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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."'"
Just like HL2 ... gimme a gravity gun and I'll get rid of the lil' suckers
This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone
Or it could be used to follow White Broncos
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?
But police say that such privacy concerns are unwarranted because surveillance is already ubiquitous. "You shouldn't be worried about being spied on by your government," said Heal. "These days you can't go anywhere without a camera watching you whether you're in a grocery store or walking down the street."
You're already screwed, but you don't have anything to worry about unless you have something to hide. You don't have something to hide do you citizen?
Dropping the paranoia. I've been into a surveilance center in a major city and, as you would expect, half the time the people working there are too busy checking out the hot women walking about to notice any crimes...
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Why not? It would make "World's Wildest Police Chases" that much more entertaining.
Here is a link to the SkySeer product on the manufacturer's web page that includes a photo of the device (looks like a model airplane): http://www.octatron.com/Products/SKS.html
"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.
LA's a big city. There are some good things about this.
* It frees up man power
* It saves money on paying pilots and buying more aircraft
* They can cover more are quickly plus relay constant feed back and be remotely controlled to travel certain ares faster.
There are some bad things.
* It could, theoretically, be a privacy issue as they take pictures of people's yards (I'm sure pictures will be wide lens)
* Let's say they can hover and ease drop on a building
* I'm sure taxes will come into play (howerver this may be on neutral ground if it really beneifts the residents).
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
"... 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.
At least someone is asking the right questions.
I don't have a problem with private businesses using cameras to monitor their property as long as the cameras are not government sanctioned stations to monitor the public. I would hope that tapes from those business cameras would at least take a subpoena to be viewed. Where I do have a problem is when an officer seems to justify unwarranted surveillance devoid of probable cause using unmanned drones patrolling my backyard. What happened to my Constitutional rights regarding search and seizure?
And do you know how they sell this to the public?
It's for the children stupid!!! How long until this is used to collect even more information on the citizen of our US? Land of the free and home of the brave indeed...
World's Shortest Police Chases?
"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?").
Well, get yourself a GPS Jammer.
You can bweak the Man's widdow pwane!!!
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
"The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives."
Ideally that is. At least until it crashes and kills someone.
BBC has pictures http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5051142.stm
what are the price on these little babies? will they have to teach the police to handle them or will they need to bring in a dedicated tech to watch them? it seems like a lot of money to spend n somthing that has a high chance of failing simply from outside enviromental hazards.
Can these things see-and-avoid other air traffic, or does this come with a permanent TFR?
Xeni Jardin (of BoingBoing and NPR fame) reported on this a few months ago. The pictures of the plane are good, but the control equipment is even more so.
It's not like it's a big secret. It costs too much to operate choppers 24/7 for the surveillance desired. Drones are cheaper, they only cost once (plus nominal costs for fuel) and you can lay off those expensive pilots.
Now, drones are by definition dumb and sooner or later one will crash. That is not necessarily "protecting" the public, will probably hurt more people than it saves, but as long as you can argue that's the idea behind it, it will fly. Hell, the "war on terror" was supposed to protect US people, and more people died during that war than in terrorist acts before 9/11. But hey, it was the idea behind it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not quite:
http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2006/060609 uav.html
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) was reportedly evaluating a 4-pound UAV for surveillance use over the sprawling L.A. Basin, which also happens to be some of the busiest airspace in the world. Members were rightly concerned about the risk of a midair collision with the small, radio-controlled aircraft.
AOPA staff promptly raised the issue with the FAA. Not only did that action make sure that a mini-UAV wouldn't be sharing L.A.'s airspace with GA pilots, it will also lead to a better policy controlling UAVs nationwide.
The FAA made it clear to the LASD that as a public operator, it would need a certificate of authorization (COA) and an experimental airworthiness certificate before it could fly a UAV, regardless of size, in the National Airspace System. (National airspace includes Class G, uncontrolled airspace.) Those are the same rules that apply to the larger UAVs being flown by the military and Department of Homeland Security.
Public and commercial operators aren't flying UAVs for "recreational purposes," so they are not permitted to fly remotely piloted aircraft under the provisions of the FAA's radio-controller modeler's advisory circular.
