Appeals Court Reverses Earlier Decision, Says Baltimore's Aerial Surveillance Program Is Unconstitutional

from the on-the-other-hand,-this-does-look-constitutionally-sketchy dept

After two court decisions declaring the Baltimore Police Department's Persistent Surveillance Systems-provided aerial surveillance system wasn't actually persistent surveillance, the en banc Fourth Circuit Appeals Court has reversed itself, finding that the system capable of capturing the movements of people and vehicles over an area of 32-square-miles violates the Fourth Amendment.

The 192-million megapixel camera system flew over the city for up to 12 hours a day, only shutting down when darkness or weather rendered the cameras useless. This footage was retained by the PD, which could review the footage to trace movements to and from crime scenes. The resolution meant people and vehicles were little more than unidentifiable pixels, but this information -- combined with a plethora of ground-based surveillance equipment -- made it possible to identify suspects and other persons of interest.

The AIR [Aerial Investigation Research] program was challenged by the ACLU, which cited the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision in its request for an injunction. The federal court said the surveillance wasn't persistent and its built-in limitations prevented it from tracking people's movements for days at a time. As such, AIR's surveillance was unlike the location tracking in the Carpenter decision, which involved the use of cell site location information obtained from cell service providers.

The Fourth Circuit Appeals Court reached pretty much the same conclusion seven months later. Despite covering a vast area for up to 12 hours a day, the court felt the surveillance was far from persistent. It also seemed to feel the surveillance was a means justified by the ends, citing the Baltimore PD's inability to solve more than a third of the city's murders over the past several years.

The court agreed to perform an en banc review of its November decision and has, somewhat surprisingly, declared this form of surveillance a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And it makes no difference that the PD has dumped the program. The ruling [PDF] serves to prevent the PD from trying it again the next time it runs out of better ideas.

Even though the program has ended, the PD has retained some of what was collected during its run. It's still quite a bit of footage and data.

Rather than store entire days’ worth of data, they elected to retain images from 15 minutes before and after the first and last “track point” for a case, and only within a quarter mile of any track point. They believed this data was the “minimum amount” necessary to support PSS’s reports and “to support the prosecution and the defense teams” in the 200 cases aided by the AIR program, including 150 open investigations. The deletion “result[ed] in a total retained imagery data of 14.2% of the captured imagery data.” Id. In raw numbers, that is 264.82 hours of coverage, comprised of 953,337 cropped images. Id. In addition, “[t]he 200 investigation briefings and other ground-based videos” generated by the AIR program “have already been uploaded to BPD’s Evidence.com.”

The city thought this deletion made everything ok. It was no longer untargeted surveillance of a 32 square mile area but rather targeted surveillance of criminal suspects. That's the wrong way of looking at this, the court says. The PD wouldn't have this stockpile of targeted surveillance if it hadn't engaged in broad surveillance first.

Defendants also stress that BPD has deleted “all but 14.2 percent” of AIR images. But 14.2 percent of all the data collected—millions of photographs documenting thousands of hours of public movements over six months—is a significant quantity of information. Indeed, the preserved 14.2 percent is the needle in the proverbial haystack that the AIR program was designed to discover. Only after recording movements across Baltimore for twelve hours per day could BPD zero in on specific dates and locations related to its investigations and then delete the excess. And BPD still has the briefings and reports, which feature AIR images and tracked movements, information and images from other BPD systems, and insights from PSS’s analysis. Even after the bulk deletion, Plaintiffs have a concrete interest in an injunction barring BPD from accessing what remains, “however small” the interest may be.

Then the court says the lower court failed to comprehend the program's impact on residents' privacy.

Plaintiffs argued the AIR program violates Carpenter. The district court rejected the analogy, relying on precedents that approved warrantless pole cameras and flyover photography, and distinguishing CSLI as “a far more intrusive, efficient, and reliable method of tracking a person’s whereabouts.” The district court’s conclusion arose from its read of the facts: “the AIR pilot program has limited location-tracking abilities” because it “will only depict individuals as miniscule dots moving about a city landscape”; the planes “will not fly at night and cannot capture images in inclement weather”; and “gaps in the data will prohibit the tracking of individuals over the course of multiple days.” From that premise, it believed the AIR program could not expose the “privacies of life.”

