A Surveillance Master Dissects a Murder from the Sky [video]
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Reporter Bob Woodward (known for breaking much of the Watergate story that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation) claims that the US military has a new secret technique that's revolutionary. The following is what he said in his interview[1] with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in September 2008:
Woodward: This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate, target, and kill leaders [in Iraq].
Pelley: What is this? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of taking out just the ... leadership?
Woodward: It is the stuff of which military novels are written.
Pelley: Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the tank and the airplane?
Woodward: Yeah.
The bits of info from Woodward, the timeline of the development of military aerial camera systems (such as Angel Fire), the claimed capability to locate people -- it all fits. This is the revolutionary advance in military capability they are talking about.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415...
How many months until this is in the hands of any interested party with a bit of technical knowledge an the ability to read some documentation?
One of my older posts addresses the larger picture of this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033
The sensory data looks like ARGUS, before this around 2008 the Israelis had a similar system called Sharp Anchor which had even greater resolution at 4cm per pixel in full color which was reportedly deployed over Gaza.
Hell, this very video alone indicates homes where a group of vigilantes, witch-hunters or competing drug dealers could go tonight to get revenge.
At least the company behind this seems to be ethical.
"Secret Cameras Record Baltimore’s Every Move from Above (bloomberg.com)": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12347595
"Additionally, they discovered that when the suspect walked away from the shopping center, he’d passed in front of a ground-based security camera. Accessing that footage and reviewing Cooper’s mug shots on file, they found a possible match."
One book I was recently browsing "Crime Analysis Systems: Using Computer Simulations and Geographic Information Systems" published in 2008, and this video, make me think the combination of predictive analytics and their toolset, along with surveillance will lead to large neural nets sifting through traffic, pedestrian and vehicular live and historical footage, trying to forecast a crime or public disturbance, and dispatch prophylactic police personnel.
Minority Report without the time-traveling mentats!
I am sure every police department would like this, if they don't already have it. PSS, Ross McNutt's company sells the tech to domestic and international buyers.
I will not even address the privacy concerns, since they are so ubiquitous and immediate in today's consciousness.
In fact, let me take that a step further. What evidence do i have that this was even a murder? I'll assume in this case it is, but can i independently confirm that? Of course not. Worse still is the logical skip: "well now that i have shown you this, here are some colorful lines demonstrating a ton of other related behavior that you should totally extrapolate nefarious connections from." The scope of narratives that can be taken out of context, or outright invented using these videos is terrifying.
Power indeed.
Step two, they went to these recordings, looked where they found that body, and they tracked all the people who were there when the murder happened.
>an entire narrative is presented without any shred of evidence
Why should it? It's not trying to convince you a murder took place. That's already an established fact. It's trying to show you the technology.
Nothing here would have been able to predict a crime. Someone driving around the block twice before driving across town might just be a driver whose car is making a funny sound when he turns left, so he's investigating it. That means nothing. Unless you've got a bloody corpse laying in the alley he's driving past. Then it means a whole lot.
i am not much of an expert, but for a start they would need the exact time of the murder - without this fact all these little dots that move around the screen don't make a lot of sense.
Assuming he saw it.
Part of the problem with this is that you are looking at a scene with additional knowledge which the people present may or may not also have had, and you're looking at it from a vastly different angle.
If these things makes it to court, expect a lot of challenges on the basis of those kind of things. If it's used merely as a starting point for "real police work" then that may be ok.
But consider e.g. the policy of extrajudicial assassinations of suspected drug dealers for money in the Philippines[1], where a system like this would potentially allow police officers to "justify" their decisions far faster (and there's a lot of people with money in that) by playing fast and easy with what "looks like" a drug deal.
Or consider that the US has a government that considers extrajudicial killings of terror suspects by drone acceptable. How long until systems like the above play into providing "evidence" into those kind of decisions - we already know they don't have a problem with rather substantial collateral damage.
This kind of technology does have a lot of potential for good. But it also has a lot of potential for supporting authoritarianism and for aiding state terror.
(In fact, they're passing over the ground at ~10km per second, so they end up using very fancy tracking optics to prevent motion blur. The best can apparently image lines in a parking lot. And to top off the technological insanity, some built during the Cold War did all this with ANALOG FILM, which was then dropped via a reentry capsule and caught in midair by a support plane while parachuting back to earth.)
With that said, if you're doing a drug deal and don't want to be murdered, why would you do it indoors? Also, to murder someone indoors, you need access to a building, which really tends to limit the number of viable suspects (if it's a private place) or produce a lot of witnesses (if it's a public place.) The murder happened in an alley because nobody is watching the alley. There aren't a lot of indoor spaces that aren't being watched by someone.
Because you also don't want to get arrested, and the presence of tech like this means you have every reason to assume it won't be long before the moment any of the people present gets tied to drug activity, they will start to go through recordings and tag anyone he's been in contact with in circumstances that look like they might be a drug deal.
It's creating a situation where doing it outdoors does not just place you in jeopardy because of a specific deal, but potentially also because of any incidents tied to any deal any other people present have made or will make.
> or produce a lot of witnesses (if it's a public place.)
I find it bizarre that you assume an indoors location will inherently produce more witnesses than doing it outdoors.
Consider a parking garage. I've been to plenty in major cities where finding a location that is free of people for a little while would be easy even in the middle of the day.
Even so, even with witnesses, if the alternative is a few eye witnesses vs. an "all seeing" surveillance system in the sky that can track you for extended periods of time, it's not at all given that it wouldn't be preferably to be prepared to risk a few witnesses. Case in point:
> The murder happened in an alley because nobody is watching the alley.
