https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare During the Global War on Terror, using unmanned aerial vehicles for

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare During the Global War on Terror, using unmanned aerial vehicles for persistent surveillance dramatically changed the way the U.S. military pursued fleeting targets. However, their sensors provided very narrow fields of view, referred to by warfighters as looking at the battlefield through a "soda straw," allowing insurgents to disappear from view and not giving information on what was happening in surrounding areas. So in 2009, the U.S. Air Force began development of a wide-area surveillance system to enable the MQ-9 Reaper long-endurance UAV to survey an entire small city from 25,000 ft (7,600 m). Requiring fewer systems to recon a large area frees up more available assets to be able to perform other missions and enables operations to be more limited where a light "footprint" is desired. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-compton-surveillance-20140424-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-compton-surveillance-2014... http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriffs-deputy-compares-drone-surveillance-of-compton-to-big-brother/360954/ http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriffs... Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time. If it's adopted, Americans can be policed like Iraqis and Afghanis under occupation–and at bargain prices: McNutt, who holds a doctorate in rapid product development, helped build wide-area surveillance to hunt down bombing suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan. He decided that clusters of high-powered surveillance cameras attached to the belly of small civilian aircraft could be a game-changer in U.S. law enforcement. “Our whole system costs less than the price of a single police helicopter and costs less for an hour to operate than a police helicopter,” McNutt said. “But at the same time, it watches 10,000 times the area that a police helicopter could watch.”