The district court misapprehended the AIR program’s capabilities.

This is long-term tracking of people's movements, even with periodic interruptions due to nightfall or inclement weather.

Because the data is retained for 45 days—at least—it is a “detailed, encyclopedic,” record of where everyone came and went within the city during daylight hours over the prior month-and-a-half. Law enforcement can “travel back in time” to observe a target’s movements, forwards and backwards. Without technology, police can attempt to tail suspects, but AIR data is more like “attach[ing] an ankle monitor” to every person in the city. “Whoever the suspect turns out to be,” they have “effectively been tailed” for the prior six weeks. (“[P]olice need not even know in advance whether they want to follow a particular individual, or when.”). Thus, the “retrospective quality of the data” enables police to “retrace a person’s whereabouts,” granting access to otherwise “unknowable” information.

[...]

[T]he program enables photographic, retrospective location tracking in multi-hour blocks, often over consecutive days, with a month and a half of daytimes for analysts to work with. That is enough to yield “a wealth of detail,” greater than the sum of the individual trips.

The fact that the surveillance ended at night doesn't matter. Most surveillance happened during the day and most activities people engage in happened during the time periods the surveillance was occurring

AIR data is a photographic record of movements, surpassing the precision even of GPS data and CSLI, which record variable location points from which movements can be reconstructed. And while the coverage is not 24/7, most people do most of their moving during the daytime, not overnight. Likewise, many people start and end most days at home, following a relatively habitual pattern in between. These habits, analyzed with other available information, will often be enough for law enforcement to deduce the people behind the pixels.

As for the claims the PD never engaged in persistent surveillance with this system, the record says otherwise. The system may deliver unidentifiable pixels in its raw form, but the PD still found it useful enough to perform aerial stakeouts.

The Policing Project reported that one AIR investigation “monitor[ed] the home of a suspect’s mother over the course of two days and track[ed] the individuals who came and went.” Policing Project Br. App. at 16. And an AIR report “detail[ed] a vehicle’s movements over the course of three days, listing eleven locations at which the vehicle stopped, and noting the interactions the driver had with other individuals.”

The court says the surveillance planes can still fly if the city wants to try that approach again. But they'll need warrants to do it.

The AIR program records the movements of a city. With analysis, it can reveal where individuals come and go over an extended period. Because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment.

There are several concurrences and a dissent that is criticized heavily by the concurring judges. The most stinging take on the "ends justifies the means" posturing of the dissent is delivered by Chief Judge Roger Gregory:

The dissent faults the majority for making “[n]o mention whatsoever” of Baltimore’s high murder rate. Because the dissent would not enjoin a police surveillance system, it purports to champion “our dispossessed communities” and “the most vulnerable among us.” It suggests the majority, by contrast, “contribute[s] to the continuation” of violence and “leaves only hopelessness” for “the good people of Baltimore.”

This critique depends upon a certain premise: Policing ameliorates violence, and restraining police authority exacerbates it. As surely as water is wet, as where there is smoke there is fire, the dissent takes for granted that policing is the antidote to killing. Thus, the dissent repeatedly evokes the grief and trauma of gun deaths only in the name of a familiar cause: police and prisons. Of course, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance, 15–16 (1966). But many Baltimoreans know these institutions all too well as the only response to violence.

Just because there's criminal activity doesn't mean citizens want fewer rights, especially those in neighborhoods where violent crime is most prevalent. And the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court shouldn't assume fighting crime is a higher calling than protecting the rights of Americans.

Wherever they call home—from East Baltimore to West Baltimore, from Sandtown to Roland Park, from Cherry Hill to Locust Point— Baltimoreans need not sacrifice their constitutional rights to obtain equal governmental protection.

Even though Baltimore's aerial surveillance program is dead (possibly just for the moment), its legacy lives on: more precedent saying persistent tracking of people's movements is unconstitutional.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 4th circuit, aerial surveillance, baltimore, baltimore police department
Companies: persistent surveillance systems

Fourth Circuit Appeals Court Seems Skeptical That Baltimore's Aerial Surveillance System Violates The Fourth Amendment

from the aloft-for-now dept

The legal fight over Baltimore's aerial surveillance system continues. Airplanes armed with powerful cameras fly constantly over the city, allowing law enforcement to view the movements of people and vehicles over a 32-square mile area. The resolution may be high (192 million megapixels) but the area covered reduces people to (nearly) unidentifiable dots on a screen. However, these recordings can be accessed to trace movements of pixels/people as they move to and from suspected crime scenes.

