Analyzing London Riot Video Will Be Daunting, Just Ask the Pentagon

Alexis Madrigal has an excellent blog post over at The Atlantic exploring what the London police can learn from the Vancouver police department's investigation into riots there last June. He notes that investigators in Vancouver had to review about 1,500 hours of video, compared with an estimated 66,567 hours of video awaiting review by British authorities.

According to Madrigal's math, it will take 200 investigators 41 days to give all that video a cursory review. Throw in all the BlackBerry messaging data, Twitter and Facebook feeds that Scotland Yard plans to analyze for evidence, and you've got a serious time suck.

As Madrigal writes:

"Welcome to the future of law enforcement. The long-time problem of having too little information has transformed into its exact opposite, too much. Humans can produce more data than they can readily analyze."

It's a problem the U.S. military has been coping with for years now. Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the now-retired former Air Force deputy chief of staff for information, surveillance and reconnaissance, made it his personal mission to get reporters to stop using the word "unmanned" when writing about remotely-piloted vehicles, his preferred term for UAVs. That's because the manpower required not only to operate the vehicles but to exploit the value of the data they collect is so daunting.

Last year the Air Force started using the Gorgon Stare sensor pod on Predator drones, allowing each drone to transmit multiple video streams simultaneously. But scrubbing all that imagery for vital intelligence has proved at least as difficult as collecting it in the first place. In a 13-month period before Gorgon Stare was even deployed, the Air Force alone collected 250,000 hours of video. As one officer told me, it would take someone 28 years to sit down and watch it all.

Not surprisingly, the Pentagon and its contractors expect it will require more technology to dig their way out from under all this data -- the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone.