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" Warning: Some Spoilers Ahead Body of Lies, Ridley Scott&amp;#039;s grisly take on the post-9/11 Middle East, follows CIA superagent Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he tries to bring down fictional terrorist leader Al-Saleem. The film is chock-full of spy movie standards: exotic locales, double-crosses and tense prisoner exchanges. But even though the film follows a standard spy-thriller plot, experts tell Popular Mechanics that the technology featured in the film is much closer to reality than the farfetched gadgets Q routinely devises for James Bond.  Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) is Ferris&amp;#039;s contact at the CIA, a blowhard with a Southern drawl who&amp;#039;s rarely out of contact with his agent. Hoffman spends most of the film with a cellphone to his ear, talking Ferris through a firefight halfway around the world even as he attends his kids&amp;#039; soccer match back in the U.S. From CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Hoffman monitors Ferris with live streaming video provided byUnmanned Aerial Vehicles, similar to the real-life Predator, which routinely runs missions in the Middle East. The real-time video provided by the UAVs is at such a high resolution, and equipped with such a large zoom, that Hoffman can follow chases through cramped streets and even pick out individual people.  Greg Davis, project applications manager at Insitu, which works with Boeing on the ScanEagle UAV, told PM that the movie&amp;#039;s depiction of unmanned surveillance is fairly accurate. The Air Force does have Predator bases throughout the U.S. where pilots use remote control to fly UAVs on bombing and surveillance runs in the Middle East. Most UAVs come with both infrared and television cameras that can provide real-time video, Davis says, and drones can stream video back to Langley (though sending video around the world isn&amp;#039;t instantaneous; there is a slight delay that Body of Lies doesn&amp;#039;t show). With the click of a mouse, says Davis, real-life operators can tell a UAV to track an individual object--including a person, as is the case in the movie. According to Davis, even following a person through the streets will one day be possible--contractors are developing ways to coordinate multiple UAVs, so that if a building obscures one camera, another can fill in. These hives of aircraft will communicate autonomously, without any human input. What Body of Lies exaggerates, Davis says, is resolution. Current technology, whether from a low-flying UAV like the ScanEagle, a high-flying one like the Predator or an orbiting satellite, can resolve down to a few inches. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s good enough to distinguish whether the enemy is carrying a shovel or a gun,&amp;quot; he says. The crystal-clear resolution that Hoffman sees in the film, good enough to identify individuals, is beyond current capability, but engineers are working on it. Because the ScanEagle flies low--its ceiling is around 16,000 ft--it must be small enough to avoid detection. Ultraclear resolution, then, is a matter of fitting a bigger--or better--camera into a small aircraft, and Dik Daso thinks it could happen. Daso, a retired Air Force fighter pilot who curates the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum&amp;#039;s UAV exhibit, said the U.S. military experimented with more primitive UAVs for most of the 20th century before introducing reconnaissance drones in the early 1990s similar to the sophisticated aircraft in use today. Daso expects UAVs designers to continue to move toward better resolution and video streaming, someday probably resulting in the level of streamlining seen in Body of Lies. David Ignatius, author of the 2007 novel from which the film was derived, told PM he tried to base the technology in the story on what he has actually seen while covering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a columnist for the Washington Post. But while the agents inBody of Lies use UAVs, cellphone monitoring, email surveillance and other high-tech means to keeps tabs on their targets, the terrorists also go off the grid--shutting down their cellphones and communicating face-to-face or through cryptic notes left in secret locations\u00AD--making them nearly impossible to track. It&amp;#039;s a real challenge that today&amp;#039;s military faces. The radio silence leads Ferris and Hoffman, with the help of a computer whiz named Garland, to the film&amp;#039;s most high-tech scheme (spoiler alert): Faking an entire terrorist attack, hoping some competition will bring Al-Saleem out of electronic silence.  Ferris first picks a patsy, Omar Sadiki, who fits all the criteria intelligence agents look for in a terrorist without actually being one--he&amp;#039;s well-to-do, well-traveled and well-connected, but in reality he&amp;#039;s just an architect. Ferris breaks into Sadiki&amp;#039;s hotel room and accesses his hard drive with efficiency rarely seen outside the Mission Impossible films to steal a list of names and e-mail addresses from a nonviolent group at Sadiki&amp;#039;s mosque. While spy movies love this trick--instantly cracking a computer password--John Pironti, chief information risk strategist at CompuCom, told PM that it&amp;#039;s not quite true. With today&amp;#039;s best password-cracking technology, a person definitely could access a computer password. But it would take at least hours to do, Pironti says, unless you were incredibly lucky. The technology has improved, he says, and having physical access to the computer would accelerate the process compared to remote access. But we can&amp;#039;t just plug into a computer and instantly crack the password like Ferris does. However, Pironti says, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re getting closer.&amp;quot; Once Ferris steals the information, he and Garland use the names to spread rumors about an attack, which other intelligence agencies pick up as chatter. Finally, the Americans detonate a bomb on one of their own air bases in Turkey, using already dead corpses to make it look real, and congratulatory emails flood the inbox of the unsuspecting Sadiki. Once Ferris has the names, says Pironti, the rest of the movie&amp;#039;s scheme is totally plausible. Email threats from one person wouldn&amp;#039;t attract the attention of intelligence officers, which is why Ferris and Garland send emails from the addresses of the members of Sadiki&amp;#039;s benevolent mosque group--to provide corroboration. The hardest part, according to Ignatius, would be keeping the secret, which is why he tells people who ask him that he doubts America actually executes such plans.  While Body of Lies makes no claim to represent any real event in the War on Terror, Ignatius said the real-life intelligence situation in the Middle East inspired one of his central themes: the chasm between those on the ground and those in the office. Ferris speaks Arabic and spends most of the movie covered in wounds from gunfights, dog bites and bombings. Meanwhile, Hoffman and Garland operate from the comfort of home, with Hoffman often overstepping his man in the field. In real life, Ignatius says, field agents joke about the &amp;quot;7000-foot screwdriver&amp;quot;--their superiors who try to control the action from halfway around the world.  The cinematic terrorists&amp;#039; choice to forgo electronic communication was particularly effective, Ignatius said, because it took advantage of one principal problems for real life U.S. intelligence gatherers. America&amp;#039;s technological prowess is unrivaled, he says--U.S. agents have spy technology few could ever hope to match. But while all that technology seems to make the world smaller, isn&amp;#039;t hasn&amp;#039;t helped the face-to-face intelligence gathering that Ignatius said is America&amp;#039;s weakness. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not so good at the human piece.&amp;quot;  RELATED STORIES * SCI-FI VS. REALITY: Paranoid Thriller Eagle Eye Exaggerates Surveillance Tech  * PODCAST: Law Enforcement is Watching You with Unmanned Drones  * PLUS: UAV Race Between Raytheon and Boeing Heats Up  * DIGITAL HOLLYWOOD: All of PM&amp;#039;s Fringe, Lost and Blockbuster Coverage   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a12130/4286845/>