Insight Program: DARPA’s Ubiquitous Intelligence

The Pentagon’s surveillance net is massive. But it was holes and seams. Spy drone videos and communications intercepts may be aimed at the same target. Analysts have a hard time flipping easily from one kind of intel to the other, however — allowing those targets to get away. So the military is working on an out-there idea to fix the problem: a single mega-system that pulls together and analyzes every kind of intel you can imagine. If it works as planned, it’ll be a whole lot harder to slip through that Pentagon net.

No surprise that Darpa, the military’s blue-sky research arm, is the agency behind the lofty five-year program, called Insight. The agency’s goal is to replace “largely manual exploitation and…chat-based operator interactions” with a system that mines different inputs, including drone footage and on-the-ground intel, and quickly stitches together the data to identify potential threats.

What Darpa’s calling “a next generation ISR [intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance] exploitation and resource management system” would be faster than human analysts, but it’d still rely on their input. Darpa wants an interface that’s adaptable, letting users provide context and pick the best surveillance combo for a given situation.

The Pentagon’s been investing in super-powered surveillance for years now, and Darpa wants Insight to capitalize on the rapid growth in the recon field. The program will incorporate brand new spy cams, like ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 Gigapixel camera that tracks over 100 square miles in real time. And ongoing Darpa projects might be rolled into the Insight system too. The agency’s solicitation cites a handful, including the recently-launched PerSEAS, a program to design complex algorithms that can somehow spot threats based on little more than “weak evidence.”

And Darpa’s betting big on Insight. The agency’s creating an entire “Insight Test Bed,” to be located at Fort Irwin’s National Training Center, that’ll mimic “real world operational settings,” complete with scripted scenarios. In hopes of fast-tracking ongoing programs, Darpa’s also prepping a “Development Incubator” of unclassified data and evaluation results for contractors. The goal is to boost collaboration and lower the cost of systems testing for developers — not to mention make it easier to integrate their work into Insight’s eventual surveillance depository.