The murder happened because they thought nobody is watching the alley. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other places suitable as well. So when that changes (the alley is being watched), the calculation as to which space is least risky changes too.
They fly a modified Cessna for hours on end and use a stitched imaging system to form a massive panoramic video, basically.
Highly recommend the read
It's an array of 10 or so cameras shooting at 1fps at high res. Quite a lot of data generated over a day :) For smaller areas tethered drones would be interesting. I guess the main limitation is that most crime is committed at night when visibility is low.
It wouldn't be super hard to DIY this btw - there are good open source stitching and tracking algos, and many cameras that can shoot at high res at 1fps
Of course if this agency has access to the cellphone towers, it could allow them to draw those points, but I don't know if towers are always triangulating the positions of all cellphones in an area at any given time.
Note for example that it is rather likely, if you go from an historic "know good" dataset containing more convictions of poor people of colour, that you would automate racial profiling... Quite possibly mixing cause and effect in the training period. Consider further the implications of a company running prisons (paid per inmate) going into the business of selling city/country-wide surveillance systems to "assist police".
it's almost as if they modeled the real tools after the fictional ones...
The cost of crime to society has been estimated to be on the order of $300 billion/year (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/). But that doesn't include numerous indirect costs. E.g. decreased property values, white flight and the various issues it causes, people staying indoors or making sacrifices due to fear of crime, etc.
One of the biggest things is that bothers me about our society, is children are not allowed to go outside anymore. People blame electronics, but it's almost entirely due to parents that fear their kids being outside of their eyesight. Look at the incredible map on this article, on how much range children have lost over time: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-... And it's almost entirely due to fear of child abductors and crime, although other issues like increased automobile traffic play a part. I find this incredibly sad.
A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and social impact.
I too, find the idea of being watched constantly creepy. So I propose some restrictions. They should require a warrant to get the data from the surveillance machines, and only be allowed to use it for a particular case. It should be entirely air gapped. It should be deleted after a week. And it should ideally be stuff like this surveillance drone, which can't make out individual faces, just movements to see where people have gone.
We are looking at a society that is surrounded by sensors anyway. Surveillance cameras on businesses are becoming nearly universal now they are so cheap, and everyone walks around with a microphone in their pocket. Soon all cars will have insurance mandated dashcams, not to mention self driving cars loaded with sensors. All that stuff seems much creepier than a drone, as it can't make out the faces of individuals and what they are doing or saying.
I wanted to be on your side, I really did, until I came to this paragraph.
From my point of view "crime" is an intrinsic part of our species, doing bad things is one of the things that make us humans. I'm not condoning rapes nor murders, it's just that, if you look at the history of our species, you'd realize that we are where we are (we've sent people to the Moon and discovered planets from galaxies far, far away) also because we did "bad" stuff.
Take the Bible, a book that has had a profound effect on the "Western" civilization. The story of Cain and Abel is one of the most important from the Old Testament. The New Testament is also a "Chronicle of a Crime Foretold", to paraphrase Garcia Marquez.
Or Homer's The Iliad, the book that defined the Greek-Roman antiquity. It's full of murders and rapes and bad things.
Long story short, we wouldn't have had the "enormous economic and social impact" that we have today as a species if, let's say, an omnipotent God/Spaghetti Flying Monster would have just watched us from the very beginning and would have prevented us from doing any crimes.
Someone above mentioned "Law&Order" as some sort of dismissal, but that's exactly the point, in a "know it all surveillance society" the societal aspects that made the producers think: "hey, let's make a show about the good guys catching the bad guys, let's call it 'Law&Order'" would not be present. Fiction is always backed up by facts from the real life.
I should know, i grew up in a wannabe "know it all surveillance society" (on the Eastern side of the wall), where we did not have TV shows like 'Law&Order' because, technically, the "socialist society" we were part of didn't have any bad guys. There were of course criminals, and rapist, and bad people, but they were just a glitch hidden under the rug. It was sort of supposed that in the brighter future awaiting us all those "bad elements" would have been gone for good.
The former socialist government of my country was against the bad guys because in the end we were all supposed "to all be equal", some commenters on HN are against the bad guys because it brings down real estate prices, maybe some other people are against the bad guys because in a book of fiction 2000-years old someone wrote it down that: "You should not steal", the fact remains that no-one, ever, would be able to hide the "bad guys" under the rug, for ever. It's against our very nature as a species.
The problem with your assertion that once crime is reduced significantly children will be allowed to go play on the streets again does not match reality, as evidenced by this randomly googled graph[0].
Crime's been down for a long time, yet fear is way up.
This fear is easily but not correctly explained by direct factor such as crime or terrorism. So any reductions in crime or terrorism will not induce a reduction in fear, it will just shift so to something else.
Why all the fear though, I don't have a good answer to...
[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-c...
Though, to be fair, I'd posit that it should balance out after a while. Once people start noticing that their fear is unwarranted, they'll start becoming more comfortable.
Totalitarianism is absolutely relevant for democracies, because many are only nominally democratic, many employ totalitarian practices and many turn into totalitarianism.
Technology is eventually going to make it impossible to really prevent "Persistent aerial surveillance". What requires an expensive small blimp today might become the size of a ping pong ball (or wide area flock of them) and come out of a 3D printer tomorrow.
So who will be using such tech? Governments and private entities alike - we can try to legislate against either but technology will probably overpower the legislation quickly.
So what is the impact of this sort of technology? Maybe it's not all George Orwell. Your bike was stolen on Third St at 1pm? Roll the video back or forwards to know exactly where the thief is. Someone shot up a nightclub and rushed out in a crowd? automated video analysis caught them.
Yes it sounds scary if it were a monopolized power, but eventually I don't think government will be able to hold monopoly on it.