Baltimore PD Can Keep Tabs On The Entire City, Thanks To Privately-Donated Aerial Surveillance System
from the thanks-for-flying-Air-Baltimore dept
When all you have is repurposed war gear, everything looks like a war zone.
It's not just the Pentagon handing out mine-resistant vehicles and military rifles to any law enforcement agency that can spell "terrorism" correctly on a requisition form. It's also the FBI acting as a gatekeeper (and muzzle) for cell phone-tracking hardware originally developed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The latest addition to the pantheon of "war gear, but for local law enforcement" is aerial surveillance. While this sort of surveillance is nothing new -- police have had helicopters for years -- the tech deployed to capture recordings is.
Bloomberg has a long, in-depth article on aerial surveillance tech deployed by the Baltimore Police Department -- all without ever informing constituents. Baltimore isn't the first city to deploy this repurposed military tech. The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department gave the same gear a test run back in 2014. The LASD also did little to inform the public about its purchase, claiming that people might get paranoid and/or angry if they knew.
Baltimore's acquisition of Persistent Surveillance Systems' 192-million megapixel eye in the sky also occurred under the cover of governmental darkness. The tech was given to the police and paid for by a private donor -- which kept the public out of the loop and any FOIA-able paper trail to a minimum.
Last year the public radio program Radiolab featured Persistent Surveillance in a segment about the tricky balance between security and privacy. Shortly after that, McNutt got an e-mail on behalf of Texas-based philanthropists Laura and John Arnold. John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made billions before he retired in 2012. Since then, the Arnolds have funded a variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension rollbacks and charter schools. The Arnolds told McNutt that if he could find a city that would allow the company to fly for several months, they would donate the money to keep the plane in the air. McNutt had met the lieutenant in charge of Baltimore’s ground-based camera system on the trade-show circuit, and they’d become friendly. “We settled in on Baltimore because it was ready, it was willing, and it was just post-Freddie Gray,” McNutt says. The Arnolds donated the money to the Baltimore Community Foundation, a nonprofit that administers donations to a wide range of local civic causes.
The cameras are able to capture activity across the city. The resolution may seem high, but the area covered by the cameras still makes individuals nearly unidentifiable. What it does do is provide a wide-angle look at the movements of these humans reduced to pixels by current tech limitations. Rather than just provide a closer inspection of certain areas, the scope of what's captured allows law enforcement to rewind their way through people's lives, seeing where certain pixels go and what pixels they interact with… and where those pixels go. The ability to trace movements backward can provide law enforcement with details on where criminal activities originate and where possible co-conspirators might be located. It also helps officers track down suspects who have fled from crime scenes.
While it's certain to provide some investigative use, it also gives the Baltimore PD an unprecedented overview of entire neighborhoods for it to peruse in hopes of discovering something that justifies its deployment. It expended zero manhours informing the public, however, before putting it to use. The BPD is already facing heat due to the unconstitutional deployments (multiple thousands of them) of its Stingray devices. Now it has another bit of questionable war tech in use and it's still refusing to discuss it.
Where the city stands in this approval process -- if there even was one -- remains a mystery. City officials aren't discussing the surveillance tech either. If there was any oversight of the high-tech donation, no records have surfaced.
The only party that seems comfortable talking about the surveillance tech is the person behind Persistent Surveillance Systems, Ross McNutt.
McNutt often says that when he stares into the computer monitors, the dots moving along the sidewalks and streets are mere pixels to him. Nothing more. If anyone else wants to project identifying features onto them—sex, race, whatever—that’s their doing, not his. Even as the technology advances and the camera lenses continue to get more powerful, he says, his company will choose to widen its viewing area beyond the current 30 square miles rather than sharpen the image resolution. He’s exasperated when his system is criticized not for what it does, but for its potential.
The potential is the problem. Surveillance systems like these are prone to both feature creep and mission creep. If they're already being deployed secretly, the chances for abuse move from merely "probable" to "almost inevitable." McNutt may be extremely open about his tech and its capabilities, every law enforcement agency that has made use of it has been the polar opposite. And when private donors skirt procurement processes and other red tape by purchasing surveillance tech for law enforcement agencies, a certain amount of accountability disappears.
If an agency feels it's counterproductive to gauge public sentiment before deploying more surveillance tech, the least it can do is keep them informed about upcoming changes. But the Baltimore PD did none of that. It simply took its expensive surveillance gift and put it to work.
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Filed Under: 4th amendment, aerial surveillance, baltimore, eye in the sky, privacy, surveillance
Companies: persistent surveillance systems
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No it isn't
If the city has been made aware of what's going on and remains silent in spite of that it's a pretty good indicator that they are in favor of what's going on and don't want to admit it.
If they were against it it would be simple and easy to say so, if they were for it, likewise simple, the only reason to stay silent is because they are in favor and don't want to say so.
