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Spies In The Skies: FBI Planes Are Circling US Cities (buzzfeed.com)
Peter Aldhous, and Charles Seife, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with "augmented reality" software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines -- making them hard to detect by the people they're spying on. [...] The government's aerial surveillance programs deserve scrutiny by the Supreme Court, said Adam Bates, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. "It's very difficult to know, because these are very secretive programs, exactly what information they're collecting and what they're doing with it," Bates told BuzzFeed News.
Once we replace George W. Bush with a true progressive, all this crap will stop.
I hear there's this young Senator from Illinois that so progressive, open-minded, and well-thought-of. Joe Biden even said he's well-spoken.
Was in Baltimore on Monday and saw a couple of planes circling... they had trailing advertising banners -- what a great cover to hide their real intent...
STOOOOPID FBI, modern App appers know that to clandestinely capture cellular traffic while spying on the populace from the air, you need a blimp app, like the project LOON, not LUDDITE airplanes that require wasting precious taxpayers bodily fluids paying for human pilots to endlessly circle the city. APPS!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'll feel safer when they combine this with AI to create a pre-crime system then deploy Robocops to snuff it out pre-emptively using an automated form of Judge Dredd instant justice decision making.
Can we get a KickStarter going for this?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...