Via friends, I found two very bizarre items today which are wholly unrelated but which put together create a pretty serious mind-fuck. First is from a friend who found today a solicitation for bids by the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for somebody to pitch them a technology that can automatically monitor and model crowd behavior (click here and scroll down a ways).

OBJECTIVE: The development of an innovative, inexpensive device that provides the ability to construe the intent of crowds and predict hostile action as well as recognize suspicious events using light weight, low power, man portable technology.

DESCRIPTION: Crowd Modeling / Monitoring would be a very valuable tool for military, law enforcement and commercial applications. Crowd Modeling / Monitoring technology could be utilized to alert authorities to potentially hazardous situations including unusual amassing of groups as well as presence of known hostile individuals. This technology would allow the monitoring force to predict hostilities prior to their occurrence and enable law enforcement to locate persons of interests through automated detection.

They also say that such a technology would be useful in protecting financial institutions and gaming (gambling) industries to spot suspicious behavior automatically. So… for some reason the military believs it’s important to protect casinos? Among other requirements, they ask that the technology be visually undetectable and “designed with a network environment in mind to allow for unattended operation.”

On that note, here’s something wild and wacky that JP found about computer simulations of societies, a project called New Ties:

The NEW TIES project is growing an artificial society using computer programming that develops agents–or adaptive, artificial beings–that have independent behaviours. The project is the first of its kind to develop a large-scale and highly complex computer-based society. The project’s results may have larger implications for information technologies design, evolutionary computing systems, artificial intelligence and linguistics.

The project’s goal is to evolve an artificial society capable of exploring and understanding its environment through cooperation and interaction. The agents are sufficiently complex and their environment demanding, which enables them to develop a communication system to learn how to cooperate and to adapt.

Maybe I just saw these juxtaposed at exactly the right time, but you have to wonder: is there some place where these two technologies intersect? What about correlating the above technologies with those 460+ terabytes of information that Wal-Mart has been gathering about it’s customers? Or mash that into a ball with the NSA’s surreptitious attempts at social networking tools. What we seem to be looking at is not only complete tracking and monitoring of all individuals, but the very real attempt to do the same thing scientifically on a system-wide societal scale, projecting into the future, changing key variables… Ah, the possibilities make my head spin with terror and revulsion.

You have to wonder how long they’ve been running predictive simulations about what will happen as we slide into a total surveillance and police state. Apparently, we didn’t protest too much during their simulations, so they’re making their fantasies concrete block by block.