Surveillance planes spotted in the sky for days after West Baltimore rioting | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance planes spotted in the sky for days after West Baltimore rioting

washingtonpost.com

40 pointsbootload66 comments

As someone who lives in Baltimore, the riots reminded me why I'm less afraid of the police than of my neighbors. Police flying overhead to capture publicly visible events didn't try to throw a chair through the window of the restaurant I was eating at with my family, or vandalize the drug store by my house, or break the door of my favorite fro-yo place.

It's not that I'm not sympathetic to the general idea the ACLU and EFF are pushing here. It was just a reminder of why the public gives the police so much power and benefit of the doubt.

On the other hand rioters won't break into your residence while you're asleep and maim your toddler with a flashbang on the flimsiest of evidence and conjecture.

I think most people don't expect the police to do that to them either. No-knock raids are something that happens to other people. Riots could affect anyone. (Not commenting on the accuracy of this view, just its existence.)

I'm 32, white, male, and I still get nervous whenever I get pulled over. I can do everything right and still end up dead on the ground with the officer walking away from the situation unscathed.

How many times have you been pulled over?

Its actually been about a year, as I drive a bit more conservatively now, but probably around 18 times in my entire life (early 20s, tech worker money single guy expenses, high performance sports cars).

My point is, you should never have to worry that you might be killed during a traffic stop.

I live in the UK. Around a decade driving, have never been pulled over once. Thanks for your reply, it was interesting. Higher than I anticipated.

Another average white guy here. I've had over 100 interactions with the police. More than 60% of the time, I was doing nothing wrong at all. Just gotta live in the wrong neighborhood.

Radiolab did a show about these surveillance aircraft. In the show the host turns from skeptic to believer-- and here's why:

The plane flies in a circle and records activity. Later on a crime is discovered, say a garage break in . The police call the surveillance team and say 'Look at this spot' and the team rewinds the video and see a blue van pull up and break in. Then the play the video forward and find where the blue van went. Then the cops are dispatched to the blue van's spot and an arrest is made.

Personally, I see the value in that system and am ok with it being deployed. Especially to places like West Baltimore.

The FBI saying "Yes, of course we have spy planes" helps.

>"The FBI's aviation program is not secret," spokesman Christopher Allen said in a statement. "Specific aircraft and their capabilities are protected for operational security purposes."

(And then he bullshits and says they aren't equipped for mass surveillance. Just like how the government doesn't keep phone records and the NSA doesn't spy on the internet.)

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ap-fbi-using-low-flying-spy-plan...

Can we not extract aircraft details from FAA flight records, and operational capabilities from FOIA requests regarding what vendors are providing what equipment for these aircraft?

Also, based on the aircraft's flight pattern characteristics (altitude, flight patterns) can we not infer equipment operating parameters?

Some blogger did pretty much that awhile back;

https://medium.com/@MinneapoliSam/fleet-of-government-aircra...

The more powerful part of that episode for me was when they took the technology to Juarez and used it to identify a group of people who murdered a police officer who was on her way to work... They followed the killers to a safe house, where they were met by a different group of people who had committed another murder earlier, and several other groups of people. It's insinuated that they took down the specific cartel responsible for all of the deaths and that the leader had initiated 1,500 murders.

It's hard not to feel sympathetic for a little privacy loss if you can take someone off the street who was responsible for so much death and destruction.

There would have to be strong controls on the recordings so that (a) the police need a warrant to access it, and (b) they can only view the relevant time and place. And I don't mean "a person whose nominal job it is to control access," I mean actual incentives and technological barriers so that unauthorized access becomes difficult to impossible.

Surveillance can certainly be used to solve crimes. But one of the issues is to get right the level of oversight, transparency, and trust in the system to minimize abuse. Because we have a long experience that these systems are abused.

For examples: police have sold information - http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22465173 . Intelligence people have spied on love interests - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT . City workers have used cameras to spy on a naked woman in her house - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/merseyside/460974... .

This extends to companies as well, as when HP chair Dunn 'authorised the surveillance of board members and journalists' - http://www.alphr.com/news/enterprise/93590/hp-chairman-resig... . (I use that as a proxy for a likely scenario; should a government whistleblower send documents to the press about an illegal coverup, then the same surveillance technology used to find criminals can easily be repurposed to find the leaker.)