The city isn't paying a dime for these cameras and airplanes. The equipment -- provided by Persistent Surveillance Systems -- is paid for by a private donor. This perhaps explains why the city chose to roll it out with zero public notice back in 2016. After a brief shutdown, it has resumed, with a bit more public involvement. It may be audacious, but it hasn't been all that successful. Reports show the program logged 700 flights but only one arrest.

The ACLU sued, claiming this persistent surveillance of nearly everyone in the city violated the Fourth Amendment. The federal court disagreed, even taking into consideration the ability of the program to engage in persistent tracking of individuals when combined with the PD's cameras on the ground. Despite the word "persistent" being used by the company itself, the program is far from persistent, with darkness preventing recording and inclement weather occasionally grounding spy planes.

There's an appeal underway, but as Louis Krass reports for Baltimore Brew, the ACLU doesn't appear to have found much more sympathy one level up. The ACLU argued the untargeted surveillance system is an unreasonable search. In other words, Baltimore residents would not consider it reasonable to have their public movements surveilled for up to 12 hours a day for six months straight.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson disagrees.

“Whose constitutional rights is this violating?” Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, asked.

“These are simple observations of public movements, and it’s not inside someone’s dwelling, it’s public streets, where someone’s expectancy of privacy is minimal,” he said. “We’re not talking about excessive police force, so is it the right of the pixel whose rights are being violated?”

The judge is right that the expectation of privacy is lower in public areas. But this is too reductive. A pixel isn't just a pixel -- incapable of having its rights violated. It's a person, even if that person can't be clearly identified using these recordings alone. The entire purpose of the aerial surveillance system is to help police identify criminal suspects. And police do this by cross-referencing this footage with surveillance equipment on the ground, which is completely capable of turning a "pixel" into a person.

But Wilkinson isn't the only judge being asked to rule on this. Judge Roger Gregory is far more critical of the government's arguments. The government said there were no Constitutional concerns in tracking the movements of millions of Baltimore "pixels" since the PD was only interested in the "pixels" who may have been near a crime scene. Most of the recordings collected are never used by the Baltimore PD's analysts.

That doesn't make it okay, says Judge Gregory.

Gregory, a Clinton appointee, countered that it is unconstitutional to gather such information in the first place.

“That would turn the Fourth Amendment on its head,” he said. “That’s like invading someone’s home with a camera and taking a photograph of you, then say, ‘It’s no problem because we never developed the film.’”

It seems unlikely the Appeals Court will be any more impressed with the ACLU's arguments. As long as people are still rendered as pixels -- and planes incapable of capturing footage 24 hours a day -- there appears to be very little violation of privacy. If there's no sympathy for the mosaic theory of the Fourth Amendment -- where multiple Constitutional surveillance techniques combine to form an unconstitutional invasion of privacy -- Baltimore residents will still be watched by multiple eyes in the sky.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 4th circuit, aerial surveillance, baltimore, drones
Companies: persistent surveillance systems

Federal Court Says Baltimore PD's High-Powered Aerial Surveillance Program Doesn't Violate The Constitution

from the increase-resolution-to-violate-rights dept

Four years ago, the Baltimore Police Department unilaterally decided to put several eyes in the sky. The 192-million megapixel camera system capable of covering 32-square miles was sent skyward with zero public comment or input from the city. And why not? The city was barely involved. The BPD received the camera system courtesy of a private donor.

The head of the company, John McNutt, was contacted by some Texas-based philanthropists who offered to pay for the system if McNutt's company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, would put it up in the air. What the system lacks in depth, it makes up for in breadth. Humans and vehicles are reduced to mere pixels, but the system's ability to rewind recordings makes it possible for the PD to track movement of vehicles and people near crime scenes.

