NEW COUNTERMEASURES

Glad to see them rolling out.

The United States is sending new high-tech systems to Iraq aimed at thwarting strikes on its forces, including a “virtual microphone” in the sky to help pinpoint snipers, the head of the Pentagon’s cradle of technologies said on Wednesday.

Other antiguerrilla gizmos would help detect roadside bombs and booby traps that have been killing U.S.-led occupation forces, said Anthony Tether, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA...

Separately, he said there might be fewer guerrilla bombings if not for privacy advocates’ fears of research on linking thousands of cameras to computers to track vehicles in an urban combat zone.

“If we had it in Baghdad today, we’d probably have fewer bombings,” he said, citing the possible use of such technology to trace the origins of blasts destabilizing U.S.-led postwar reconstruction efforts.

This program, called “Combat Zones That See,” was ending because Congress had earmarked no funds for it in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, said Jan Walker, a DARPA spokeswoman...

One project uses a large ground-based carbon dioxide laser to project a kind of microphone in the air with a range of “tens of kilometers” to determine where a shot came from by gauging particle movements, Tether said.

But did you notice that Congress cancelled funding for a system that could make our soldiers safer because of "privacy advocates fears".

Wanna bet none of those privacy advocates have loved ones in uniform in Iraq?