Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance
wired.com
wired.com
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
I’m sure most people have no problems with drones being used for hot pursuit, appending those charged with murder, etc; but this is highly advanced technology that deserves more scruinty and accountability.
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Or this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgia-deputy-charged-with...
Or this: https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwauke...
Or this: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/10/pasadena...
Of course, the example chosen for the article didn’t involve anybody abusing their authority. It involved police doing what I’d expect them to do. But I’ll acknowledge that if all of the relevant details were different, then I’d also be concerned.
Relevant detail: Cops have done this with every new tech they're given.
Yeah, when we try that, they… commit more crimes.
Riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrolmen%27s_Benevolent_Assoc...
Doxxing the mayor's kid: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/twitter-suspends-account...
Or even bombing the mayor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_San_Francisco_P...
> The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands. The Supervisors unanimously refused. Mayor Alioto immediately then declared a state of emergency, assumed legislative powers, and granted the strikers' demands.
The policing arm of the executive branch can be difficult to manage, the point is once it leaves the purview of the state, it is impossible to manage.
Yes, I agree.
I just think we're in that "much worse" scenario now, with police unions, qualified immunity, pardons for brutality, and police punishing attempts to rein them in.
American cops are out of control, and emboldened by their success.
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
It’s also true that they have those powers because we’ve decided the alternative is worse. The example used in the article was a case where police did not obviously abuse their authority. If you want to get me worked up about police overreach, you’ll need a different example.
> I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move
How did the drone control anybody’s move in the example? It seems that the drone wasn’t even noticed.
I don't ever remembering getting the option to vote on whether my police department could use drones and surveillance tech or not. We can't possibly conclude that society has decided the alternative is worse – society never got a choice, the police departments are just spending their budgets on cool military shit and then going on to abuse it like they always do.
When I drive on the freeway, any time a police car gets behind me and turns on its lights, I have to stop. If I don't stop, I can ultimately be charged with evading arrest, or fleeing police, or some similar offense. I can be fined and even put in jail, even if a judge decides that the officer didn't actually have a valid reason to stop me.
If a police officer approaches me (when I'm not in a car) and tells me that I'm under arrest, I don't have the legal permission to leave. Even if I know I didn't break any laws. Even if I happen to know why the officer wants to arrest me and I know that it's not a valid reason for an arrest.
Why? Why does the law require me to obey without question, especially when honest mistakes that I might make are treated very differently from honest mistakes the trained officer might make? Fundamentally, because we have decided that the alternative is worse.
Do officers abuse their authority? Of course they do. But we've decided that toothless police departments aren't worth anything (and, in fact, lead to more vigilantism and crime). And we've decided that "self help" solutions (e.g., giving people the right to violently resist arrest if the officer is in the wrong, while punishing people who resist valid arrests) are worse.
San Francisco used to not investigate or prosecute any of those crimes. Laptop stolen out of a car? Nothing to do. Now they catch video of it happening, follow the license plate, arrest the perpetrators. Catalytic converter stolen? We don’t investigate that.
Yes, police have shitty track records of abusing authority and technology. Does that mean we throw out all authority and technology? If you do we get the chaotic lawlessness San Francisco experienced for years.
So what’s the middle way? 1) Use the tech to fight crime. (Check! They’re doing it) 2) prevent abuses of that technology and authority (in progress, let’s see how it goes)
When criminals are locked up, they will get released and many of them don't have anything else to do other than returning to do crimes, with gained experience from the previous failures.
But it's possible to reduce crime by preventing it. Do not let dangerous districts form, build communities, reduce access to weapons and so on.
- Massive money sink that shows no results: See SF during covid and a bit after - Dystopian policies that tank crime but flagrantly violate peoples rights: see stop and frisk, El Salvador, etc
Some people are going to be criminals no matter how much money you give them. I would argue that especially in functioning countries, the returns on carrot approaches to crime reduction are magnitudes weaker than stick ones.
See also: racial profiling and Driving While Black.
Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.
suspicious; odds of it just being a minority? 1:100.
I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
Once the cat is out of the bag you cannot put it back. Similar to how LLMs have massive training sets on copyright material.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
What right does the government have to give my data to randos? The public that's captured is not the same as the public that accesses the data. Just imagine the creepy implications.
Imagine what stalkers could do if they could follow a woman's every movement. Imagine robbers staking out houses from the comfort of their couch.
