Suprisingly, the Intelligence Community(IC) is considering the use of different forms of sensors to evaluate future agent recruits, according to the Washington Post. There seems to be a certain irony in those that spy being spied on, but the proposal insists that there are new complex demands for agents. For now the proposal is more of a discussion since it is listed as a “Proposers’ Day”.
The program, called Multimodal Objective Sensing to Assess Individuals With Context, or Mosaic, would collect data on a series of predetermined traits for a potential recruit. The information would be analyzed to create in-depth evaluations on whether an individual is a good fit for the agency.
Further detail discusses the sensors and their use including the mention of key data points like psychological profile, cognitive abilities, mental “resilience”, productivity, as well as general health and well being.
To address this challenge, the MOSAIC program aims to take advantage of multimodal mobile, worn, and carried sensors and the corresponding data to enable the measurement of an individual in situ, throughout their daily activities, using an aggregate of behavior, physiology, social dynamics, physical location and proximity, as well as other novel data sources.
What was most interesting were the comments made on the post. Many speculated that there wasn’t much to be tested other than the normal health tracker sort of info. However, maybe they weren’t considering the accumulation of data. Combine the typical heart rate, accelerometer and GPS with things like face tracking, voice recording, and street cameras, and you’ve got some pretty detailed info on environment and how someone is reacting. Plus, add in some AI wisdom like IBM’s Watson services looking at social media, emails etc.—you can do speech to text, tone analyzing, personality insights, visual recognition and relationship extraction. That could amount to a lot of data, not including whatever new sensors they’ve got cooked up. So, will recruits be willing to do this? My guess is yes. Not because they want to, but because their desire to have the title of agent will outweigh the privacy factor. The catch is that Mosaic will include current agents as well, to look at improvements on productivity. So, it’s going to be new rules out there, as they say. If you are fascinated by intelligence, you may have a need for a small camera. Have you checked out our Spy Camera for Raspberry Pi? It’s as small as a thumbnail and can be mounted inconspicuously in many places with its adhesive back. Pretty fun stuff if you are a Ghostbuster fan or just want to see if your kid is sneaking out of his room at night. Just remember, keep it legal.
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