Technologies of deception advancing

Deception remains one of the enduring hard problems of the community, and its ever varying forms are testament to the creativity of the human mind, and the capacity of the human soul to lie.

This item at Defense Tech caught our eye. The concept of using holograms for tactical deception in the urban environment is an interesting one, and quite familiar to readers of science fiction (and their movie-going counterparts). The potential instantiation of such technology could be quite useful if executed properly. A more comfortable sniper hide, if nothing else, could make our lives much nicer….

Outside of the cutting edge and onto the more prosaic realities, we note the proliferation of deception tactics into the ordinary, for purposes of beautification. We note the following item on urban architecture, and the spread of buildings more integrated into the surrounding landscapes.

These challenges present serious questions for future intelligence problems. However, it is an excellent chance to begin integrating these types of problems from the very start into new analyst training programs, using such publicly available examples in the modern arena; and something outside of the hoary old World War II examples so often re-used. (As brilliant as they were for their day, such cases were highly situated examples which occurred in a technological and social context, and in a conflict environment, we are likely never to see again and thus of more limited utility to the instructor and student.)