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Re: No it isn't
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You would be right if you were discussing the shadow organizations in the intelligence sector however...
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Use common sense
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/a-tivo-for-crime-how-always-recording-airborne-cam eras-watch-entire-cities/
Future headlines:
* PD Can Keep Tabs On The Entire City, Thanks To Privately-Donated ALPR System
* PD Can Keep Tabs On The Entire City, Thanks To Privately-Donated Facial Recognition System
* PD Can Keep Tabs On The Entire City, Thanks To Privately-Donated MAC Address/IMSI System
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Clear and Present Danger
This is in contrast to other options that seem more in line with serving the people of the United States, such as first hearing and addressing concerns from the public in a public forum, or even avoiding unpopular or distasteful policy.
It's also curious to me how a growing record of secret implementations of disagreeable policy have not turned into an indictment of our representatives and agents who endorse these policies, and endorse the method of secret implementation.
When secret implementation is the accepted operating procedure, doesn't that mean we are no longer a for-the-people government? And if so, why do we continue to pretend that we are?
Isn't this exemplary of clear and present tyrany against the people of the United States?
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Re: Clear and Present Danger
I'm sure it was "sold" to them under the "war on terror" and "if we reveal our capabilities...".
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Re: Clear and Present Danger
There are plenty of police programs that the public do not like. If the police force was run as a popularity contest rather than with the goal of keeping the peace / applying the law, then you would have a disaster.
What would go? Radar guns (nobody likes to get a speeding ticket) and parking meters and police writing tickets for that would go too. Police walking the beat? Out, that is like surveillance. Drug raids? Organized crime? Fuggedaboutit. Nobody wants the police arresting their friends (or their dealer!).
So yes, lots of things happen quietly, away from the public's eye. A lot of programs that the public wouldn't like still run and exist. It's the nature of the game. Deep down we know we need police and we need law enforcement, yet we also have a deep desire to "get away with" stuff.
Disagreeable policies that are legal are not an issue, just that you don't like them.
The surveillance offered in this situation appears to be legal (ie, it captures what can be seen from the air, similar to a helicopter or plane). Any concerns for privacy are similar to those of a helicopter with a camera, and the courts have long since held that all of that is acceptable. Disagreeable to certain people, perhaps, but legal.
As for private financing of the equipment, I don't really have an issue with it, provided it is used in an equal and fair handed manner, and the company providing the equipment does not extract benefit from the data collected except for testing purposes. Ptherwise, the police get an extra tool, something that might help us monitor police activities, and it just seems to be a pretty decent idea.
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That doesn't follow. Firstly, we do make a lot of decisions by popularity contests (that is elections a la referendums), and as much as the people of the US suck at making decisions by popularity, we suck at appointing someone to make those decisions for us even more.
At this time, the police across the states are a disaster, and we see their overreach time and time again. If anything the police have been given too much lattitude and need to be constrained, if not completely reformed.
What would go? Radar guns (nobody likes to get a speeding ticket) and parking meters and police writing tickets for that would go too. Police walking the beat? Out, that is like surveillance. Drug raids? Organized crime? Fuggedaboutit. Nobody wants the police arresting their friends (or their dealer!).
Debatable. No-one wants the powers of detection trained on them, true, but they do like having those powers trained on others. I suspect most of us would rather live in a lawful state in which no-one gets away with nothin' rather than anyone getting away with anything.
But that's not the world we live in either. Rather ours is a world in which some people get away with stuff, some people don't. Other still get blamed for stuff they didn't do, and the police and officials get away with anything they want. This is not the equal justice on which our nation is supposedly founded.
So yes, lots of things happen quietly, away from the public's eye. A lot of programs that the public wouldn't like still run and exist.
Which is based on the presumption that someone knows better than the public what is good for them. How are such people chosen who get to decide in secret how to rule? By divine right of birth?
The public may be dim, and have to learn from hard knocks, but no-one else is more qualified to make those decisions, and when someone does, it is invariably in favor of their own interests, not in the interest of the people.
As Madison noted, men are not angels and this includes the people you would have rule in secret. The very fact that they have to implement their policies in secret is indicative, itself that they are up to no good.
The phrases Taxation without representation and Nothing about us without us are part of our nation's history for a reason. The problems we're having now with law enforcement are repeats of the indictments against King George in the Declaration of Independence. Our nation was founded in a stand against the very treatement by state agents, and the disparity between that and the treatment of state agents.
Disagreeable policies that are legal are not an issue, just that you don't like them.
Law is not infallible and laws are often passed that are not in the interests of the people. We not only have laws that run contrary to the spirit of equality and equal justice for all, but we continuously are addressing laws that run contrary to the spirit in which they were written.
And policies can often run within the confines of what is legal, but still run contrary to what best serves the people, much as speech can be legal while still being neither true nor appropriate nor a very nice thing to say.
