Scents that make you trackable, indoors and out. Nanocrystals that stick to your body, and light up on night-vision goggles. Miniradar that maps your location on Google Earth.
You can run, but you'll learn it's hard to hide from a new range of military tech.
The Defense Department calls it “tagging, tracking and locating,” or TTL, this business of finding and following high-value targets on the battlefield. Ever since SEAL Team 6 took out Osama bin Laden, we’ve learned a lot about the technology used by special operators to find and reach their targets, from stealth helicopters to biometric identification devices. TTL gear, though, ranks among the spookiest Special Operations’ extremely spooky arsenal.
The military has spent a hefty chunk of change on TTL tech: $450 million has gone to a single company, Blackbird Technologies of Herndon, Virginia, which has emerged as the leader in this covert field. Millions more have gone to the development of bleeding-edge tracking methods, encompassing everything from human-thermal-fingerprint detection and miniature crop-dusting drones to radar-responsive tags.
Al-Qaida says it found spies using infrared beacons to call in drone strikes in Pakistan. A Pakistani Taliban commander claims the United States puts tracking “chips” in cellphones, in order to train Hellfire missiles on militants. But these aren’t the only technologies that can to secretly track people.
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