Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K 252
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
Help me find them! (Score:2, Interesting)
One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, only one person wins the prize, even though it will almost certainly require the effort of an online community? This sounds like a breeding ground for betrayal.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that's the actual goal of that challenge. Not how people will find the balloons but how people will cooperate together if there's only a single prize to be won.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I was thinking more about that. A public online community will help you find all the real coordinates quickly, but there will undoubtedly be a lot of *fake* coordinates mixed in.
I think the real challenge won't be in finding the balloons, it will be in validating and filtering out all the non-balloons.
Re:One person? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmmm - strategies and counter-strategies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.
What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?
What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Interesting)
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
Possible strategy (Score:3, Interesting)
Social media test? (Score:5, Interesting)
Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.
Defense research angle?
Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.
Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.
I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.
This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.
The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although heavy on subterfuge... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Step 1. Set up a website (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:One person? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.
Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?
Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).
In that case, you've just broken their experiment.
But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)
Why all the marketing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else noticed DARPA's recent major marketing/publicity campaign? There is now this well-publicized balloon hunt. There was the televised robotic vehicle challenge. Even very recently, DARPA was central to the plot of an episode [cbs.com] of NCIS: LA. Its research efforts [scientificamerican.com] have been given very visible press in magazines such as Scientific American. (Look here [scientificamerican.com] for another recent SA article about DARPA research.) DARPA has also been featured twice on 60 Minutes in the past few months. And, it now has quite a following [facebook.com] on Facebook.
All of these somehow involve or inform the general public--not exactly par for the course given DARPA activities historically have been kept very much under wraps. What's really going on here? Why the recent publicity barrage? Two years ago, or less, I'm willing to bet 98% of Americans had no idea DARPA even existed. Might it be the old magician's trick of having us watch one hand while the other hand is actually performing the "magic?" For example, have you seen iRobot's shape-shifting Chembot [dvice.com] recently developed with DARPA funding?
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Social media control test? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:robbiewilso (Score:3, Interesting)
well let the spam begin!
Dear Robbie.h.wilson,
Hello, I represet a cosortum which has found nine of the baloons in question. If your baloon is the tenth baloon, you to win $5714.28 ! Please to visit this website and enter your accounts infomations for your electronic payment. http://balooncontest.darpa.gov.example.com/ [example.com] We look forward to hearing from you. We all want to win our $5714.28
Let's be honest... (Score:1, Interesting)
It has nothing to do with finding the balloons or how the data is shared among social networks.
DARPA doesn't need us to find those balloons. There's a small handful of agencies with 3 letter names that have software sufficient to troll the intertubez for all chatter about red balloons, filter said chatter, then train local traffic cameras or CCTV cameras on the balloons to verify.
It's probably a gimmick to see how far behind the government agencies that the private sector is.
Re:One person? (Score:3, Interesting)
- Prepare, plan and hypothesize ahead of time - not really possible with a non-manufactured event.
- Create a unique situation, making the experiment easier by reducing the amount irrelevant information that will be turned up looking for info relating to the event.
- As others have said, this has a social experiment aspect to it as well - who will win with such a big incentive for betrayal? A small well-organized group, or an aggregator site that grabs loads of possibly useless results and assaults DARPA with random combinations of locations until it wins, and then gives the informants a pittance? (On that note, I wonder if it will be possible to "brute force" a win?). They can also test the level of public participation given a certain incentive. Replace "red balloon" with "terr'ist" and you're basically testing the effectiveness of a public manhunt given short notice, and since the rules say they may ask you about your methods, they'll also find out which methods are most effective. I like how they cutsied that up with all this feelgood stuff about social networking and team-building.
Re:Social media test? (Score:3, Interesting)
The beauty of this is that it could be a lot of things. If some American official someday leaks "this is why we really did this" the odds that I would discount spin can't be over 50%, which relegates this to a quasi-permanent bucket of unknowability. It's a rare thing when a lightening bolt momentarily catches the men behind the curtain with a ruse in flagrante. The Soviets had their washer microphone. The Americans had the thermohaline undersea acoustic channel (where I live, a couple of decades ago, an undersea microphone research project was shut down precipitously).
Reputedly, the Americans had a telecoms satellite with the electronics compacted to such a spectacular degree, they managed to fit a spy telescope where the Russians believed it was technologically impossible. As the story goes, this flew over open Russian nuclear missile bays until some Russian mole tipped them off, and that was the last silo with exposed cleavage it ever flew over.
Another story is that the Americans pulled off a deep undersea splice of an unencrypted fibre optic cable connecting Moscow to one of their satellite states. This cable was unencrypted because 1) the Russians didn't believe a silent optical splice was technically possible, and 2) the Russians probably didn't think an American submarine could into position to do this undetected. I think there was once a big piece in Wired about this.
The final case that comes to mind is the Siberian pipeline sabotage. This one, especially, works almost as well as propaganda as fact, but it appears to be rigorously documented. I love the image of the CIA analyst popping up over his cubicle wall going "nobody panic, we know about this" as ever other analyst in the facility fumbles to get to the red phone.
A scenario I sometimes wonder about is a conversation between no such agency and the ghost of Alan Turing that goes like this:
Dr Turing's ghost, we've got this molecular-perfect crystal of gallium arsenide the size of a dinner plate (at some staggering cost to the space program), an experimental electron beam lithography apparatus able to draw a million logic units per day (the anti-vibration table alone is staffed with a team of twenty full time Black Mesa technicians), and more liquid gas than NASA. What kind of pretty picture do you think you could draw on this thing given a few months to think about it, and a year for the etching?
The one question I've most wanted to find out is this: what was the state of the art in 1970 for one-off half billion dollar chips? Lightening rarely strikes twice, and 99 times out of a hundred you never find out.
Re:Floating? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think there's a lot more to this.
What are they observing?
* Establish a geographically diverse target (10 balloons somewhere in the US).
* Observe how the organizers encourage people to work with them.
* Observe how they communicate with the search teams, coordinate efforts, and disseminate data.
This could be used to coordinate efforts between the military and civilians, should the need arise. In the sake of the great terrorism debate, what if a vehicle was known to be in the US, and it is expected to detonate a nuke on US soil. This kind of crowdsourcing would have a better chance of finding it than putting everyone in the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the road hunting.
Unfortunately, this is probably organized towards the handling and neutralization of civilian unrest inside the CONUS. It would:
* Identify civilians who can organize large groups to neutralize them.
* Identify communications routes that would need to be neutralized.
* Identify intelligence breaches that could be used by the dissidents.
So, it's all in how much you trust our government. Would they recruit the civilian population to assist in a time of need? Would they neutralize dissidents during a period of civil unrest?
I'm fairly confident I'm not on the stage 1 list (neutralize in the first hour), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the stage 2 list. I'd suspect the organizers who aren't LEO or government will be on the stage 1 list. The followers will be on the stage 2 list.
Who wants to play the game now?
If I happen to spot a red balloon, with a couple spooks camped out below it, I'm going to plink at it with a BB gun. :)