Consider the potential uses against dissidents, too.

It's not about oversight. They don't need to be spying on citizens whom are neither suspected of a crime nor have a warrant against them. I don't give a fuck it it solves crimes; I'd rather the criminals get away with it if this is the cost. It needs to stop.

Most forensic and evidentiary processes are pseudo-science at best this includes fingerprints which are still mostly matched by humans against smudges and not through some nifty CSI super computers since they well don't give as many positive results under any circumstances as law enforcement would like.

Other stuff like lie detectors which are in quite often use in the US are complete nonsense.

Witnesses are inherently unreliable, rarely they produce even remotely accurate testimonies, and in most cases tell the cops what they want to hear rather than what has actually happened.

Expert witnesses including law enforcement agents constantly give flawed testimonies and are inherently biased based on the nature of the case and the apparent guilt of the perpetrator. Paid expert witnesses are even worse because they have a clear incentive to give testimony that will strengthen the case for the party which paid for their services, both state and federal level prosecutors have their pet experts that will tell the jury just what they want them to hear, same goes for many large criminal law firms.

So far only 2 types of evidence seem to increase conviction rates while drastically decrease wrongful convictions and these are audio/video recordings and DNA.

While I understand the fact that people do not like to be watched, and a smarter man that me once said that those who are willing to give up liberty for security are not worthy of either. In our current reality however increased privacy might actually result in loss of liberty, especially if you are a member of an at-risk group as far as unlawful convictions go.

This debate is decades old, and history shows that complaining about "spying" is not an effective method to keep new technology out of police hands.

If the police use a search light for better visibility a night? Not spying. Use binoculars? Not spying. Fly overhead? Not spying. Look into the windows of a barn which is "accessible only after crossing a series of "ranch-style" fences and situated one-half mile from the public road"? Not spying.

At least, not according to the US Supreme Court. There are of course many who object.

It's not even so much about "keeping technology out of the hands of police", it's about having appropriate safeguards against misuse and accountability for people granted the power to use (and abuse) it.

If we can't even indict police who shoot people in the back to go to trial(1), how can anyone believe cops won't use this to stalk ex girlfriends or anyone else they feel randomly curious about?

(1) http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30339943

(Which is what I started off with, two comments upwards, with the statement 'one of the issues is to get right the level of oversight, transparency, and trust in the system to minimize abuse'.)

Is it too conspiratorial to think that this have likely had zero law enforcement value but rather just a a real world benchmark or acceptance test for surveillance tech that will end up being used in much more high valued arenas?

If you built some kick ass new sensor you'll probably want to test it in an environment that won't put it at much risk, Baltimore rioting aside isn't exactly Pakistan or Nicaragua.

These airplanes are flying every single day circling the same cities every single day. These systems are used to crush dissent and crush any form of protest, that's the problem.

They aren't there to crush any form of protest that's absurd, should they be there probably not but take the orwelianess level down a notch or three.

The FBI planes circle cities for hours and hours, equipped with Stingrays and FLIR cameras. This has no place in a free society, period. The "orwelianness" is pretty dead-on-balls fucking accurate.

How much different is this from metro, traffic, and transportation CCTV systems that we've had for decades?

Intent.

They use thermal cameras and stingrays. This is not technology that the public has access to. If traffic and CCTV cameras had thermal and cell-interception capabilities, people might be a bit more concerned. If I'm in my house, no one should be able to look inside it or intercept the signals from my phone. Do I need to thermally-insulate my house to get some fucking privacy?

Neither Thermographic nor SWIR cmeras can actually see through house walls, any internal heat source will be diffused, and bodies won't be picked up at all this isn't Hollywood.

Most modern CCTV cameras have SWIR mode for night operations.

Cell-interception is more easily achieved on a metro scale through carrier or base station based interception. In any case Stingray is a brand name for an IMSI catcher made by Harris, they sell many other IMSI catchers to local law enforcement agencies.

Miami PD for example bought their hand-held version back in 2006.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1282625-06-11-29-200...

They are quite often used in raids to pin point a specific house or an apartment.

