The US Army has started testing new intelligence software provided by security and aerospace firm Lockheed Martin. The software is designed not to assist in intelligence gathering, but rather to organize the terabytes of intelligence data already being gleaned by the US intelligence apparatus every day, all over the world.
The program is called the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS-A, and it comprises of a family of systems used by military analysts to work with shared intelligence, whether that intelligence is coming from drones, ground sensors, biometric scanning devices, or any other intelligence-gathering sources. Lockheed Martin has been contracted to help update the system with new capabilities such as its Automated Entity Merge Service (AEMS), which merges similar sets of real-world data; and the DataMover, which will standardize the formatting for various kinds of intelligence data.
As technologies like biometrics allow for the collection of ever-greater amounts of intelligence data around the world, it would seem to be an urgent concern to find ways to organize that data and expedite its use, so a step like this seems only natural. Given that this is a government thing, it requires extensive testing and evaluation before it can be deployed, but the current plan is to mobilize the software in 2015.
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October 16, 2014 – by Alex Perala
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