by Dave Taylor

Created on: May 09, 2007   Last Updated: May 22, 2007

Here's how to end the Iraqi war.

We now have the technology to at least see what the heck happened when someone did something naughty, and to trace back where the jerk came from to his hive of scum and villany. Using this same technology, we can also learn to understand one another better, to run our governments more efficiently, and to do a bunch of other neat things that I'll let you figure out later.

Imagine a video camera with a small, built-in hard drive, a chip used to compress video, a low-power general purpose processor, a wireless ethernet device, and a GPS device.

Let's call that gizmo the Do-Over, because we're going to use it to get "do-over"s of stuff that happened, in a completely open and non-Orwellian way.

Now put that camera on scary freaking downtown block in Baghdad so that it's facing the market. In that camera's field of view, put another camera just like it that is looking at the parking lot next to the market. In that camera's field of view, put another camera that is looking at the school next to the parking lot. In that camera's field of view, put a camera that is looking back at the market. Rinse and repeat until you have a whole mess of cameras with each one covering another.

Each of these Do-Over cameras is running a little web server, and that server serves up the last several minutes of footage. The footage is available to anyone that wants to grab it off of that server. They can either stream the footage, or they can grab as many minutes of footage as the hard drive has space.

Each of these little Do-Over cameras is also telling all the camera nearby it where it is using the GPS device inside it, its orientation, and it is feeding each nearby camera a little ping that says "Hey, I'm still alive and kicking."

So here's how it works, going through a suicide bomber scenario:

1. Scary duder splodes himself in the market, takes out the market Do-Over.
2. The parking lot Do-Over is covering the market Do-Over. It gets a visual record of the bad guy popping himself, gets an electronic record of when the camera stopped transmitting, and as a result, it starts forwarding its data to its nearest neighbors away from the explosion.
3. Anyone within wireless transmission distance of the cameras can sniff these packets and grab his own feed.
4. The community, which is monitoring itself, can not only see who dunnit, but can trace back from whence the sploding car came, because the last camera to see him before it popped is going to have told the last camera

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>