If the Pentagon Wants TiVo They Can Give Me a Call

Wired's Noah Shachtman blogged this week about a report recently released by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board that basically espoused the application of existing video technologies in the commercial sector to national security.

In the report, the board calls for TiVo by name, describing the need for a "Tivo-like" ability to run recorded time backwards and pinpoint important events. Word-for-word, the report said:

To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed, to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and diversity. Furthermore, the ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data.

Hmm...well, lucky for the Pentagon, the former head of TiVo's engineering group is now working on exactly that at 3VR Security, which was also recently covered in Wired.