institution turned to the editor of a documentary called Boob Jobs & Jesus.
That editor, Timothy Snell, was one of several reality TV production experts consulted for a recent RAND Corporation report that advocates applying Jersey Shore-style production techniques to help the Air Force mine through mountains of surveillance data.
The idea might not be as crazy as it sounds. Air Force officials have acknowledged that they're already buried under the heaps of footage that spill in, every hour of every day, from the myriad sensors and cameras that collect data.
Even as they struggle to manage the current data load, in excess of 10,000 hours a month, the glut is only expected to increase. In particular, the introduction of wide-area surveillance systems ' namely ARGUS and Gorgon Stare camera suites, which can spy on whole cities at once ' practically guarantees that overburdened analysts will have to sift through way more footage than ever before.
RAND's new report, titled 'The Future of Air Force Motion Imagery Exploitation: Lessons from the Commercial World,' sets out to revamp how the Air Force tracks all that information. The key: using the infinite wisdom of ' wait for it ' reality television.
This simple illustration demonstrates the "control room" format suggested for Air Force surveillance by the report's authors. A supervisor, on-foot, monitors a bank of screens that are also visible to everyone in the room. Illo: Rand Corporation
The report consulted myriad masterminds of unscripted TV. In addition to Snell's bosom-filming expertise, the authors also cite producers of For The Love of Ray J, Rock of Love: Charm School, and Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami ' to suggest improvements to Air Force surveillance techniques based on 'this relatively new television genre.'
Turns out, reality TV control rooms and Air Force ground stations actually have more in common than you might surmise. The volume of footage exploited in a reality TV control room, the report states, 'is comparable in scale' to what an Air Force ground station processes. Operations in both scenarios run 24/7, with operators required to 'record and report events in near realtime.' And in both settings, footage can be mundane for hours on end ' until unusual or important events occur unexpectedly.
'You can't have someone staring at the empty Jersey Shore living room for 24 hours a day,' Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who did not contribute to the report, tells Danger Room. 'But when something crazy happens at 3 a.m., you want to be sure to spot it.'
Air Force surveillance often follows a similar model. So with such commonalities in mind, the report offers four primary suggestions for Air Force officials, all of them derived from the slick techniques of reality TV production.
First, there's the configuration of the Air Force's ground stations ' the locales where intelligence teams monitor footage and command the drones. Right now, the stations are often arranged as 'a 360-degree arena,' including a central command post around which crew members are stationed in front of their screens. Instead, the report suggests that personnel be arranged in a manner akin to those in a TV control room: One giant bank of screens at the front of the room, with individual operators ' each with their own screen ' facing that bank, and a team of supervisors monitoring the 'screen bank' on-foot.
That giant bank of screens, visible to every operator, would allow all of them to see 'all motion imagery being exploited within that room,' as well as 'other geolocated intelligence data' such as GPS or SIGNIT data. In other words, it'd broaden an operator's situational awareness beyond what they're readily able to glimpse on their own computer monitor. When it comes to processing a ton of footage, the configuration offers another key advantage: It'd be easier to spot what are called 'cross-cuing opportunities' between cameras. Say, cuing a narrower-range camera to zero in on a suspicious target spotted by a wide-area camera.
Next up is communication between personnel. Right now, Air Force drone controllers use chat rooms to talk among themselves. In practice, that can mean dozens of chat windows clogging a computer screen, forcing operators to toggle between surveillance and chat. It's a method, as Zenko notes, that's 'ripe for distraction.' TV producers, facing a similar inter-communication problem, rely on headsets instead. It's an alternative that provides greater mobility, fewer visual distractions, and that allows 'expressi[ons] of urgency,' the report notes, to a greater extent.
Then there's a proposed 'multimedia database,' something already used by reality TV producers. Hours of footage are saved to a database, and staffers 'tag' important scenes that can be looked up later to 'construct the narrative' of a given episode. For Air Force personnel, such searchability would be vital. Of course the Air Force can hold onto thousands of hours of footage. But analysts need to know exactly where to look in order to mine that data for anything useful.
Finally, in a suggestion that Zenko describes as 'particularly salient' for the future of military surveillance, the authors suggest discreet ground stations that focus, like reality crews, on one area of surveillance (Khloe's walk-in closet!) rather than one platform (bedroom night-cams!). In a military context, that would mean devoting one ground station entirely to all the drones spying over a specific swath of Afghanistan, rather than beaming footage from drones hovering across the country into every single ground station.
'You're going to have one blimp just sitting over a city, for months,' Zenko explains. 'Personnel would do a better job if they were intimately familiar with that one region.'
The suggestion is designed to work in conjunction with the report's other ideas: a ground station focused on one area, with a bank of monitors offering different angles and data input from that region, plus a multimedia database of local footage that's been tagged and organized.
Of course, as the report's authors acknowledge, there are plenty of differences between the control room capturing footage from The Shore House and the one observing Pakistan through a Predator's camera. For one, personnel are keeping an eye out for distinctly different things. Reality TV crews are just waiting for Ronnie and Sammi to hit the smoosh room ' or each other. Air Force crews? Not so much. And a reality TV control room, the report notes, benefits from 'at least a 'loose' script,' whereas military personnel are much less sure what to expect.
Caveats aside, Zenko is confident that the report's ideas are already being considered by Air Force officials. 'These RAND reports don't occur in a vacuum,' he says. 'Odds are, the Air Force has already tried some of these ideas, and they wanted them to be considered more fully.' It might not be long before the military's precarious surveillance Situation gets majorly juiced.
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