Hacker News Reader

For the price of a police helicopter police departments can continously monitor a 10 mile wide area from the sky. That is a lot better than waiting for cars to recognize stuff, subpoena all of them then work on the very hard problem of pieceing it all together.

View on HN

The existence of this system is rather odd then:

https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA

Not that the level of surveillance that's becoming possible (and even expected) isn't deeply repugnant, I'm just not convinced it's quite as cheap as you make it out to be.

I think you are vastly underestimating the cost and complexity of tracking everything/everywhere. It's not just a matter of mounting a couple of go-pros on a chopper and putting it in the air. Heck, even if that were all it took, that's very expensive.

Actually, you can look find cases of this already. Complete neighborhood-wide monitoring of every car down to the license plate, and every individual's basic outline are captured by surveillance planes.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/mysterious-planes-over...

Well yeah, that's why you use much smaller, cheaper, and quieter drones instead of helicopters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com