The government has an obligation to protect the data it has on its citizens, not to just give out willy-nilly. By your logic, public hospitals should share your medical files publicly.
The solution would be for less data to be collected in the first place, not to make the data leak as dystopian as possible.
-Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
-Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
-I agree that it would be a better world if there were no drone surveillance, however, in a world where there is drone surveillance--i.e., the world in which we exist--I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I've gone through great lengths to ensure it can't, I'd rather not have the government undo all that effort.
> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it for you and send you a nice notification.
> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
I strenuously object. But that's not this conversation. It's way upstream, as the SCOTUS has already decided that there is no public expectation of privacy.
>> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it >physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber >can already stake out a house. > >Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared >to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it >for you and send you a nice notification.
A rando can send a drone or a fleet of drones to do the same surveillance that you are worried about here. Perhaps you are just really anti-drone?
>> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided >panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen. > >I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be >changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
There is no such thing as an infinite-sided panopticon. Definitionally, a panopticon is one-sided.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
[2] Doesn’t even cost money, it saves money.
Police should be part of the community they are policing, not some invading force brought in and hovering over it. When the police live in the same place they are policing and know that community as neighbors, they'll treat it like home and not like some battlefield that they were shipped to, to fight enemies.
They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.
It was really fascinating… In 2016.
At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.
Instead of planes, they are using drones…
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky
2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...
But since you brought it up, SFPD should also have a policy on when they share drone footage, and I'm going to assume they violated that. In this case I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that it was accidental and they are learning from it. And I'd be a lot more concerned anyway if it were ubiquitous surveillance of ordinary citizens, not just incidental captures during scoped, presumed legitimate operations.
I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
>If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent
I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
And what is a petty crime these days?
Within the last year in Woolston Lyttelton and Brighton: I've been assualted unprovoked, I've had the outer unit of my split heatpump stolen (for Al, $$$ to fix), I've had outdoor plumbing damaged (for Cu, $$ to fix), I've had the rim stolen[1] off the back of my parked car, last week my friend had tools stolen that they can't afford to replace.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the above petty crimes are unacceptable to me or my friends.
Nothing has been reported because that just costs time and doesn't resolve the problems.
In small groups of people society is surveillance (yes, often detrimentally). I've lived in small towns and the surveillance is extreme. Society has got worse at encouraging/enforcing good society.
I loath surveillance capitalism, but systemically I'm unsure what the answer is.
I finally gave in and installed a Eufy brand camera (my security friend used that brand and installed it, although I can't recommend the UI). I don't think that it will even help. Ironically the security friend was broken into recently and had their security camera stolen.
None of the above was motivated by hunger or good reasons: it was real scumbags for the situations I know the perp, and likely drug users for the metal thefts (or perhaps kids - two brass taps are not worth it).
[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360962317/its-bit-epidemic-m...
In my very limited experience, individual officers seem well intentioned. They are extremely well trained in the privacy rights of crooks: I'm guessing crooks use that to their advantage. Tht outcome feels like gaslighting if you're a victim trying to understand what is going on.
I assume it is possible to get involved in politics to make some systemic change. But that costs too much (selling my soul to become a politician, not just time and money).
I'm an engineer type that at least sees solutions to systemic flaws. I have worked on enough broken software in enough broken businesses to know my limitations to effect change.
How you could you possibly quantify this? It's so vague to mean anything, and worse, this sort of rhetoric is the moral licensing that gets poorly thought out policies passed through congress.
>I loath surveillance capitalism, but systemically I'm unsure what the answer is.
The answer should never be to make privacy impossible, because the government will take advantage of that.
+/-fortunately voters do matter.
I can't vote for much in the US given that I'm in New Zealand.
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
Yes, i understand what you're saying hence why i mentioned culture. American justice (and cultural cues that inform the policies) seems to be more about revenge than rehabilitation.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
But these drones are used to chase active criminals. Unless you committed a crime and ran back to your apartment, I think you’d be fine
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?
We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.
As far as I can tell this program is addressing a real crime problem in SF, it is getting real criminals off the streets and helping police do their jobs.
If some policeman abuses his authority and misuses the tech we should 100% prosecute them for that crime. There is as yet no report of a police officer misusing that tech.