What I like doesn't matter, but part of the problem is that what some people like matters a lot more than it should, so we tend to have policies that put a lot of money and power into the hands of the few. Those aren't good policies.
It further doesn't help that people in prison stay there when the laws they broke are overturned. I remember being taught that is not the way it's supposed to be, but we don't actually bother to release people because the state was wrong in prosecuting them in the first place.
...the courts have long since held that all of that is acceptable...
The courts have a long history of bias and stupidity, often making rulings that lead to inequality and further abuse. Again, legal is not necessarily right or what best serves the people. These days, regulatory capture is so pandemic that what is legal often runs contrary to the interests of the people. Those ingrained in our legal system are going to serve our legal system. They're not going to serve the people.
In fact, at this point countless opinions from the Department of Justice have demonstrated a regard of the people of the United States as the enemy. We should not only refuse them any additional teeth, but should pull the ones they already have until they realign their priorities.
Once all of them are pulled, we might be able to start another institution that will actually serve the public.
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Re: Re: Clear and Present Danger
Did you order the code red?
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Re: Clear and Present Danger
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"Now does your opinion change when the lens is on you?"
In this instance for example how would Ross McNutt respond if someone were to dedicate a drone to constantly watch and follow him, so long as they assured him that currently the video resolution is low enough that it's only capable of distinguishing him from those around him?
I can't help but think that he might find such an act just a wee bit invasive, despite apparently being perfectly fine with it for everyone else. Now were I wrong here, in that they would have no objections to such surveillance then I'd say sure, their opinion on the matter is worth consideration. However if they did object, as I imagine would be the case given how often it turns out to be so elsewhere, that just means that they'd be displaying a stunning level of hypocrisy, leaving their opinion on the subject worthless at best.
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With all due respect(none at all),
The Baltimore PD
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Well...
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altitude
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Re: altitude
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Re: Re: altitude
Drone dropping from the sky due to a lost connection in a sparsely populated area is bad. Drone dropping from the sky in the middle of a city is much, much worse, so yeah, here's hoping these models are either taken out of service(ideally) or at least have better connections.
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Re: Re: altitude
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In Which Universe?
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Re: In Which Universe?
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FOIA?
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Hardly Secret
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYhjktrmPuA
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So say there's this official...
He just needs to find something to pin on you, it doesn't even have to be a frame or a trumped charge, just enough to get probable cause.
The SWAT guys come in, shoot up your house, take you to jail. Everything you own is seized via civil forfeiture. Chance of conviction (with no solid evidence) is 90%+, now you're in lock up.
So he says to your wife, be my love slave and your hubby gets to stay in the swanky white-collar prisons. Refuse, and I'll make sure he's Bubba's plaything for a long, long time.
If your wife doesn't cooperate, he can make you disappear into one of the secret infomax prisons, where you live under fluorescent lights 24/7 and the guard who walks up and down the hallway never talks to you. Ever.
And this official, say a police chief, or a deputy mayor or even some civic-building middle office clerk, can totally do that. Has done it. There are more false convicts in US prisons than there are actual criminals. It's too bad that we can't separate the guys who were targeted from the guys with bad luck to be in the wrong place, from the guys who actually committed crimes. We have no functional justice system that actually determines guilt from innocence.
Someone should write a story.
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Not far enough!
It goes without saying of course that removal of the tracking device, switching your assigned device with someone else, or blocking the signal in any way would be treated as a crime worse than any other on the books in order to ensure that people would rather face any other charge rather than the charge for removing the tracking device.
Since this system would only ever be used against criminals, and would never be abused, the only people who would ever object to it are criminals, or those with criminal intent! As such they should be the first to be fitted with the tracking devices, because after all, 'If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide'!
*Naturally law enforcement, politicians, and those with large enough personal wealth will be exempt from this requirement to avoid even the possibility of someone using the system to track their movements for nefarious purposes such as kidnapping, blackmail or stalking. Again, the system would never be abused for such purposes, the exemption will be purely as a completely redundant safety measure.
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US version of a Total Police State
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The old "Frog in boiling water" process. Seems to work on Sheeple real good.
You know - sit around and debate whether or not its actually happening, while ignoring the fact that they've already lost their democracy and no longer have even minimal control of their government or its agents.
I wonder if this is why fascism always works.
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"I wonder if this is why fascism always works."
We may have to do this a few times before we get the hang of it.
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Re: "I wonder if this is why fascism always works."
Extremely well said sir.
I do keep fogetting that in the grand scheme of things, this particular era is utterly different than all others that preceded it and is indeed a mere tick or two on the clock of history.
I suppose that if all periods of peace and fair treatment of populations on earth were added up, it might account for about 1/10th of 1% of human history, at most.
C'est al vie eh.
Sadly, it appears too that the movers and shaker of earth have decided that those familiar old times are worth bring back.
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