Local police units have had this tech since the late 90's, in many places this was used in counter-drug and counter-organized crime operations, you had patrol cars with IMSI catchers that would drive through a neighborhood catching all cell-id's and matching them to known numbers of drug dealers and gang members.

So no this isn't really new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare

  During the Global War on Terror, using unmanned aerial 
  vehicles for persistent surveillance dramatically changed 
  the way the U.S. military pursued fleeting targets. 
  However, their sensors provided very narrow fields of 
  view, referred to by warfighters as looking at the 
  battlefield through a "soda straw," allowing insurgents 
  to disappear from view and not giving information on what 
  was happening in surrounding areas. So in 2009, the U.S. 
  Air Force began development of a wide-area surveillance 
  system to enable the MQ-9 Reaper long-endurance UAV to   
  survey an entire small city from 25,000 ft (7,600 m). 
  Requiring fewer systems to recon a large area frees up  
  more available assets to be able to perform other 
  missions and enables operations to be more limited where 
  a light "footprint" is desired.

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-compton-surveillance-2014...

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriffs...

  Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the 
  Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and 
  did the first reporting on this important story. The 
  technology he's trying to sell to police departments all 
  over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like 
  Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain 
  areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that 
  they can look back and see what happened anywhere they 
  weren't watching in real time.


  If it's adopted, Americans can be policed like Iraqis and 
  Afghanis under occupation–and at bargain prices:

    McNutt, who holds a doctorate in rapid product 
  development, helped build wide-area surveillance to hunt 
  down bombing suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan. He decided 
  that clusters of high-powered surveillance cameras  
  attached to the belly of small civilian aircraft could be 
  a game-changer in U.S. law enforcement.


      “Our whole system costs less than the price of a 
  single police helicopter and costs less for an hour to 
  operate than a police helicopter,” McNutt said. “But at 
  the same time, it watches 10,000 times the area that a 
  police helicopter could watch.”

Something similar has been demoed publicly before by DARPA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGxNyaXfJsA

I still don't see an argument here, just quotes from an editorial, can US intelligence agencies track everyone in the continental US sure, they can also enforce traffic using AGM-114's doesn't mean they do.

What is the big deal. Anything you can see from a Drone isn't really private anyway. And what you do as part of a violent mob real really isn't private.

I think the Taliban has proved that any sort of dystopian fears are wildly over blown.

Plus we already have police helicopters.

Do you know what equipment was on the plane? Police are already starting to use X-ray scanners without warrants...

And police choppers are loud and annoying, while drones are presumably quiet.

On the other hand, what if we scaled if up? It would be very useful for the police to have a constant fleet of drones in the sky ready to swing their cameras around to focus on anything. Report of a mugging at fifth and D? Get visual on it in seconds. Which as a potential mugging victim I'm all for, but still, the idea of constant airborne surveillance gives me the heebie-jeebies.

That said, this, along with many other potentially useful crime- fighting tools, is about to become technologically possible, and we're going to need rules about every new thing that comes along. Right now we have no useful framework for making rules, apart from seeing what people shout loudest about. Personal heebie-jeebies aren't a good guide to sensible decisionmaking.

Also, the people making the decisions/laws (politicians) are usually the least likely to be directly affected by any of the downsides of the technology.

E.g.: How many Congressmen / Congresswomen have been directly affected by the idiocy of the No Fly List?

>Which as a potential mugging victim I'm all for, but still, the idea of constant airborne surveillance gives me the heebie-jeebies.

There are 220 million smartphones in America. How many of them are set up to send location data? 80-90%? Shit, Android reads through my texts/email and gives me directions to where I'm going to meet someone for dinner before I even ask for them.

Privacy is dead.

Is the distinction between a private entity collecting semi-consented to location data, and the government/law enforcement collecting such data lost on you?

I say "semi-" because I'd wager that less than 5% of people read and understand the implications of the TOS they click through.

Your privacy might be dead, but don't think that everyone else's is as well.

No, no. The FBI planes have "Stringray" devices on board and pick up people's private calls and their IMSI IDs. They also have FLIR/high-res cameras. This shit is not "public" when they pretend to be a cell-tower to MiTM your phone.

To be fair, stingrays now require warrants for anything other than immediate life/death situations and national security, and nothing is really private once they have a warrant.

