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FBI Forced To Release 18 Hours of Spy Plane Footage (vice.com)
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes a report from Motherboard:
It's been just over a year since amateur aviation sleuths first revealed the FBI's secret aerial surveillance of the civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland. Now, in response to a FOIA request from the ACLU, the Bureau has released more than 18 hours of aerial footage from the Baltimore protests captured by their once-secret spy planes, which regularly fly in circles above major cities and are commonly registered to fake companies.
The cache is likely the most comprehensive collection of aerial surveillance footage ever released by a US law enforcement agency... The footage shows the crowds of protesters captured in a combination of visible light and infrared spectrum video taken by the planes' wing-mounted FLIR Talon cameras. While individual faces are not clearly visible in the videos, it's frighteningly easy to imagine how cameras with a slightly improved zoom resolution and face recognition technology could be used to identify protesters in the future.
The FBI says they're only using the planes to track specific suspectds in serious crime investigations, according to the article, which adds that "The FBI flew their spy planes more than 3,500 times in the last six months of 2015, according to a Buzzfeed News analysis of data collected by the aircraft-tracking site FlightRadar24."
The cache is likely the most comprehensive collection of aerial surveillance footage ever released by a US law enforcement agency... The footage shows the crowds of protesters captured in a combination of visible light and infrared spectrum video taken by the planes' wing-mounted FLIR Talon cameras. While individual faces are not clearly visible in the videos, it's frighteningly easy to imagine how cameras with a slightly improved zoom resolution and face recognition technology could be used to identify protesters in the future.
The FBI says they're only using the planes to track specific suspectds in serious crime investigations, according to the article, which adds that "The FBI flew their spy planes more than 3,500 times in the last six months of 2015, according to a Buzzfeed News analysis of data collected by the aircraft-tracking site FlightRadar24."
tracking where you come from and where you go...
http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/
In the late 1980s, we heard rumors that we could read newspapers from ORBIT.
The rumors I heard never said that they could read anything beyond maybe the headlines, and that only on a clear day. You could identify a coke can on its side, or you could read a license plate if they were facing the sky which they aren't, but not actually read a newspaper. Anyone who believed that you could do that is an incredible sucker.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Armed crackers in a stand-off with the FBI because some white privilege rancher want access to BLM land is what always comes to mind when I see "BLM protesters".
Yeah, I can see how you'd rather "see" that than see people looting the businesses in their own neighborhoods, burning down city blocks, chanting about wanting to see dead police officers, and cheering when cops are murdered. It's a lot more fun to "see" things that don't involve so much destruction and death.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Where in that does it say 'permit required' for your rights?
Seriously.. where the fuck does it say that the government can stop you from assembling and petitioning your own government??
That's right.. It does not. Go to North Korea if you don't like it, or, vote for people who will piss off the rest of your fellow citizens less.
Otherwise just accept the fact that sometimes people who are upset will inconvenience you.