Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move From Above
Since January, police have been testing an aerial surveillance system adapted from the surge in Iraq. And they neglected to tell the public.
[...] The verdict trickled out of the courthouse in text messages: not guilty, all counts. Ralph Pritchett Sr., who's spent each of his 52 years in Baltimore, stood on the sidewalk among the protesters. He chewed on a toothpick and shook his head slowly. In a city with more than 700 street-level police cameras, he wondered, shouldn't the authorities have had video of Gray's ride?
"This whole city is under a siege of cameras," said Pritchett, a house painter who helps run a youth center in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood called Johnston Square. "In fact, they observed Freddie Gray himself the morning of his arrest on those cameras, before they picked him up. They could have watched that van, too, but no—they missed that one. I thought the cameras were supposed to protect us. But I'm thinking they're there to just contradict anything that might be used against the City of Baltimore. Do they use them for justice? Evidently not." Pritchett had no idea that as he spoke, a small Cessna airplane equipped with a sophisticated array of cameras was circling Baltimore at roughly the same altitude as the massing clouds. The plane's wide-angle cameras captured an area of roughly 30 square miles and continuously transmitted real-time images to analysts on the ground. The footage from the plane was instantly archived and stored on massive hard drives, allowing analysts to review it weeks later if necessary.
Since the beginning of the year, the Baltimore Police Department had been using the plane to investigate all sorts of crimes, from property thefts to shootings. The Cessna sometimes flew above the city for as many as 10 hours a day, and the public had no idea it was there. A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, based in Dayton, Ohio, provided the service to the police, and the funding came from a private donor. No public disclosure of the program had ever been made. Outside the courthouse, several of the protesters began marching around the building, chanting for justice. The plane continued to circle overhead, unseen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:13PM
Anyone who is really interested in this topic should listen to the Radiolab episode that covered this topic:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/ [radiolab.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @02:26PM
wget "http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast16eyeinthesky.mp3"
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:17PM
your daddy's 'The Wire'
(Score: 3, Funny) by JNCF on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:20PM
No public disclosure of the program had ever been made. Outside the courthouse, several of the protesters began marching around the building, chanting for justice. The plane continued to circle overhead, unseen. And now, the weather.
I couldn't help but mentally read this in the voice of Cecil from Welcome to Night Vale.
Truth, meet Fiction --- Fiction, this is Truth. He's a little bit... strange.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:31PM
We covered this same company when it was revealed they were secretly recording Compton.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/04/18/1514238 [soylentnews.org]
Brutalizing surveillance is always directed first at minorities because they don't have the social capital to fight back. In the past it was a lot harder to scale up to everyone. Now its easy. We let this pass because its nominally targeted at suspicious people who are not like us and tomorrow it will be targeted at us. I believe father Martin Niemöller had some insight on the issue. [ushmm.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:41PM
The National Reconnaissance Office [facebook.com] has been taking pictures since the '60s, but with satellites. When they upload their pictures they still aren't as hip as this McNutt dork, because drone.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:46PM
Not a drone. A cessna. RTFS FFS.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 25 2016, @11:45PM
1) Use money without telling why
2) Ingest everything without analysis, so it's not a "Search"
3) ???
4) Profit
(for 3, make appointment with Google, Tesla and Apple, who already record all their customers' movements)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:36AM
...and only get out of the car when you are under a roof (garage, parking structure).
Or do what I do, only come outside at night. It's been so hot here this summer (setting local records) that I haven't been outside much anyway.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @12:54AM
The likely hood that these cameras are only operating within the visible spectrum is extremely rare. Plus any decent motion analysis software will notice your bit of concrete behaving as a car so it'll be marked as such.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday August 26 2016, @01:34PM
ok, so LCD screens on the roof, cameras under the car looking at the road feeding them images. Adjust image for ambient light, motion, etc. Hey presto! invisible car!
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @02:58PM
How much of what LCD radiates is IR?
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday August 26 2016, @01:21AM
1. Image anomaly detected during routine aerial surveillance.
2. Analyst sees your concrete clunker, decides to grab your license plate.
3. bob_super added to a watchlist for "special" anti-authority individuals.
4. A future government uses the lists to determine priority kill targets.
5. bob_super and his family end up in mass graves.
It goes something like that, right?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday August 26 2016, @01:38AM
I think we have the answer to the question "should there be title to comments" when I get three fun answers on a silly char-limited title and none on the dumb comment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @04:30AM
We can't be sure of the answer until you make a silly comment under a stupid subject, as a control.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Fnord666 on Friday August 26 2016, @03:46AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @02:23PM
...an aerial surveillance system adapted from the surge in Iraq
Really now...? Explain to me exactly what a military-grade surveillance system is doing over peace-time US soil?
These fuckers really think that there's a war on the home front. If they aren't careful, they may just be in the sowing stage... The reaping will follow at some point
(Score: 3, Informative) by BananaPhone on Friday August 26 2016, @02:26PM
In a police state the citizen is the enemy.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday August 27 2016, @07:08PM
And, who would be the enemy, other than normal people? World wars (holocausts for civilians and infrastructure) had the same people financing both sides. Terrorists have been trained and financed by the same people they apparently fight, and we are at war with nations who send us people that we let in with no fuss... The counterculture, hippy, Woodstock, drugs, have initially been sponsored by the military and the secret service, so all bases are covered.
Add to this that governments around the world in different political social and economic conditions pass the same laws at the same time, and the obvious emerges, the police state is global. But resistance is simple (not easy, simple), just listen to your conscience, when something feels honestly wrong, it is.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @12:54AM
many of these stupid fuckers think they are protecting US citizens by violating their rights and/or privacy. others are just the devil's concubines aka your standard government worker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @07:45PM
It wasn't police surveillance. It was just a crew doing aerial surveys of Pokemon Go adoption.