Slashdot Mirror
Police Launch Drones Over LA
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that law enforcement officials have launched a new form of drone aircraft to patrol the skies above Los Angeles. From the article: 'Police say the drone, called the SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions. "This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives."'"
Well, naturally it'll be a great outcome when it's used to save lives. What kind of outcome will it be when it's used to keep tabs on citizens' movements?
"The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives."
But we'll settle for tracking your every move.
"bringing technology most commonly associated with combat zones to urban policing." now some might argue that LA is not that far away from being a combat zone.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Once they fly over a backyard with some woman topless sunbathing out by the pool they'll forget all about saving lives.
Don't be so surprised if paparazzies gets their hands on one of these. Those celebrities will just think it is a computer looking. Computers have never done anyone any harm? Now have they? :)
Clicked pie.
"... but will in fact be used to further re-enforce the creeping feeling that LA, and indeed America at large, is turning onto a police state where the citizens are under constant surveillance."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Some of the hot women might not care to be checked out by people they can't check out in return. Would you?
"This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone" COULD BE used. Obviously it WON'T be limited to those situations. How will it help find missing children? Since they are missing, you don't know where to look, and you cannot possibly look everywhere in Los Angeles. If they are kidnapped, then how will the drone find them in a car or a house? Searching for lost hikers is a legitimate use, but how often will it be used for that? I don't see an epidemic of lost hikers justifying purchasing this equipment. As for use in a fire zone, why would the POLICE purchase a drone for that? Wouldn't the FIRE DEPARTMENT need it? These are NOT the reasons for using these drones. These drones will be used to monitor the streets of Los Angeles to gather track citizens and citizen activities at the expense of intruding on people's privacy (not legally defined privacy, but real-life privacy). These will be deployed during lawful public protests, for example, under the excuse of public safety. Since the Department of Homeland Security already has jurisdiction over pretty much everything, they can use it to build profiles of people at a lawful protest, adding to the data the DHS collects against citizens, allowing it to add people to no-fly and other blacklists. This is really just domestic spying, not to save the children, hikers or survey a fire. ("Mr. Fire, can we ask you a few questions?").
That was my point... if the technology is out there that will let someone silently look through your windows, guess what - That's what they'll probably do.
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
That's true, but it's controlled by remote. So therfore you don't have to pay a pilot, which I'm sure is a decent amount of money (I never researched it though)to go up in the air. Plus it'll cut back on insurance payments. As for maintenance. Looking @ this link that someone posted in the thread before. I'm not really sure maintenance will be that high of a cost. At 20 to 30 grand, it's almost disposeable in a big city like that.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
By and large, the most frequent response when I get this is "Oh, no, thats not going to happen. The government is doing this for a good reason, and I trust them."
So I've given up on trying to convince any but my closest friends. I just don't care anymore. If they want to be this flippant about the fourth ammendment, I'll let them be. To either wake up one day to realize they lost all their rights (and its too late for them to do anything about it), or to stay asleep....either would be a horrible punishment. They deserve it; they've chosen it.
I'm not that worried about it. We are smart enough to be on the inside of it all. We're smart enough to be the ones at the top monitoring all the OTHER stupid citizens. When enough smart ones rise up who care enough to do something about it, I'll either welcome them in or join them to set it the way it should be. Its win/win either way.
To the government, everyone IS a suspect.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
After reading over a lot of the slashdot replies to this article; it's interesting to note that the majority of them are posts by people with privacy concerns. I mean, a tool is just that; an instrument that serves a purpose. As has already been said before many times; Theres nothin fundamentally wrong with this technology, but instead how it's used will be the deciding factor. While I don't give much thought to the average joe's insights or opinions, I try to pay attention to underlying themes, ideas and threads of thought that run thru society as a whole. And, right now theres a storm brewing here in the USA. Im not saying most (or even the majority), but a substancial part of the populace does have a very uneasy feeling about our government and their motives. I'm trying to be an optimist, but despite that; I see such technology being abused to serve the interests of those in power without some type of VERY good oversight... Let's hope other people see this also, and do something about it before technology gets too advanced and we have no choice but to play along... Just my $.02
launched a new form of drone aircraft to patrol the skies above Los Angeles
Drones following Drones. Kafka would be proud.
The ______ Agenda
"This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Or to make flights 100 feet over highways with a laser gun and a telescopic camera. Screw red light cameras - just send an automated plane out over an area with artificially low speed limits and watch the fines come in as the automatically generated and mailed tickets go out by the thousands.
The problem with a lot of traffic law enforcement is that it doesn't have anything to do with enforcing saftey, but with generating revenue for the city/county. Red light cameras usually aren't placed at the intersections with the highest rate of accidents, but rather at ones with high amounts of traffic and low yellow light times.
Not to mention searching private property, since SCOTUS rubber stamped warrantless air searches in 1989. The Bush Administration (deservedly) gets a lot of flack for erroding privacy rights, but the Supreme Court has been eroding the 4th and 5th amendents long before Bush held any office.
Funny? Yeah. But only because of the HL2 reference. Replace 'a gravity gun' with 'any firearm available in LA' and the joke becomes reality. If criminals in LA are willing to shoot people with their guns, surely these new UAVs are just target practice to them. I can see this becoming quite a costly project..
