U.S. Watched George Floyd Protests in 15 Cities Using Aerial Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Watched George Floyd Protests in 15 Cities Using Aerial Surveillance

nytimes.com

74 pointsjbegley59 comments

Also relevant, Air Force is investigating the use of military planes during protests.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/us/politics/investigation...

If the words "aerial surveillance" was replaced with the word "helicopter", then this article could have been posted verbatim 40 years ago, and been just as inconsequential.

They didn’t have stingrays 40 years ago.

40 years ago, stingrays weren't necessary to monitor cellular calls.

Yes, but my point is that 40 years ago the intelligence capabilities of an aerial vehicle were orders of magnitude less useful.

A jet ranger carrying a passenger with binoculars is vastly different than that same jet ranger with modern optics and RF packages. The only real commonality between the two is that they are both deployed on aerial platforms.

Do those drones go through the same FAA certifications as human manned planes? If not, they shouldn’t be allowed to fly over US civilian populations.

Yes

https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...

Further drone operators are required to stay in contact with ATC while a flight plan is in effect. VFR rules apply while the drone is in eyesight of the operator.

Assume the government can override these requirements with a flick of a pen.

The real question is how many of ICE drone platforms were armed?

Seriously? As in making an airstrike on illegals type of armed?

Anything without a paywall?

For the NYT, disabling JavaScript with eg the NoScript extension is sufficient to read the article without the paywall.

Sadly it appears that they fixed the .com. thing

I don't get why this comment is being downvoted. This definitely contributes to the discussion. If the entire or a majority of the front page is paywalled articles than those of us who can't afford, don't want to support a specific publication, etc. can't meaningfully contribute to the discussion.

I think this is a BAD thing for the health of the comment section. An even worse outcome is people commenting based on the headline and maybe a blurb only. How is that supposed to promote a good community?

If you want paywalled articles being the bulk of the posts on hacker news that garner discussions then we might as well just go ahead and paywall this site.. because it's slowly becoming a paywalled tech discussion site.. just with more steps.

there are simple ways of circumventing paywalls for most of the commonly linked sites. NYT for example can be bypassed just by using reader mode in Firefox. for the others, this extension is a good start: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...

it is mildly annoying to see the same complaint over and over when the solution involves only a minimal amount of research.

This is a short term solution to a long term problem. The point is not workarounds or bypasses.

So would I be wrong to post a link to a full movie when link requests you pay for it?

Piracy is piracy

Except in this case you can link to another news site for the same story.

Piracy is a result of a bad business model.

Piracy is the result of you wanting something and not wanting to pay anything towards its creation and the upkeep of the creators. Piracy is the collective result of personal greed. Don't try to hide it, and don't try to tart it up in some BS about bad business models.

That's not even remotely true across the board.

I won't bother digging into all of the details of bad publishing business models in academia, but that is a direct counterpoint to the blanket statement you're trying to make.

With staying on topic re: The costs to the end consumers. It's not personal greed to not want to pay to access the content when the cost of the content doesn't reflect the cost to produce it or even a "fair premium" on top of what it costs to produce it.

You're also discounting the business models themselves and how they work. Let's say I care to read this one specific article from NYT. Why do I have to pay to access all of their content? If they want more money they'd allow me to do a microtransaction to purchase this article. And no, not 20-30% of what a month long subscription costs.

It is in fact a bad business model. In either case, I don't pirate these articles and I'm even arguing against using workarounds to view them without paying. So don't try to paint me as some comically evil person who just "doesn't want to pay" because my argument is inconvenient to your world view.

> I don't get why this comment is being downvoted.

It probably tells that you also hit the paywall. Those who downvoted probably didn't, perhaps because their setup doesn't trigger it by default, or because they searched by themselves how to avoid it.

I personally didn't see any paywall when accessing the site directly (ie, without a VPN).

If you’re U.S. based you may have free access to the NYT and other paywall ed news sources through your library. Usually they call it e-media and you can access news sources and magazines from across the nation and around the world. Hopefully your city library has e-resources you can take advantage of and participate more fully in the conversation.

https://beta.trimread.com/articles/21954

For browser extension, see: https://github.com/iamadamdev

TrimRead seems like an awesome idea! There are so many times I couldn't read an article sent to me/participate in a discussion because of a paywall.

and?

The federal government had no need to surveil its citizens in addition to the thousands of police officers and helicopters and drones at a city and state level.

It also shows such a signal of prioritization: Why isn't the federal government protecting its citizens from bad police officers? Why did it take three weeks of peaceful demonstrations (and some violence) to get any attention to this?

Are we supposed to be upset? It's easy to play down what's been happening these past few weeks from a suburb or small city, but we should hope that the extreme criminal acts that have destroyed whole neighborhoods recently at least have some chance of being solved.

Much as the sympathizers would like to deflect that insurance is somehow going to cover all of this (it isn't), anyone who complains about “food deserts” but cheers on riots in the hood is part of the problem whether they admit it or not.

It is illegal to use military equipment like drones on US soil.

Depends on what you mean. If they fired missiles at civilians you'd have a point, but merely flying a drone in the U.S. is routine, civilians do it. Some cities and states have restrictions on the routine use of drones by police, but using aerial surveillance is not generally illegal in the U.S. far as I'm aware (nor do I think it should be).

With that logic would it not also be illegal for military jets and helicopters to fly on "US soil"

Nobody in power cared about George Floyd's death until the violent protests. As Noam Chomksy once said - See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

> Nobody in power cared about George Floyd's deaths until the violent protest

That is untrue. Well before the executions, arsons, and burglaries, there was essentially no ambiguity in the public perception of the case. Most people who watched the video believed they witnessed a murder, and that charge was already planned for Chauvin, well before the public was aware of riots.

And of course, even if it did work, it would still be wrong, and the people executing people and shooting senior citizens to death to steal televisions should be prosecuted.

Executions? Wtf are you talking about?

Several people have been executed, including a Federal Protective Services officer.

Anderson was killed a a 2A boogaloo nut, not a BLM protester: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_boogaloo_killings

Nobody is less dead when killed by a person of a different ideology from the nominal ideology of a gathering.

When you push out the police, it's no wonder that people who would like to get away with heinous crimes show up.

I really wish Trump would've sent the FBI into Minneapolis to investigate before the violent protests started.

Who said the FBI wasn't watching?

It was a trick, because Trump DID send the FBI in on the 2nd day, before the violent protests started. So people in power did pay attention and did care before the violence started.

I'm willing to entertain this possibility, but how can you be so certain that they weren't persuaded by the persistence of the nonviolent elements? baltimore's protests have been remarkably peaceful, and the city leadership has already made some (albeit minor) concessions.

Another analysis would be they're seeing the violence in other cities and want to get out ahead of it.

The looters and rioters don't care about his death either - they just want to exploit the tragedy to steal and cause harm to their own communities.

> extreme criminal acts that have destroyed whole neighborhoods recently

Where do "facts" like this come from? I mean, a police station was burned. A bunch of windows have been broken in a bunch of places. But there's literally nothing to support anything like a statement like that.

Seriously: who told you "neighborhoods" had been "destroyed". Which neighborhoods? How many residents were displaced or whatever? Did you think to maybe question your sources when they arrived with no data at all? Didn't the fact that Fox (who normally are pretty good about journalistic micro-rigor, believe it or not) got caught faking image evidence about the unrest maybe cue you that you might be being misled?

But you're still going with that rhetoric? Why? Where are you getting your facts?

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