Slashdot Mirror
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.
Come November, be sure to vote for a Democrat so as to finally end the KKKonservative grip on the White House and restore our privacy!
Oh, wait...
(Troll my tail...)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Seems to me you guys end your anthem with something about "land of the free"? I think it's pretty safe to remove any references to that one.
This suggests that the FBI and DHS have more funding than they need. Perhaps it can be applied to some useful activity (such as making teacups; breaking and crushing them; mixing with water; and making more teacups).
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Spies In The Skies: FBI Planes Are Circling U.S. Cities
Now replace this with:
Spies in on the Roads: FBI Cars are Circling U.S. Cities
How is this any different? Is the FBI not allowed to fly planes now? Don't get me wrong, I don't trust the FBI as far as I can throw them, but..I'm not sure what they are doing here is illegal?
Flying is not illegal. Large scale surveillance of cities and us citizens might be.
The FBI really is the new SA/SS.
This must cost a lot. What is being gained, does it make economic sense ? If the actual results don't financially justify it - then they should not do it.
Plenty of other reasons why they should not do it, but just another slant.
Two things:
First, inherently aerial surveillance can be (unobtrusively) broad. That plays into the NSA-we're-logging-everyone's-calls-innocent-or-not concern.
Secondly - and this is an area open to debate - there's the reasonable expectation of privacy. Something that has been used to justify a lot of surveillance in these un-private times.
A person who stands at one end of a block and shouts at a person at the other end of the block cannot reasonably expect privacy. People are going to hear whether they want to or not.
A person who stands next to another person and talks in a normal voice doesn't have a true expectation of privacy, but common courtesy typically comes into play here unless they have reason to suspect bystanders.
If the people are being overhead from the other end of the block because someone has unobtrusively trained a shotgun microphone on them, that's exceeding reasonable expectations because people who go around with live shotgun mikes are not the norm and because individuals are being spied on. That's about the same degree as aerial surveillance with an unmuted plane.
A person who's in a house talking to another person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy because even though I could bounce a laser off the window from a hidden location and pick up what was being said, that's something that needs a warrant, or at least provable justification. More or less the same level for a muted plane. Other similar acts incude attaching a GPS to someone's vehicle. or hijacking phone calls with a Stingray.
If instead of actively aiming a spy beam at the house in question, I set up a cosmic ray detector equipped with an audio demodulator, I'm outside all bounds of reasonable expectation. This where stuff like tracking your cellphone's location lies.
Note that these examples have no legal weight. What courts rule as "reasonable" can be quite unreasonable, but once you get into that territory, you're risking a legislative backlash or at least domestic discontent.
The reasonable expectation of privacy in un-private situations isn't a new issue. The Federal Communications Act of 1934 allowed persons to monitor any radio-wave transmissions that they could capture, but communications not explicitly directed as public broadcasts or to the listener were not be be repeated or exploited. When Reagan "got the government off the backs of the people", they narrowed that, making it against the law to monitor selected frequencies, but regardless, private radio conversations were expected to remain private, whether intercepted legally or not.
The FBI really is the new SA/SS
Proving only that you have no idea what the SA or the SS actually were.
Uhh, okay. I dislike the FBI as much as the next guy, but if you seriously think this, I don't think you understand the scale of the crimes committed by the SS and SA.
I hear Godwin calling...
I think you're confusing the Stasi (the secret police in post war East Germany [1950-1989]) which spied on it's citizens, with the SS (Schutzstaffel [1925-1945]) which was the enforcement arm of NAZI party and responsible for the war crimes committed.
A secret police wasn't just in Germany - it was in all of Eastern Europe and Soviet satellite state well into the late 1980s.
Whatever you think of the governments aside, the intelligence agencies work for their governments - the resulting actions are taken by their recipients of their intel. So although we don't have as loatheful a government as those states [yet], the intel gathering apparatus is much worse now than it was then.
We're already though beginning our slide down the slippery slope though.
Ask yourself - why are we collecting more information on what happens in the US, than in the middle east?
Intel is currently being shared with law enforcement. How is that consistent with the due process that supposedly separates us from 3rd world dictatorships?
You see, mass surveillance is a tool not for going after everyone all the time, it's a tool for getting dirt on undesirable individuals for things "unrelated" to the cause of the annoyance (which are not illegal, and often virtuous). It's for people like Joe Nacchio (http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2014/03/27/former-qwest-ceo-joe-nacchio-tells-story-fight-against-nsa-sec.html).
I feel a little safer going about my daily activities knowing that, while nothing can prevent all possible forms of terrorism, at least someone is keeping an eye out and looking for irregulatities. The bad guys need to be perfect to escape detection, and they've shown that they really are not capable of that. I know a lot of people feel threatened by this an complain, but stop and think for a minute if you lived in a land where there was utter lawlessness and you were afraid to leave your house for fear of being robbed or assaulted. I think those people that complain are spoiled by 100+ years of success in our country and take our safeness for granted. A lot of the world is not so lucky.
I remember a time when the authorities were not monitoring people all the time and I still lived in a very safe society. So this type of surveillance is not required to have a safe society. Terrorism existed then, too. We just weren't as terrified by it.
I also keep in mind that my idea of a "bad guy" (such an unfortunate term, as there is no such thing) may be different from the FBI's idea of a "bad guy". The FBI considered Occupy Wall Street protesters to be "bad guys". On the flip side they also consider members of the Patriot movement to be "bad guys". I know it's almost inconceivable, but any one of us could be considered a "bad guy" for reasons we haven't even thought of. Therefore there needs to be a balanced solution. And over the past 15 years I think things have gotten out of balance.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Daley did more than 'close' the airport. He had bulldozers tear up the runways in the middle of the night, without FAA permission. If he was not 'Da Boss', this would have been considered an act of terrorism.
What if a small plane had needed to make an emergency landing? His act endangered lives.
It doesn't matter though, he was able to get the contracts to redevelop the island and build a concert venue to his friends and cronies.
Once upon a time there was an Amendment to the Constitution. It was rather specific, it basically said that the powers that weren't granted to the federal government (by the Constitution) were left to the people or to the individual States. Why do I mention that?
What that Amendment meant was that it was, at one time, interpreted to mean that if the Constitution did not specifically allow for it that it was not something that the Federal Government was allowed to do. In other words, if the Constitution did not give them permission then it was not allowed and the rights were reserved for the individual or for the State.
Somewhere along the road that changed. Now, the interpretation is the other way around. Now, it's read that if the Constitution doesn't expressly disallow it that it's allowed. It's pretty much exactly the opposite of the intent and we, the citizens, have not only allowed this misinterpretation but have actively cheered it on when it was "our side" that was doing it.
I don't know exactly how or when it happened but there are a few key places to look. I think it was over several events and has gotten progressively worse.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."