The aerial surveillance system is more re-purposed war tech. It was originally deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan under the name "Gorgon Stare." That's what Persistent Surveillance Systems is flying over Baltimore, this time with the city's official blessing. After a period of public comment, the surveillance system is no longer just a test project.

The ACLU sued to block the launch of the program, citing the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision, which adds a warrant requirement to the collection of cell site location data. It's not an exact fit, but the Carpenter decision has been read by some courts to cover more than just location data.

Unfortunately, the ACLU's attempt to secure an injunction has failed. The decision [PDF] doesn't find the Carpenter decision applicable to an all-seeing-eye that can only capture the movement of pixels, rather than identifiable human beings. That being said, the planes (three of them) will fly for a minimum 40 hours a week each, resulting in six months of 12-hour-a-day coverage of nearly the entire city. (h/t Munchkin at Law)

There's something more than a little dystopian about the program. But, despite the promise contained in the company's name, this surveillance isn't all that persistent.

The AIR [Aerial Investigation Research] program's observational capabilities are limited. PSS [Persistent Surveillance Systems] cannot provide real-time surveillance. The on-board technology does not have zoom, telephoto, night vision, or infrared capabilities. The imagery is limited to "1 pixel per person" -- essentially a single dot on the map. Accordingly, an individual's characteristics are not observable in the images. As the planes will not fly at night or during inclement weather, significant gaps in the imagery data will emerge. These gaps in the record prevent the monitoring of a person's movements over the course of multiple days.

Footage related to criminal investigations will be separated and held for up to 45 days. Suspicious pixels' movements will be analyzed by investigators -- a process the PD says will be "labor-intensive," requiring up to one hour of investigators' time for every two hours of movement observed.

But it won't just be pixels moving around PSS's 32-square-miles of footage. This system will be integrated with surveillance tech on the ground, including the city's multiple CCTV cameras, Spot Shotter systems, and automatic license plate readers. Combining all of these elements will allow the PD to de-anonymize pixels and continue tracking of now-identifiable humans and vehicles.

Despite the concerns this integration of the city's surveillance equipment raises, the court says it will not issue a permanent injunction against the use of PSS's spy planes.

The record presently before this Court indicates that images produced by the AIR pilot program will only depict individuals as miniscule dots moving about a city landscape. The movement of these dots cannot be tracked without significant labor. Gaps in the imagery foreclose the tracking of a single person over the course of several days. This limited form of aerial surveillance does not constitute a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, nor does it burden First Amendment speech activities.

Even if it were a closer call, one feels the court would still have arrived at the same conclusion: the end justifies the means.

In a City plagued with violent crime and clamoring for police protections, this Court is loath to take the "extraordinary" step of stopping the AIR program before it even begins.

A bit more usefully, the court points out that not everything that identifies a person or their movements is a Fourth Amendment search, even if the Carpenter decision applied that to the collection of cell site location data.

The Plaintiffs' argument, seeking to lump together discrete surveillance activities as one Fourth Amendment "search," is simply without merit. Using a combination of resources and activities -- including police interviews, CitiWatch cameras, license plate readers, and public records -- the Baltimore Police Department may be able to reconstruct a detailed account of a person's activities and associations. The addition of one more investigative tool -- in this case, aerial surveillance -- does not render the total investigatory effort a Fourth Amendment "search."

Baltimore citizens and activists are right to be concerned about the PD's use of near-persistent aerial surveillance. But the limitations of the system prevent it from being considered a threat to Fourth Amendment protections -- at least as it's configured now. This second pass by PSS and the BPD will be subject to far more oversight than its test run. The decision notes that the program's efficacy will be tracked by two independent research groups and the public's perception of the program monitored by the University of Baltimore. The program will also be subject to a "civil rights and civil liberties audit" by the New York University School of Law. And, finally, the entire program is subject to the contours of a consent decree signed with the DOJ -- something that has been in place since early 2017.

At some point, the Fourth Amendment may be implicated by hours of aerial surveillance. But until the tech reaches the point where persistent tracking of individuals across an entire city is feasible, it seems unlikely any court will declare the PD's program a violation of Constitutional rights.