According to AOPA's FAA sources, the LASD reassured the agency that it will fully comply with all FAA regulations.
>...there's many more hot women walking around than there are crimes.
You've neve been to LA.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
But the question is.. where is Jessica Alba in this whole thing? :)
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
My son flys light aircraft in the LA area. He has commented Helicopters are often
difficult to see, especially when the hover stationary at the end of runways. There
have been several crashes with loss of life in LA due to light planes hitting helos.
Perhaps since UAVs fly lower than helos, they will reduce crash danger to my son.
I'm curious if UAVs are exempt from all FAA regulations or do they require any
notification tonearby towers when they are launched?
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
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.
SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions.
Wow, the situation in LA is a lot worse then I thought since apparently they are worried about helicopters being shot out of the sky.. I wonder when it was the Crypts picked up a surface to air missile?
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
but what happens when the 'bad guys' start building drones of their own? . Imagine drone shoot-outs over the city. .
Did anyone even RTFA? The drone reached an altitude of 300ft and promptly took a nose dive into a thankfully vacant lot. Now suppose i'm a lost hiker or other nefarious sort on the lamb. Near silent and undetectable how pretty will that be when this android flap box jams me right in the face after losing comms. Give me a loud noisy helicopter any day at least i'll hear my doom approaching.
"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.
I found this picture of the prototype: http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:7SY6ib0nUY04 BM:battleteam.net/tech/fis/docs/images/halflife2_s canner2.png
... Does the NSA have a live feed into the drone's microphone?
Dustin - A different story...
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.
OK, I'll bite. We got pilotless aircraft flying low and slow over neighborhoods in Los Angeles, spying on people, and the authorities say that it's for "finding missing children and lost hikers? C'mon on. The police in LA would only spend all this money on one thing:
"Nigger Control!"
To put it bluntly, in their words [in hushed whispers], not mine.
Do they really have such a big problem that they need all this Kafkaesque technology? Or are they really just a bunch of paranoid psychopathic cowboys with too much money to spend on death machines?
All this weird 'us vs. them' paranoia that infects the wealthy people of Los Angeles (more than anywhere else on Earth) is getting to be rather embarrassing. Do they really believe that their maids are gardeners are going to rise up and slaughter them in the middle of the night?
Get a grip, people, and come back down to the real world.
I'm beginning to think that the entire L.A. techno-fascist police state mentality is directly related to the local Hollywood fantasy mentality. Only it is the inverted nightmare that grows out of too much fantasy, too much money, and too many drugs.
Is there any other place where people live like this? God, let's hope that it doesn't spread.
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.)
Aircraft are regulated by the FAA.
This activity on Los Angeles' part got the attention of a certain pilot's association which apparently put lots of ice on the project.
So it doesn't appear to be flying anywhere above LA County anytime soon...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
.....but what happens when the 'bad guys' start building drones of their own?......
How about hacking the control system and taking it where the police doesn't want it to go? It would be sort of like the hackers making a PC Zombie, only this one flies.
In the article: "There must have been some sort of communication interference," said De La Torre as he inspected the multicolored wires and circuitry spilling out of his damaged drone.
Actually it was a hacker who made the $25K toy airplane crash into the empty lot.
All theory is gray
You know, of all the science fiction stories that I'd hope would come true, Dark Angel wasn't one of them. As I recall from that series, the aerial drones were being outfitted with guns to preform assassinations. The populas never suspected because they had grown used to seeing the drones flying about, doing surveillance. I've always wondered if that series was canceled because it hit too close to home. On the other hand, the second season sucked.
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Weren't there aerial drones in the short lived show "Dark Angel"?
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Here in Maryland, the state police have a fleet of Dauphin helicopters with infrared cameras and 30 million candle-power spotlights. They can see an awful lot, day or night. In theory they can spy on anyone in any public place.
In Baltimore, the city routinely used video surveillance of public areas --particularly places known to be open air drug markets. The courts upheld the convictions of those caught on tape dealing in drugs.
My question to those who object to UAV surveillance: What do you think these things do that hasn't already been done? The courts have upheld the use of all these technologies. Does the placement on an unmanned aerial vehicle make any difference?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!