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Anaheim, California - Conspiracy freaks, hold onto your tin hats.

Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research arm, may have publicly abandoned its creepiest programs, like Total Information Awareness. But the agency, as shown at its DarpaTech conference, still has a project to make you run full-speed into your bunker.

Mighty Isis

Darpa wants to start planning for a blimp, three times the size of Goodyear's, that would keep watch over an entire city.

Hovering 70,000 feet above ground, the ISIS (PDF) airship (short for Integrated Sensor Is Structure) would use a giant, flexible radar antenna to give, in the words of Darpa program manager Larry Correy, a "dynamic, detailed, real-time picture of all movement on or above the battlefield: friendly, neutral or enemy."

"We will apply this technology to track people emerging from buildings of interest and follow them as they move to new locations," said Darpa's Paul Benda. "Imagine the impact it will have if ISIS tracks the movement of individuals for months. Hidden webs of connections between people and facilities will be revealed."

Such a system is meant to keep tabs on urban combat zones -- abroad, of course. But there's no reason ISIS couldn't float over New York or Chicago or Kalamazoo.

For now, hold off on buying that one-way trip to a secluded Caribbean island. ISIS is futuristic, even by Darpa standards. At the moment, the agency is only studying the feasibility of the airship. Darpa won't even begin soliciting research proposals until 2005.

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