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Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied On a Whole City
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with some concerning news from the Atlantic. From the article: "In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren't told about the spying, which happened in 2012. 'We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,' Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time."
So if you are sunbathing in your back yard, with 12 ft fences and no buildings visible, would you still presume privacy? Should you be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude?
Learn to love Alaska
I can see how this might work against somebody stealing a car as it is something that can be relatively easy to track. But tracking a person as they go into the subway is difficult or if somebody is wearing a hoodie. It still wouldn't touch the big players in organized or white collar crime.
Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.
I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)
You shouldn't be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude regardless. Legislating against the human body is wrong on many levels.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Apparently you've never watched AK Marc sunbathe in the nude.
-LAPD
I don't care about being recorded in public locations so long as I can also record everyone else.
I do, if it's the government. You should, because it makes it even more trivial for the government to harass its targets.
Looks like the future is going to be all about masks. But they'll just ban those, won't they?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm sorry, but I guess I don't understand why this is any bigger deal than cameras on a street corner. Maybe it's having grown up in Baltimore with a police helicopter constantly overhead that's desensitized me.
Doesn't everyone just assume that when in public, everything you do could be observed by someone else? Now, if they were looking in people's windows, that would be a bit creepier.
Did you miss this bit?
"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.
You do something the government doesn't like, and they'll use their ubiquitous surveillance to track everything you do in public places (If this trend continues, they'll have surveillance devices everywhere.). If you make even the slightest mistake, they'll have cause to harass you or ruin your reputation. And remember that laws don't have to be just, so even if the 'mistake' is illegal, that doesn't mean what you did is immoral.
Doctoring the footage could prove to be another problem. It certainly wouldn't be beyond our sneaky, slimy government.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
That's the land of the free and the home of the brave for you. So brave. So free.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
So if you are sunbathing in your back yard, with 12 ft fences and no buildings visible, would you still presume privacy? Should you be mailed a ticket for sunbathing nude?
A ticket? Not at all.
Rather, you should expect a SWAT team to haul you off to prison to await trial, where you will be found guilty of indecent exposure and forced to register as a Sex Offender for the rest of your life.
especially because its hard to ID a perpetrator from above the top of their head.
That's why we need to outlaw hair and head wear. It will be in the best interests of public safety if everyone had a prominent barcode tattooed to the top of their clean shaven, bald head to aid in identification by Law Enforcement surveillance drones.
You cannot seriously have an issue with the collection of such freely available imagery.
I do. Especially when it's the government doing it. We The People can easily restrict their activities if we choose to do so. The fact that "anybody" can do it doesn't mean we should let the government, with its virtually limitless resources and authority, do so.
What can the police do these days? Automatic license plate scanning? Red Light cameras? Automated Speed cameras? How about a FLIR camera on a helicopter?
I think that's all morally wrong. The fact that we allow it means we're not living up to the whole "land of the free and the home of the brave" thing.
What do you think the limit should be?
On the government's use of surveillance technology in public places.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't know of any laws, but I don't care. I'm saying I think it *should* be illegal.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
"spying" has come to include all stuff we don't like.
The government is definitely spying on you when it has ubiquitous surveillance devices recording as much as possible, even when it happens in public.
right and wrong doesn't come down to degrees.
When something is done past a certain degree that it becomes harmful (in my eyes), I consider it wrong. Very simple.
So because they are good at it, that is a problem?
Because they have virtually limitless resources and ability to harass, it is a problem. History, with its numerous examples of government abuses, further shows that it is a problem.
Stop getting wrapped up in what implementation they are using or how efficient they are.
So, I should stop thinking about anything and mindlessly declare that the situations are the exact same while disregarding the implementation and efficiency? That sounds ludicrous.
Mass Surveillance is a meaningless term.
"meaningless" is a meaningless term.
You're not going to convince me that the government having surveillance devices installed everywhere in public places, or making use of surveillance drones everywhere, are good things. It just isn't going to happen.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It doesn't matter if they don't like it. So long as it's legal, they can't do anything about it.
Just like the NSA surveillance doesn't exist? Just like the TSA, free speech zones, DUI checkpoints, stop-and-frisk, etc. don't exist? The government doesn't have to follow the laws, and especially when they're allowed to act in secret. They have enough resources to cover everything up, harass people, and ruin reputations. An example of this would be the surveillance of MLK, which was targeted. Only, this sort of technology would expand the scope of it and give them more power.
Your argument makes as much sense as banning guns and knives because they have been used to commit murders.
My argument makes as much sense as banning the act of murdering innocent people. I am suggesting a specific limitation on a specific actor that will curb abusive acts carried out with technology.
Doctored footage is easy to spot and *they* would then be breaking the law.
Under current laws, you mean. And it doesn't have to perfect in order to ruin reputations.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
This seems like a general warrant to me. For civilian aircraft, there are minimum altitudes, and no general expectation of privacy from overhead observation at that distance. But in this case, this is for the purpose of gathering evidence. How is that not a general warrant?
but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity
Their whole job is dealing with people who do crime and ask for forgiveness later. I don't condone what they are doing, but I can see how they could slip in that direction.
Which is why we have this thing called the United States Constitution, and why that constitution has an amendment (the 4th one, in fact) that deals with this sort of thing. That same constitution also has a concept of separation of powers, and defines what branch of government has what power. Law enforcement (under the executive branch) are only doing half of their job - they're sworn to uphold the law but the are ignoring the highest law, the constitution The judicial branch exists to prevent that, but they don't seem to be very good at doing the part of their job that involves upholding the constitution.
And what's with the massive influx of AC idiots defending the government's nonsense?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
TFS said they used an "aircraft", which I guess means "airplane". We better watch out - next thing you know, the sheriff's office will have helicopters and be able to hover, watching someone for a while. With an airplane, they can only watch for a couple minutes before they've flown by.
The difference was that in the past they'd have to spend $5-10k and then they can watch one person for a period of an hour or two. Now they can spend $100/day and record everybody in a whole town, without targeting anybody in particular.
This isn't a camera with a zoom lens. This is a high-resolution wide-field camera, that effectively behaves like it is zoomed in on everybody everywhere at the same time.
The "government" is not your mom nor your neighbor.
No, it's much, much worse; it's made up of normal people who are given authorities that normal people don't have. Power corrupts. The government is not made up of perfect angels who cannot make mistakes or abuse their powers, but normal people. That is a big part of the problem. You would do well to remember this.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
It doen't *prevent* those crimes at all, merely makes them easier to solve. I for one am not motivated to make the investigators job easier because of the obvious end game for that line of reasoning.
I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)
If we decide not to allow the public to fly drones around peeping into back yards, the same should apply to the police (without a warrant). The limits on casual/easy police surveillance should be pretty much the same as the limits on the public. The police should be no more than citizens that we have authorized to act in our name.
That said, it may be time to be realistic, that technology is expanding our powers of easy observation beyond historical limits. Create new laws regulating personal and commercial drone camera use, including allowable flight altitudes, linger times, recording and viewing resolutions, etc under various circumstances - with the same standards governing police use without a warrant. Balance new benefits against the loss of a few old privacy benefits. Same goes for things like Google Glass.
The key is to avoid allowing politicians to carve out any special exceptions/powers exclusively for the police - insist that police powers be based on those of the general public.
IMO.