Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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
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.