Cable News Network - 13:00 ET July 13, 2002
A Look at Terrorist Tracking Technology
HATTORI: Turning now to the war on terrorism. Not all weapons in that battle involve bullets or bombs. A new generation of high- tech intelligence tools helps military planers find enemy forces, and figure out what they're up to. David Ensor has more.
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DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, security officials got high tech help from a little-known intelligence agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Three-dimensional maps to help plot out their efforts: Where to put observation posts, which facilities were vulnerable from where from a terrorist sniper.
But there are new intelligence-gathering technologies now under development that may soon be even more useful in the war on terrorism. Normal black and white spy satellite images tell a lot. Color images tell even more, but they cannot see what is camouflaged. Something new called hyper-spectral imaging can.
JOHN PIKE, DIR., GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: With hyper-spectral imagery, you are looking at literally hundreds of different colors, and minute differences in those colors can tell you the difference between leaves and a camouflaged command post.
REP. PORTER GOSS (D-FL), INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: If you've got a campfire going in a cave, and you can't see the campfire or the smoke, maybe you can detect the heat. It's that kind of a thing.
ENSOR: It may also find heat from vents leading to underground bunkers deep under Baghdad, used by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Hyper-spectral imagery is so sensitive, sources say, that it can even detect trace amounts of a particular chemical in the air.
PIKE: Now, the military can take hyper-spectral imagery and detect minute pollutants that might be leaking out of a clandestine chemical weapons factory.
ENSOR: There are also new intelligence tools developing for the National Security Agency, the eavesdropping branch of U.S. intelligence, known for listening in on potential terrorist phone calls and e-mails around the world. Now, they are improving something called traffic analysis, learning things from patterns in the volume of mass communication.
Take the Super Bowl. Telephone company executives can always tell you who's winning.
PIKE: They can tell you how the Super Bowl is going and who won the Super Bowl simply by looking at how many people are making phone calls at any given time. The National Security Agency uses this technique to monitor phone calls in Afghanistan or Pakistan, to try to predict an impending terrorist attack.
GOSS: If you see an uptick of electronic activity of a certain type in a certain area, you can expect that something is happening. It might be a nuclear test, it might be conversations on cell phones, it might be people warming airplane engines. It might be people getting ready to test rockets.
ENSOR (on camera): There are, of course, other implications of these and other developing technologies that officials do not want to discuss publicly. Suffice it to say that in the intelligence war on terrorism, technology is America's friend.
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