Spy agencies seek new ways to track individuals

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) - U.S. spy agencies are looking at new technologies that might help them score more successes in tracking individuals, after their long and, so far, fruitless searches for high-profile fugitives like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein."There are certain infrastructure elements or entities that we can find through our sensors, but this is a real challenge to find an individual person," Lt. Gen. James Clapper, director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency said on Thursday.

To find one person requires a mixture of all the different types of intelligence, with spies on the ground probably the most important, he told reporters at an intelligence conference. "There are some potential phenomena, scientific phenomena, technical phenomena that are being looked at in terms of the ability to track individuals through individual signatures," he said. "There is a lot of work being done on it that is classified that we're not real interested in revealing what the technical approach might be for fear of compromising it," Clapper added.

NIMA, which analyzes satellite imagery and produces maps, sent about 90 people to the Gulf during the Iraq conflict, helping identify targets using unmanned Predator drones and Global Hawk planes.The greater use of precision-guided munitions in the Iraq war compared with the first Gulf War placed a "high premium" on the agency's analysis of imagery and maps, he said."We were credited ... with actually shortening the war," he said. Increased collaboration with the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on electronic communications worldwide, resulted in "the elimination of a lot of bad people," Clapper said, declining to identify them.

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http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=M4UB5AJGUTYKICRBAEKSFEY?type=topNews&storyID=3634656


Guess the old sniffer dog routine just didn't work out with Osama "Phantom Menace" Bin Laden.....

...used to get regular reports on the location of OBL. Apparently he had a "spy" on the ground or something. Then, when he passed this to the Bush Administration, they pissed it away because it wasn't important.

Anyone else remember hearing this or is it just wishful thinking on my part?