There are however thousands of examples of police using that tech to arrest real criminals, criminals who commit property crime and violent crime. Those people are off the streets.
I am cautiously optimistic about this program and so far fully support it. We should pay some pen testers to attempt to misuse the system and see if the internal controls are sufficient to catch them.
But let's also come back to the individuals misusing drones argument - something that's a lot more immediate and perceptible. Whenever there's arguments about expanding police powers, proponents always hand-wave these concerns by suggesting that some systematic or technological changes be made. But neither the police nor the government above them have an incentive to do these things beyond the shallowed need for good PR. Police would like the least restrictions and oversight on their actions to 'increase efficiency', governments would like the same to squash 100% of crime. There's no mechanism that moves the ratchet back. You know these measures will not be implemented. The only method to prevent this that seems powerful enough seems to be denying them the power altogether.
Most importantly, it frustrates me that in these arguments, it's always presented as a two-choice space. Either you get the status quo, or the incredibly dangerous new mass surveillance tech. Crime waves have existed in the past. How did cops manage to deal with them without a thousand eyes quietly recording everyone doing everything? In many places, crime has been going down well before any mass surveillance doodads could even have existed. Don't you think there's other actions that can be taken to improve things outside of just allowing them whatever they want?
This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises."
First, the police have a weird habit of determining that black people drive the most suspicious cars. Does this racial profiling extend to their drone use as well? It's clear from the article that the police are using the drones in more situations than just the active investigations that they claim to use them in. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black)
Second, if you're being followed by a police car, you know the police car is there. If you're being followed by a drone, you have no idea the drone is there. From the article, the SFPD's drone policy states that operators must only record video once the drone has arrived at the scene, and they must take care not to record individuals unrelated to the active investigation. However, every video had recorded the full takeoff, flight, loitering, return flight and landing – capturing all of the people in SF going about their daily lives. One of the videos showed the drone hovering outside the windows of an apartment building while police schlepped around inside; if I lived there, would I have to worry about a drone appearing outside my window and recording me jerking it in the privacy of my own home? Would I even know it's a police drone, and would I be able to guarantee that the footage was deleted?
Third, I can pull over and ask the cop why they're following me, or (more likely) just let them pass. A drone is just going to loiter there, waiting for me to commit whatever crime they think I'm committing.
Finally, I hate to invoke the slippery slope argument here, but IMO it's warranted. It's easy to deploy drones wherever you want throughout the city; it's not easy to tail every vehicle waiting for them to commit a crime, just because you find them suspicious. If police find drones to be super effective at tailing all of the people they want to tail, why not buy more drones and just have them hover throughout the city perpetually so there isn't a square inch that goes unwatched?
What about we keep the drones to reduce crime and just selectively never investigate black suspects?
>Second, if you're being followed by a police car, you know the police car is there. If you're being followed by a drone, you have no idea the drone is there.
There are such things as plain-clothed police officers. Not that police officers have to announce their presence to you when they are driving on a public road anyways.
> Third, I can pull over and ask the cop why they're following me, or (more likely) just let them pass. A drone is just going to loiter there, waiting for me to commit whatever crime they think I'm committing.
If they ask YOU what crime YOU'RE committing you don't have to answer. Why would they have to answer you or even admit to following you?
You say slippery slope when what I think you really mean is that it shifts the overton window of what is and isn't acceptable. That is a valid concern, but unless the police are allowed to fly drones in places where gen pop aren't allowed to, they aren't getting any special privileges from their position so I thin the point is moot. Slippery slope imo only starts when the police get NEW privileges.
Why should the police be accountable, indeed? That's honestly my whole point, my whole issue with police having drones. They're not accountable, and when they get caught, they lie or ignore. They have power over you and I, they're in a special position, and for that reason we should both be fighting them and holding them accountable wherever and whenever they step over the line (which, I'm sure you're aware, is constantly). Given the option and an inch, the police would establish a surveillance panopticon, all in the name of "safety."
> That is a valid concern, but unless the police are allowed to fly drones in places where gen pop aren't allowed to, they aren't getting any special privileges from their position so I thin the point is moot.
The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get. They get training to use these drones. They get the tacit permission of our governments to use these drones in their pursuit of us, to record video of us going about our daily lives, to survey us listening to music on our rooftops, or driving with our friends, or living in our apartments.
Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail. Meanwhile, the police themselves can fly a drone outside your window, or use drones to stalk you if you're a woman, and people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
Mind you that scenario is explicitly forbidden by law, the drones are only supposed to record at the scene but the police are illegally recording for the entire flight.
Should the police be allowed to break the law when they feel like it? Or should they be held to the same (or higher) standard as the general population because of the extra authority we give them
I disagree. Those we empower to take life must be held to the highest possible standard. After all, there is no returning from that path once it's taken.
The police are accountable, this is one of the big reasons they wear bodycams—so that there is a video record of if they were abusing their power. If they don't have the bodycam on, this would look very bad in front of a jury. If they're actually stalking you that's an abuse of power and you can sue the city/state.
The key difference is that they aren't accountable to you on the street because they need the special privilege to do their job.
Given the option (shown time and time again) police will sit on their ass and rack up overtime for their ridiculous pension. They aren't paid by crimes avoided so I don't think they would care to proactively fix it.
> The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get.
This is a real problem in America, where tools that could potentially be used for nefarious purposes become illegal for the general population "for their own good". If you're arguing we should have access to specialized surveillance drones and other police equipment on the market you have my complete support.
Also training for a drone, using a drone, recording video in public spaces, surveilling you in a public space are not privileges.
Surveilling you in your apartment needs a warrant, unless you have your window open, at which case it doesn't.
>Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail.
Anyone can walk up to you and kill you, it doesn't mean there aren't legal consequences for it.
>people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
This is because we've heard these arguments a million times and know it's a trojan for some harebrained ideology, which is unfortunate, because police oversight is an important topic—especially considering police unions wield a lot of political power.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line between what police can and can't do?
This is begging the question. You have not established that someone being surveilled by drones is engaged in crime.
You are absolutely giving up privacy (essential liberty) for security in these cases. Drone cameras don't stop observing just because you're in your backyard, or in your house, or in a private area.
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/
See also "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"
The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character.
https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Rey...
Not going to dig in either of those links because I suspect they go down the data mining route more like a flock less about active calls. If you would like to point out why these are bad for active calls I am all ears.
I see your distinction better now. The Reynolds essay speaks a little more to the issue at hand. Essentially the technology allows for scope creep. Previously the limiting factor for physical police surveillance was officer FTEs, which creates a lower bound for the conditions that predicate an "active call." When this constraint is lifted, then Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”
If you have any case law that shows general cameras break the 4th I would love to read.
Did you? The article provides clear counterexamples to that policy.
Please let us know how this violates the 4th. I would love to learn more about it.
This is one of those areas that can be a slippery slope. Look at the UK and the terrible state it’s in. On the flip side I would hope that so long as the guardrails are in place that first response drones can be good for all parties.
It seem awfully similar to the geofence surveillance SCOTUS just said requires a warrant.
> Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places.
A certain level of drone surveillance would seem likely to rise to this level of intrusion, and I think ALPR cameras already do.
I'm the person who posted the article lol. The article lists several cases where the drones were used to investigate random people – not active calls. They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside.
The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
> Can you describe how this breaks the 4th?
Put me on the Supreme Court and I'd be happy to do that for you. Until then, there are more qualified people to do it and the rest of us will just know it when we see it. :)
edit: removed the part where I said u/infecto didn't read the article – it's clear we both read it and came away with different conclusions.
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
Or to the requirement for RCS for which certificates are only issued to trusted parties?
1. It's not happening
2. It's a good thing
3. Peddle false information
Impressive
Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ...
This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ...
The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.
What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used.
Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
I could even get comfortable with tech like Flock if it was not so ripe for abuse.
But the police don’t need a warrant to follow me in public, and even take pictures that they have no intention of publishing.
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
So do we need to wait for abuse with this specific piece of technology in order to be concerned?
Like IMO the real recourse is to come down hard on the abuses of power, and that includes things like getting Citizens united taken down so that police union(s) are not so powerful etc.
I'm generally more interested in root causes than pruning the leaves. Which I realize often is not the "pragmatic" choice.
Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner Using License Plate Reader: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/milwaukee-police-offic...
Passive surveillance would be your example. This program is specifically activated when an active investigation is in progress.
But here we are, with Skydio users openly using public sharing links to their drone feeds 24x7x365 apparently.
Sounds like another vendor needs to get added to the Covered List, methinks, but the lobbyists won't let that one fly.