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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.
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.
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/...
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.
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.
Just wait for one to fail and have to land on LSD (the road)
You're not supposed to land on LSD, you're expected to take off it.
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...
every plane has a right to fly over cities, FBI or non-FBI
Not if its airspace under ATC control. Fly around in circles, particularly with transponders turned off, and both ATC and every other pilot in the area will shit themselves.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Which means, they have their transponders on, and ATC knows what they are up to.
My problem with this, is our government seems to think it is free to do what it wants. It does not.
My bigger problem with this, is that the people more or less believe that we don't have a choice in our government's activities. We live in a defacto surveilence state, mainly because we accept it as "normal". We are in a tyranny of security, because we are not longer the land of the free, home of the brave. Especially when the presence of chalk is cause for panic among the snowflakes attending college.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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
The FBI really is the new SA/SS
Proving only that you have no idea what the SA or the SS actually were.
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...
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).
Here's the thing. Profiling and other methods that we decry the use of would probably go a long way towards cutting down on crime, including terrorism. The real problem is not that they are ineffective, but that they either harm or otherwise inconvenience completely innocent people because they would err on the side of assuming that your membership in a particular group (voluntary or involuntary) makes you inherently worth investigating. Much of what you are joking about in terms of AI and insta-justice is fictional, but the mindset behind it is not.
More realistically, if you really did forbid the entrance of Muslims and deport all of the existing Muslims in the country, you'd definitely make some dent in home grown terrorism, and you'd also drive the remaining ones underground, where communication is more difficult to coordinate except between more dedicated groups which law enforcement is better equipped to handle. There would be no more people who are radicalized by that radical preacher who was brought into your local mosque to teach publicly. The Internet would still be a problem, but you're going to be less likely to be swayed by a radical Muslim terrorist social media presence if you are not actually a believing Muslim to begin with.
Of course, you'd displace ten thousand or more innocent people for every single Muslim-type terrorist you managed to rid the country of and create an absolute human rights shitstorm. That's why it generally wouldn't work in a country that pretends to care about human rights and justice. But, nobody should confused into thinking it would be ineffective, and for that reason we should understand that being safer isn't necessarily our first priority.
We *are* safer when everyone thinks the same and looks the same. And that's why safety cannot be the point.
We were told we were getting black helicopters, not Cessnas!
Legally you are required to have oxygen onboard any unpressurized aircraft that goes above 10000 ft for more than 30 minutes.
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."
Sorry...not true. 12500+ after 30 mins, and always above 14k.
First off, let's be clear. I do know that US Citizens did fall into the hands of countries like Ethiopia while they were fighting for the Islamic Courts regime in Somalia. And there was possibly torture while the FBI (who were observers) took no action. That's deeply troubling, and possibly illegal.
However, I want to make myself clear that just because the FBI can do questionable things, that it is important to understand scale. The SS was a paramilitary (and as the Waffen SS, a military) group that was the political arm of the Nazi Party even more than the government. They engaged in running concentration camps, extermination camps, and carried out efficient mass executions in the field. They were involved in the T4 euthanasia program to kill undesirables, they were wrapped up in the racial and ethnic theories of the Nazis to the point where they were supposed to be the Aryan ideal. They were in charge of the Gestapo and the SD (which were the actual secret police) They also engaged in ritual sought to replace religion with some sort of SS religion of Teutonic mysticism which even Hitler thought was odd.
In short, they were a state within a state, and in charge of every oppressive state agency. And they used that power regularly and efficiently with almost zero check on any of their actions.
Oh yes, and they tortured people. And so has probably a large number of police agencies worldwide. That doesn't make any of them the SS. Comparing the FBI's actions, illegal or undesirable as they might be to that of the SS is to diminish the enormity of what the SS represented to make a contemporary political point via hyperbole. And that, I do not care to accept.
So I don't accept the comparison, but that doesn't mean my rejection of a bad comparison means I support illegal or unethical actions. I oppose inaccuracy.