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I remember an Asimov short story in which scientists developed a machine that could see backward in time.

If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.

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There was an article some years ago (2 or 3?), that described a drone (or drones?) that flew 24/7 over Mexico city taking high resolution video of the entire city at all times.

Whenever there was a crime, the police could zoom into that location at the time of the crime and then run backwards to see where the vehicles came from. They then knocked on that door.

I'm disappointed that I can't seem to find it using Google anymore, maybe it was from a movie or TV show?! That would be weird though, because it seems technically quite reasonable to achieve and hard to believe governments wouldn't jump on it.

I've read about that happening in Cleveland, using tech developed to find insurgents leaving IEDs in Afghanistan. Yeah, citation needed...

So glad someone else saw this, I'm not finding anything on it and I'm starting to question my own memory, as I'm quite sure I saw the original article about the Mexico program on this site.

FWIW, I also recall the tech being originally used to find people who planted IEDs in Afghanistan.

I'm kind of shocked about how all the articles I am finding seem to emphasize real-time police chases.

Now I'm feeling super suspicious.

Well, a bit more googling ( https://www.google.com/search?q=police+drone+afghanistan+rew... ) got me just 2 relevant hits.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriff...

https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... (search for "rewind")

I'd rather think it's because Google sucks now, and those keywords just bring up too many similar articles, but my metaphorical tinfoil hat is my hands.

Nice job!

Your tips got me to this one, where it more clearly spells out the "rewind" capability. I think the problem was that the tech was attached to a low-flying, piloted plane, not drones.

https://www.csoonline.com/article/2226742/record-and-rewind-...

Whew! It feels better to set my tinfoil hat down on the table next to me...

There was a website shown on HN a few years ago that used AI and plane transponder data to find circling planes which were presumably doing this kind of surveillance over American cities. It might have used further parameters to narrow it down, e.g. “over a city, circling for >3 hours” to rule out planes waiting to land. I thought it was named something simple like “plane-circles.com” but I’m not having any luck finding it again.

Edit: found it. Should have limited the search to HN from the start. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188661

I first heard about this on Radiolab. Maybe you heard it there too?

>> In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see - literally see - who planted it.

https://radiolab.org/episodes/eye-sky

I think you found it. Now I recall that episode exactly.

Apparently, my mind created some very visual memories from the narrative.

Thanks!

There have been a few products that record everything you see on the web, so you don't have this problem. Obviously analogous to recording everything you hear.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/all-about-seruku-search-...

The term for this is 'WAMI' - Wide Area Motion Imagery[1]. Here's a Bloomberg article about an instance of it in Baltimore[2] (although this wasn't where I learned about it first, like you I can't find my original source either)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery

2: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...

Not sure about the Mexico City drone, but a similar thing was developed by the US military: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

I know some folks who deployed during OEF/OIF and used these types of systems. Many a night raids were conducted simply by watching where attackers originated from.

I remember the same article, although I can't find it now.

These two seem to reference the same demo, although neither are the article I remember: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/watch-thi...

There's this reference to it: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20140206...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur... has a lot more details

https://www.pss-1.com/media-contacts

Different author, but sounds somewhat similar to 'The Light of Other Days' by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

Although iirc correctly it starts with being able to see other locations in space but at the same time, and the historical viewing is a second development.

Fantastic book, even if it's not the same one you were thinking of.

Pretty sure both those authors wrote similar concepts, with the same creepy conclusions of taking the technology to a limit.

It came up in an acoustics class once. I said that sound never really dies. It just bounces around until it becomes thermal energy, thus warming the room a little as a prelude to joking about professors talking hot air.

A student asked whether, one could recover sound from reverberations that had fallen below RT60? Could you listen back in time to conversations that had happened hours ago?

Obviously entropy can't be put back in the box with the technology we have now, but it makes you wonder.

Two things have since made me revise the question. One is recovery of sound from video images. The other was an archaeological recovery of sounds from a ceramic vase spun on potters wheel many centuries ago. Sorry but the references for both escape me atm.

The pottery record thing was tested on mythbusters and hailed from an episode of csi.

Fake? Got a link so I can dig in a bit. Thanks.

EDIT: found this thread

https://groups.google.com/g/sci.archaeology.moderated/c/5Jec...

Damnit, seemed so plausible.

Clark also used it as a throwaway line in Childhood's End. IIRC, humans were given a device that would allow them to see the past--most religions didn't survive seeing the true origins of their faith.

It was The Dead Past [1]

The idea of it was that it was known that the technology existed, but the government went to great lengths to imply that it could only see into the far distant past. The reality was it could only see 20 years back or so, and the government was covering it up because of the 1000 milllisecond issue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

Yes, that was it! Nice find :)

I wonder if this was an inspiration to the "Devs" miniseries. Won't say more about it for fear of ruining it. Amazing show.

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