Because now they can spy on millions vs 1. I think that makes the difference.
Worse large lists quickly become meaningless. Both the 9/11 hijackers and the Boston Marathon bombers where on a list, but that list was simply too large to be useful because 99.9% of everyone on those lists ended up doing nothing.
Now consider something like a DNA database. With 100 million random people on it a 99.999% accurate test going to report a false positive every single time and most tests are nowhere near that accurate.
I think, as you point out, that the overwhelming quantity of Data that would be produced by such an approach prevents this by creating a cost/benefit equilibrium for the FBI on the number of people they monitor with any regularity to build their cases.
I ask because there is no mention of license plate scanners in any of the parent comments to this, or the article.
Also while I assume by everyone you mean everyone who passes through the field of view of the scanner, and not actually everyone; phrasing things in false absolutes like that does not further your point.
Basically, aircraft follows car X, it passes by a scanner, you now know every car with timestamp that passed by the scanner and can look it up on the video. Doing this automatically is just a question of having enough video coverage and some fairly basic video analysis. They don’t even need to do this in real time as you can write the software after the fact.
In other words because they already have license plate scanners and are doing OCR + lookup they just need a video of the cars after that point.
Note: I doubt they have nearly enough footage to track everyone right now, but the cheaper it is to add one more camera and archive the footage the closer you get to that point.
PS: You can even back track cars so if you have a lot of footage of a car that then passes near a scanner you then know its path from wherever the footage starts.
However, if the blue car passed a license plate reader it stops being a random blue car and becomes license plate ABC-1234 registered to someone and your now "following" that specific car plus the original subjects car for that hour. Basicly, the readers enable you to track people not just where the reader physically is but wherever you have footage either leading up to that scan or after the fact. Together you can potentally follow millions of people for fairly low costs.
Granted, nothing says the person who the car is registered to is the actual driver, but you have someone who can probably tell you who was driving that car.
I see absolutely no way that bringing up the existence of license plate scanners created a situation where there was no slippery slope.
Also the recorded video collection grows to be a ridiculously large amount of data over time, even detecting all video of John Smith's car across the United States will become an expensive task to complete computationally. And for everyone? Well even more expensive.
Add on the concept that camera's will not be covering all of the United States at times, and if you are just using make, model, and color of cars to track people between license plate readers shell games where similar cars rearrange them selves in tunnels or garages will become extremely effective at defeating surveillance if license plate readers are not basically everywhere.
So in spite of you deciding to bring up license plate readers, and explain how they can be used to assist in tracking with airborne surveillance I still fail to see the relevance of how they ensure that 'everyone' will be monitored.
I suspect if you wanted to harass your ex-wife, or a dissident, then overhead footage of their car for a few hours would provide a multitude of crimes.
Sure, if you actually prosecuted everyone that's one thing, but selective enforcement plus mass surveillance is a very powerful and easy to abuse tool and you don't need anywhere near 100% coverage to make this effective.
Same with watch lists, doesnt all the ineffectiveness go away if they have tiering or triage system?
If you have 5 suspects and then do DNA testing that's solid evidence. Ex: Paternity test. But, if you find someone with DNA testing you need to completely ignore that evidence after that point as 100% of its predictive power has already been used.
PS: To show just how easy it is to mess this stuff up. Suppose a murder occurred in NY city and the DB returned 20 people so you look at the closest 3 suspects and aha someone lives just 10 miles from the crime! However, note you already picked someone that was close by so you need to consider the odds that someone who lives close by happens to lives in the area. EX: A high percentage of people living in say NY state also live within 10 miles a crime in NY City.
If properly used, perhaps. However, the standards for government forensics have been... questionable.
Generally speaking, government "tests" seem more focused on confirming the prosecutor or investigator's theory than on actually resolving truth about facts.
You seem to be assuming a great deal of statistical literacy on the part of people utilizing these database tools, which I'm not sure is a solid assumption.
I didn't see that part of the article, can you link me to some resources for the planes having that level of camera and computer vision technology?
The array of cameras on the aircraft that flew over
Compton can record high-resolution images of a 25-square
mile area for up to six hours. It can track every person
and vehicle on the ground, beaming back the pictures in
real time.
It’s city-wide surveillance on an unprecedented scale.
What we essentially do is a live version of google earth
only with a full TIVO capability, it allows us to rewind
time and go back and see events that we didn’t know
occurred at the time they occurred.
"ARGUS is an advanced camera system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras in a mosaic to video and auto-track every moving object within a 36 square mile area.
ARGUS is a form of Wide Area Persistent Surveillance that allows for one camera to provide such detailed video that users can collect 'pattern-of-life' data and track individual people inside the footage anywhere within the field of regard."
However, since you asserted that such a thing could happen, your link supports your point. I think it should have been qualified that the technology doesn't exist yet in the interest of full disclosure.
Light googling indicates that this is an extant system that has been fitted to aircraft since 2009:
"DARPA, working in partnership with the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory and National Geospatial Agency, conducted its first test flights using the ARGUS system last year [2009]."
The DoD indicates that the system was operationally deployed to Afghanistan in Q1 2011. [0]
LLNL has an article describing the system's optics, technical specs, and their work on processing the data streams it generates. [1]
BAE released an IR upgrade in 2010:
"BAE System's first flight tests of ARGUS-IR's predecessor, ARGUS-IS, concluded last October aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter." [2]
[0] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62138
[1] https://str.llnl.gov/AprMay11/vaidya.html
[2] http://www.baesystems.com/article/BAES_028152/bae-systems-wi...?
I don't think that it should be expected that I exhaustively comb search engines to find support for your point; I think that it's reasonable that I look solely at the source you gave me.
That said, I found the capabilities in your first (0th) source to be chilling. That source definitely supports your point.