Filed Under: baltimore, baltimore pd, john mcnutt, surveillanice 4th amendment
Companies: persistent surveillance systems

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.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, aerial surveillance, baltimore, eye in the sky, privacy, surveillance
Companies: persistent surveillance systems

LA Sheriff's Dept. On New Surveillance Program: We Knew The Public Wouldn't Like It, So We Kept It A Secret

from the because-screw-those-whiners-and-their-'rights' dept

As we've noted several times before, law enforcement and investigative agencies tend to roll out expanded surveillance systems without bothering to run it by the citizens they're planning to surveil. The systems and programs are deployed, FOIA battles are waged and, finally, at some point, the information makes its way to the public. It is only then that most agencies start considering the privacy implications of their surveillance systems, and these are usually addressed by begrudging, minimal protections being belatedly applied.

Now, it's obvious why these agencies don't inform the public of their plans. They may uses terms like "security" and "officer safety" and theorize that making any details public would just allow criminals to find ways to avoid the persistent gaze of multiple surveillance options, but underneath it all, they know the public isn't going to just sit there and allow them to deploy intrusive surveillance programs.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is using a new surveillance program utilizing the technology of a private contractor doing business under the not-scary-at-all name of "Persistent Surveillance Systems." This gives the LASD a literal eye in the sky that provides coverage it can't achieve with systems already in place. But it does more than just give the LASD yet another camera. It provides the agency with some impressive tools to manipulate the recordings.

The system, known as wide-area surveillance, is something of a time machine – the entire city is filmed and recorded in real time. Imagine Google Earth with a rewind button and the ability to play back the movement of cars and people as they scurry about the city.

“We literally watched all of Compton during the time that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,” [Ross] McNutt [owner of Persistent Surveillance Systems] said. “Our goal was to basically jump to where reported crimes occurred and see what information we could generate that would help investigators solve the crimes.”

As with nearly everything making its way into law enforcement hands these days, this technology was developed and deployed first in battlefields. Persistent Surveillance Systems' first proving grounds were Afghanistan and Iraq, tracking down bombing suspects. All it takes is a cluster of high-powered cameras and a single civilian plane to watch over Compton with warzone-quality surveillance. According to McNutt, the camera system covers "10,000 times" the area a single police helicopter can. McNutt also believes the system can be expanded to cover an area as large as the entire city of San Francisco.

While the cameras aren't quite powerful enough to allow the LASD to make use of another, increasingly popular technological tool -- facial recognition -- this still gives the LASD an unprecedented coverage area. Camera technology continues to improve, so there's no reason to believe a few of McNutt's planes won't someday (possibly very soon) have the power to assist the LASD with adding new mugshots to its databases.

But, as pointed out earlier, where does the public fit into all of this? Were privacy concerns addressed before moving forward with Persistent Surveillance Systems? I'm not even going to try to set up this astounding response from an LASD officer. Just read it:

“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” (LASD Sgt.) Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”

You know, it's one thing to think this. We know from experience that many law enforcement officials (as well as the rank-and-file) absolutely resent being publicly accountable and having to make the occasional token effort to respect civil liberties, so it's not surprising that the LASD knew the easiest way to avoid a negative public was to lock the public out.

It is, however, quite another thing to come out on record and say this. This shows just how little the LASD actually cares about the public's concerns. The agency knew the public wouldn't be happy and an official comes right out and tells the public that his agency and others don't really care. What they don't know won't hurt them... until it's too late to do anything about it.

This was followed up by another statement from an LAPD official, who noted that frogs generally come around to the idea of being boiled to death.

The center’s commanding officer, Capt. John Romero, recognizes the concerns but equates them with public resistance to street lights in America’s earliest days.

“People thought that this is the government trying to see what we’re doing at night, to spy on us,” Romero said. “And so over time, things shifted, and now if you try to take down street lights in Los Angeles or Boston or anywhere else, people will say no.”

There's no honesty or accountability in these statements. There's only an admission that Los Angeles law enforcement feels the public is there to serve them and not the other way around. Hiding your plans from the public doesn't instill confidence that their rights will be respected. Neither does telling them they'll "get used to it." Instead, it creates an even more antagonistic environment, one where the public is viewed as a nuisance at best by people whose power is derived from the same citizens they so obviously have no respect for.

Filed Under: la, la sheriff's department, secrecy, surveillance, transparency
Companies: persistent surveillance systems