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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.
There's a great Radiolab episode about the sorts of capabilities these planes can have. Essentially, they're doing pre-emptive surveillance - they take high-resolution snapshots every second, so when there's a crime of some sort reported (e.g. a robbery, a drive-by, a getaway vehicle), they can follow the cars involved backwards in time to see where they started out, or where they went afterwards.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
The flights are almost entirely for immigration, organized crime, and drug crimes. Only a tiny sliver is related to any terrorism missions, and those are really not done with the small planes but a citation jet or two and some PC12's. The hostage rescue team runs those mostly. They crisscross the country all the time.
The software essentially knows where it is looming, and the officer can type in an address or parcel number or any other piece of info to point the camera. It can track moving objects reasonably well at times. There are two to three cameras typically, and includes high zoom optics for a color (electro-optical or daylight) channel and a MWIR camera. The data is simply audio, location and camera orientation data, and video feeds moved to some SSD's that are offloaded after flight. The software places the actual mapping info, notes, etc right on the video.
The stingray units are often broken, and are widely considered by the operators to be useless POS that cost too much money. They are not useful for high flights, and are generally targeted at specific perps. The fears that they vacuum up a lot of data are well-founded, and the only thing that prevents misuse is filtering the data by an operator. Misuse happens.
Seeing posts about patriots keeping us safe from terrorism with these planes is hilarious. The jobs are boring...ex military pilots droning around for hours, TFO staring at large monitors in the back. The missions hardly have anything to do with terrorism...just everyday law enforcement needs like a team of cops in cars on the ground. The truth is a lot more boring than the mouth breathing posts.
Source: I installed all of the above, ride along, fix, train, etc all the way across the spectrum.
Almost nothing the FBI or the government does is "illegal". We can still discuss whether these activities are wise or whether we should limit them.
It may not be any different: the FBI shouldn't "circle cities" and collect data on millions of innocent people that way either.
More importantly, any such programs should be out in the open: that is, the FBI should be required to detail what exactly they were doing, why, and how. They should explain what data they collected, and they should have strict criteria for what to retain and what to delete.
Legally you are required to have oxygen onboard any unpressurized aircraft that goes above 10000 ft for more than 30 minutes.
Sorry...not true. 12500+ after 30 mins, and always above 14k.