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.

Comments

Re:Eye in the Sky

[pr0t0]

Given all the mass surveillance we've been alerted to (thank you Edward Snowden!) in the supposed effort of combating terrorism, I've always been a "he who trades freedom for security deserves neither" type of guy. But the RadioLab podcast brings it to a much more personal level because instead of fighting terrorism, which seems far removed from my reality, it looks at mass surveillance as a way to combat crime. And it's really pretty effective and cost-efficient.

The biggest problem with a system like this, as I see it, is that innocent people cannot opt-out of the surveillance. You'd almost have to start with building a brand new community that had the caveat, "This community is under constant aerial surveillance." Then you could decide to live there or not. A community like that would likely have little to no crime; not because of the surveillance, but because of the type of people willing to live under the threat of surveillance. Of course then, you almost don't need the system.

But maybe that's still focusing on the wrong problem. Maybe the money should be spent on preventing people from doing bad things to begin with. It's a struggle against human nature to be sure, but it's a worthy struggle. I just watched a great TED talk from a Boston prosecutor who talks about fixing society in general, and the justice system in particular, in a way that helps to prevent people from committing crimes.

https://www.ted.com/talks/adam...