I want the looters and arsonists to be caught, and if aerial photos can identify them, good.
The message of the protesters is lost, or at least greatly obscured, by the actions of the destructive few. The protests are about improving the civility of society. Arson and looting works against that.
Also, if military surveillance is going to be used, the footage should apply to identification of any and all criminal activity, including that of police officers acting in violation of their role to serve and protect (making the potentially incorrect assumption that they're meant to be serving and protecting a civil society).
How much good grace would be earned if the military surveillance was used to prosecute police brutality and misuse of authority in addition to arson and looting?
Nothing in the article says that they don't monitor police activity. I wonder what would be the police reaction if this were happening and made public.
Probably not much. A vast, vast majority of cops are just normal people doing a difficult and dangerous job. A vanishingly small number are power hungry psychopaths.
We really only see the bad stuff in the news, while the insane amount of great things they do go generally unnoticed, with a few exceptions every now and again.
I hope so: this article assumes that for normal citizens, monitoring seems to be a problem, so it's only natural to expect the police forces to get upset for the same reasons. That being said, it's possible that they're already used to be monitored constantly.
Your stance seems to be a common one when new laws and technology are proposed for the stated purpose of fighting crime, as if new thing is analogous to a silver bullet; without it they're essentially powerless, and arguing against is cast as arguing on the side of criminality.
In the specific example of facial recognition, what amused me since the pandemic started gaining pace, is that face masks render facial recognition far less useful than in the few days / weeks prior. So, whilst it may appear that Microsoft and Amazon are 'listening the people's privacy concerns', it might just be that there's so little to gain from it right now, due to the prevalence and increasing social acceptability of face masks, that the social credit they get for abandoning or delaying it is worth more than the potential contracts and social shaming they'd get for continuing to pursue it.
Arsonists and looters have been caught and prosecuted without the use of facial recognition.
On "beneficial": the panopticon would be beneficial in both cases. In a vacuum.
I mean... I think there's a reasonable argument to be made about what surveillance tools are appropriate and how they should be used during civil unrest.
But don't fool yourself. This isn't about catching petty criminals.