"require"--cute. Even if "required" in all states including federally, who oversees this to ensure that said requirements are being followed? What keeps them from using it anyway?

Also, the very nature of these devices ensure that they capture data that does not belong to the suspect under warrant. Just because a suspect lives in an area near me, does not give them any right whatsoever to collect my data.

Someone like the CIA might ignore court rulings the FBI, other federal/state/local police don't ignore them as a matter of policy[1]. They'd never be able to introduce evidence from that in a court case, which is what their goal is.

[1] - of course, individual bad actors do break the rules. But as far as that goes, buying and servicing a drone is something that is hard to off the books.

>They'd never be able to introduce evidence from that in a court case, which is what their goal is.

This is often not true. Many cases have shown evidence of being put together through parallel construction. It's easy to find damning evidence if you know exactly where to look, the phone conversation that leads them to the evidence is not required.

I recommend listening to the 'Eye in the Sky' episode of of Radiolab: http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

It features an interview with Ross McNutt, also interviewed in the Washington Post story. McNutt describes aerial surveillance technology he developed for the US military operations in Iraq & Afghanistan, in use for over 10 years. The primary reason for not introducing it here is the US is opposition from privacy groups, despite having been used successfully abroad to counter terrorism and organized crime.

> The primary reason for not introducing it here is the US is opposition from privacy groups, despite having been used successfully abroad to counter terrorism and organized crime.

No offence, but do you really think that giving the ability to to mass scans like this to police officers won't be abused? What's our track record on actually punishing police officers that can have provably (and demonstrably) abused their powers?

I'd almost trust the military more with that technology than local police departments and/or the FBI.

Edit: Also, what are the chances that this technology will spend a lot of time in the field at local police departments before there are any meaningful rules/regulations on how they can use it? During that period no one will get punished for "abuses" because without rules and regulations any use is valid.

No offense taken; I too do not trust US law enforcement to use this technology in a manner that respects the privacy and rights of law-abiding citizens.

Nonetheless, it is a fact that this technology has been used to trace the location of people responsible for the placement of roadside bombs in warzones abroad, and has been used to locate the headquarters of an organized crime group in Juarez, Mexico, a place that averaged 8.5 killings per day in 2010.

I highly recommend listening to the Radiolab story, it raises some interesting points.

law-abiding citizens

So it's OK in your book to trample the rights of criminals?

Because I bet we could find a crime you've unintentionally committed in the last week or so...

"successfully abroad to counter terrorism"

What the metric for success? Because the ones I've heard about don't make any sense.

TBH this isn't surprising or creepy. This could be a great chance to try out counting more dynamic crowds, for instance, so not all applications are inherently creepy.

Who has oversight for this kind of thing? It's crazy we can't get a straight answer about this kind of thing.

Isn't not knowing who has oversight for this kind of thing creepy?

I think it has the potential to be creepy. I don't necessarily see aerial observation, something over a century old, no worse than street cameras or cops: a necessary evil, to some people.

Linked article is from May. Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9504825

While most people appear to think that is not a problem, I think that it is... even more so because of some of the sensors/imagery that they use can see much more then what the naked eye can see (unless they obtain a warrant for searching all homes in the area that is being scanned).

This is 100% illegal unless a judge signed a warrant for each individual the plane observed. Is there any way of identifying the airplane and lodging a criminal complaint against the ones who were flying it?

A few weeks ago at around midnight I could hear a helicopter hovering over a nearby neighborhood for a long time (10-15 minutes) apparently not moving very much. (The sound didn't change direction much.)

It was loud and obnoxious, but also troubling. Why were they up there? We have lots of helicopter fly-bys around here, but I had never noticed a long-term hover before.

Around here, the sheriff's dept. have a website that list current active calls... if you have something similar in your area, it might give you some clue to what is going on. But ours don't get updated in real time and they don't list all calls. A police scanner might give more accurate information but is often hard to understand with all the codes that they use and the audio quality can be really bad.

SWIR/MWIR footage was captured for two subsequent experiments:

* Crowd detection: algorithmic detection of clusters containing greater than five person objects * Automatic backtrace: designate a cluster and see the paths its members took to arrive at the location (including linking people to vehicles travelled in to the scene)

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