Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mendenhall | Hacker News Reader

You could do serious damage with this. You could follow CEO's,government officials etc and detail everything they do and who they meet with. Nothing stopping that company from using the images they have stored to compile information on whoever they want in the area. Great technology thats super easy to abuse to devastating effect in a myriad of ways. No one really cares about that though .

View on HN

Watch all the cops from the sky. Sell a stream of GPS coordinates to bad guys. Figure out where all the cops live. Figure out daily routes and make your rival late for a meeting. Learn armored car routes. Figure out which kids walked home from school alone with no parents home. Accumulate lists of people who take suspicious routes so if they're ever questioned as witnesses cops have leverage.

Hell, this very video alone indicates homes where a group of vigilantes, witch-hunters or competing drug dealers could go tonight to get revenge.

Whats really scary, is that though right now this is fairly high tech and needs specialized hardware and software, that requirement won't always be there.

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?

The rapid acceleration of technology is causing problems in many areas. Freedom means trusting each other, and I fear we (as a species) cannot adapt our social structures fast enough. We are falling behind because technology is being introduced to society faster than society can adapt.

One of my older posts addresses the larger picture of this problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8916033

Oddly enough it doesn't. This was developed by DARPA with over the shelf technology the camera uses an array of several 1000s cellphone cameras and and the processing is done on commercial GPUs.

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.

"HawkEye II is intended to see expansive areas wtih resolutions that allow users to detect movements of people and vehicles. It does not provide the ability to detect gender, ethnicity, age, hair color, nor can it be used for facial recognition. This is an inherent limit to Wide Area Motion Imagery. If cameras get better - and they will - the same rseolution limits will remain in place, the change will be in the size of the coverage area."

At least the company behind this seems to be ethical.

http://www.pss-1.com/#!hawkeye-ii-resolution/ccm3

Conversely those better cameras with a narrower coverage area (ie the same one they have now) those better cameras might have the resolution required for detection of "gender, ethnicity, age, hair color ... facial recognition."

If someone has access to cameras on the ground it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to integrate this with a facial recognition system

This is already being done, and has been done (in secret) for a while:

"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."

You could do a lot of that by many other means: Simple cell phone tracking will tell you everywhere people go and everyone they meet. Plenty of apps track geolocation; data on hosted servers and the wire have plenty more data, etc.

Nothing tells a story like high quality video though. Just imagine a story told via cell phone tracking of a CEO and known prostitutes phone traveling to a hotel together vs satellite/drone video feed (at a high quality the US government uses, not the grainy stuff they and this guy are releasing) .

I could choose not to have a phone I couldn't choose to not be on the street.

I once met someone who spent a few weeks in custody for choosing not to have his phone with him. It's not always a choice ;)

What? Was he charged directly because he wasn't reachable on his cell phone?

its probably fair to say that both can be used: cellphones for indoor and outdoor tracking, airborne video for outdoor tracking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com