Peace, Love, Unity, Respect
New capabilities create new vulnerabilities all the time, I don't see anyone talking about what new vulnerabilities these drones open up and how they are going about protecting against them.
The first thing I think of when I hear about remotely controlled vehicles is, "how easily can the control part of 'remote control' be disrupted?" If the idea is that they can use these things against criminals - what is to stop a criminal from buying a pre-made unit from some grey-market in the far-east, or modifying an "almost there" off the shelf transmitter that is capable of disrupting the two way communication required to operate these drones?
Depending on the specifics, one might even be able to impersonate the unit and send your own video feed to the ground-station. At the very least, I would expect that one could simply dump enough noise into the relevant frequencies to severe the link between ground-station and drone - after all the drone is tiny, it can't have too many watts of transmitting power. A smart criminal could use multiple transmitters, and reflections off of buildings and such, making it that much harder for anyone to get a triangulation on the source of the noise too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
First link was meant to be:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4422539.stm
The first original link was to the original article, which just showed a toy radio controlled plane (aw how cute) with sheriff badges on it. Useless for nothing. The real deal, is at the link above, which is a link off of that same page labed as: "Allies plough billions into drones". Far more sinister and real. Billions. Billions. Why spend billions? I'll tell you why.
These are the ulitmate in killing machines, because those driving them are in no way in harms way, those driving them can be supervised from over their shoulder like in a telemarketing calling center, and it becomes just a laptop war agame to them... and these things can kill will impunity at great distances. If the machine crashes or is destroyed, it can and will simply be replaced with one from a factory that is churning them out under government military contracts at alarming rates.
It does not question orders, it does not fear, it comes after you and it comes after you to kill you. It does one thing and one thing only, spy and destroy. More than likely, they will travel in packs, so shooting one down, you will only be swarmed by others in the local area. Guns can be mounted on them. Cameras surely. Or more than likely, an explosive charge, so like with their other assasination attempts with these things, all they have to do is fly it near you and detonate it. Hostile element purged.
They can be mass produced. They will be mass produced. And once thhey are automated to patrol and refuel on their own autonomously, they will be mass produced. What are you going to do that is looking at you? Shoot one down? That is destruction of state property, just like breaking the glass in the back of a police cruiser to get out because they are infringing upon your freedom. They will then run a slander game on you, and criminalize you, if you are caught, and lock you away in their police state prisons which extend like warehouses for miles and miles. I've seen them from the inside... its like a warehouse of people that never ends... and ocean... like looking at the clones being trained in Star Wars Episode 2. You wouldn't believe it until you saw it with your own eyes. The words "my god" come to mind from my memory.
The lines have been drawn in the sand. Either you fight back, or you die under their foot. Whats it going to be?
Do it now, because ten years from now, it will be way too late.
Or you can keep doing what you are doing now, playing on your computer and bickering like squaking hens about this or that, with no real clue as to the war going down on the street today against the pigs.
footnote:
Do you know the word "patrolling" and patrol came from "patty rollers", which were bands of white enforcers who patrolled the roads in the deep south for any slave off his plantation without a permit (read, ID card signed by his master). If any were caught without such a writ, they would be lynched and hanged or worse. This practice was picked up by the modern police force, which now assignes "routes" to cops to patrol continously and project power on a fine grain level, so that there will always be a pig within 5 minutes of any situation. This is called their "beat".
You've got it backwards. First of all, any eye-in-the-sky the police (or for that matter, the military) would use would not be able to discern what nationality the walker is since it would be seeing him from above, from a considerable height and probably in infrared as well. Maybe if the drone passed the word to a passing police cruiser the guy might have a problem. Secondly, the police probably would wait until they had a few days of observation completed so they would know that the guy walks that way every weeknight. In fact after the first night they'd probably use the drone to backtrack him to his job and they would know that he only uses the railyard as a shortcut from work to home. Furthermore, the drone, viewing his actions from above, would certainly be able to show that he wasn't doing anything suspicious, like trying to gain entrance to a railcar or something. Finally, if his boss does find out and penalizes him in some way, then it's the boss who has broken the law (and should be made to pay for it)! Corporate shenannigans and unfairnesses like this abound in our open society. This is one of the prices we pay for our freedom. This would be no different from any other case of false slander or guilt-by-association. The only difference is that it would be initiated by new technology. All in all, those who don't break the law shouldn't have to worry about it. (And if things get so bad that they do, well, time for another revolution.)
Weren't there aerial drones in the short lived show "Dark Angel"?
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I just like how they say it could be used for things that are too dangerous for officers, then go on to add "find missing children, search for lost hikers". LA must have those dangerous nuclear mutant hiker kids with poor sense of direction.
"In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered."
George Orwell, 1984, Ch. 1
There is no money in missing children, lost hikers, and fire zones.
More likely, expect it would be used in revenue enhancement, driving infractions with exhorbitant ticket costs, etc.
Drive 90 minutes in any direction from LA and you are pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
Yes. Driving 90 minutes in LA means traffic is going nowhere while driving 90 minutes in NYC means there is just no parking space.
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."