A user on twitter pointed out that live-tracking a car via license plate was not really realistic (as seen in the News Stream Live mission). As you know, we want NT4 to be as realistic as possible based upon what the military has for capabilities in 2017. I based that part of the mission on a technology called ALPR. With enough cameras in a city, you can get a pretty accurate location of a vehicle in real-time and enough data points for your GEOINT team to deploy live tracking. You can imagine that some vehicles are easier to pin point; a camera crew standard vehicle or even a basic van can be easily located and tracked once you have their general location. The cell phone tracker based on intelligent billboards is a well known and honestly basic technology. Getting backdoor access to a cell phone is another story. Although it may be more realistic in some countries, we don't know the current capability of the US military to live tap into a citizen's cell phone. We work hard to create a balance between fun and realism. For instance, portscans or dictionary attacks won't take 2 weeks in NT4 like they could in real life. But aside from changing the pace of real hacking, it is important that every part of each mission is either possible or very likely possible from a military perspective. What's your opinion on News Stream Live and its realism?
I think at first one might think that it's not very realistic, and like many crime TV shows, but on further inspection it definitely feels well within the realm of possibility
would we know if it was realistic, would those that really know tell us?? a lot has been leaked but not all i'm sure. plausible deniability would safeguard tech that is not meant to be known. so even someone in the intelligence community might say "we can't do that" while they do that. whatever the case, the thought did not break my immersion.
I am studying to go into the Cybersecurity field. I think all aspects of this portion are on point. I think it would be nifty to add OnStar and other things that modern vehicles have built in today that the government and police definitely use to their advantage. Simple code can activate all microphones of a certain phone brand in an area when crimes are happening to pinpoint where gunshots, etc are. I also think it's fair to take heed what the narrative (Wingman) says during this part of the mission, particularly about smart billboards. And as Anashel stated, vehicles with wifi (which is rapidly becoming popular for civilians and not just business, like news, delivery trucks, etc.) are way easier to pinpoint, infiltrate and listen to. These types of technologies are built for convenience, not security. Just my two cents.
News Stream Live visualizes the steady stream of news. Based on different views it can be seen the most shared and commented topics. This allows conclusions to be drawn as to which topics are particularly relevant and what the readers are interested in, as well as which topics nobody cares about.
While I have not played this mission yet, I can tell you that when I worked as a 911 dispatcher 5+ years ago we had the ability to do this using a network of highway cameras and the like.
I can't really comment on the realism of the tracking (even though it feels very plausible to me), what i can say though is that it falls squarely in the fun-category for me. And fun and exiting very rarelly breaks the immersion for me.
In the UK, ANPR is only limited by the number of cameras. In London for instance if you were to place an active trigger/flag on a license plate the control room operator can configure an alert each time it passes an ANPR camera. (The most common trigger being 'stolen'). With the large number of ANPR & CCTV cameras in central London it is possible to track a vehicle (via data and visually) - and its probably as close to real time we are going to get without GPS/other tracker data/other invasive techniques. Outside of main cities where there are fewer camera's its no where near real time - more like an update every 5-10 minutes (assuming they actually pass a camera). As for in-game - as long as you have enough cameras or a hack tool it's entirely plausible. Especially when you consider there are already car/wi-fi exploits in the wild.
From what I've read from press sources about tracking via automatic license plate readers sitting on poles in some townships (yes, in the US), it's entirely feasible. The only stretch I see is realtime, versus historical, but that's not a big leap IMO. It's akin to what could easily happen with advances in facial recognition and the pretty thorough cameras all over the UK, yes?
UK uses ANPR (Auto Number Plate Recog.... as aposed to Auto License Plate ), and we have ALLOT of cameras. If a Police Officer wanted to know if a certain vehicle was in an area they would send a request to look at the log, get a hit, happy days.... Thats the Police who have to have a reason to look, they can't just go and look up their mate for a laugh. So how hard would it be for a system to sit within that and pull each hit on a camera for a given plate? A map of a city, first two hits give a direction and travel time, so rough speed... that narrows down the next likely hit to a few cameras instead of all of them, thats almost realtime... tracking each movement and it's exact position would IMHO still require a satalite, drone or some such. Hacking the built in GPS of a car or work tracking device like Fleetboard for trucks, just adds more and more options to do it.
