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Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance
- fortran77 4mo agoIt's nice to see SFPD taking car break-ins seriously.
- malfist 4mo ago"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
- Neil44 4mo agoIs it essential liberty to be able to run around doing crime without being surveiled?
- ceejayoz 4mo agoSweet, you've invented pre-crime.
- nozzlegear 4mo agoThis article literally documents several times SFPD used drones to surveil people who weren't committing any crimes. They sent their drones to spy on a guy who was sitting on a roof listening to music, and in another instance they sent drones to follow "suspicious individuals" who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops. This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises."
- Neil44 4mo agoHow would this be different to following a suspicious car to see what it's intent is?
- nozzlegear 4mo agoA few things IMO: First, the police have a weird habit of determining that black people drive the most suspicious cars. Does this racial profiling extend to their drone use as well? It's clear from the article that the police are using the drones in more situations than just the active investigations that they claim to use them in. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black) Second, if you're being followed by a police car, you know the police car is there. If you're being followed by a drone, you have no idea the drone is there. From the article, the SFPD's drone policy states that operators must only record video once the drone has arrived at the scene, and they must take care not to record individuals unrelated to the active investigation. However, every video had recorded the full takeoff, flight, loitering, return flight and landing – capturing all of the people in SF going about their daily lives. One of the videos showed the drone hovering outside the windows of an apartment building while police schlepped around inside; if I lived there, would I have to worry about a drone appearing outside my window and recording me jerking it in the privacy of my own home? Would I even know it's a police drone, and would I be able to guarantee that the footage was deleted? Third, I can pull over and ask the cop why they're following me, or (more likely) just let them pass. A drone is just going to loiter there, waiting for me to commit whatever crime they think I'm committing. Finally, I hate to invoke the slippery slope argument here, but IMO it's warranted. It's easy to deploy drones wherever you want throughout the city; it's not easy to tail every vehicle waiting for them to commit a crime, just because you find them suspicious. If police find drones to be super effective at tailing all of the people they want to tail, why not buy more drones and just have them hover throughout the city perpetually so there isn't a square inch that goes unwatched?
- malfist 4mo ago> run around doing crime This is begging the question. You have not established that someone being surveilled by drones is engaged in crime. You are absolutely giving up privacy (essential liberty) for security in these cases. Drone cameras don't stop observing just because you're in your backyard, or in your house, or in a private area.
- maerF0x0 4mo ago[flagged]
- infecto 4mo agoWhat liberty does a drone with a camera break? Seems like a nice optimization on police resources.
- adolph 4mo ago'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings. https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/ https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/ See also "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime" The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character. https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Reynolds-113-Colum.-L.-Rev.-Sidebar-102.pdf https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Rey...
- infecto 4mo agoSo these are only being used on active calls. As I have said else where there is a line to draw on active calls and data mining. Having an eye on the sky for an active calls is a pretty nice use of resources and serves all parties. I am a big proponent that body cams should be required to be on for all calls. Not going to dig in either of those links because I suspect they go down the data mining route more like a flock less about active calls. If you would like to point out why these are bad for active calls I am all ears.
- adolph 4mo ago
- tqi 4mo agoYou know he was talking about taxes...
- technewssss 4mo agoSad to see. Here in Europe it's definitely not any better. Despite the GDPR’s safeguards, tech surveillance is set to become one of the defining civil liberties battlegrounds in across the World. Even with the EU AI act, the people of europe are significantly at risk.
- easytiger 4mo agoWait until you find out what the EU want/have asked the GAM trio of big tech corps to do to your phone and private messaging platforms. (Coincidentally they suddenly don't think so big an anti competition problem exists anymore).
- inigyou 4mo agoAre you referring to Chat Control 2.0 which has repeatedly failed to pass the Parliament and is illegal to implement today? Or to the requirement for RCS for which certificates are only issued to trusted parties?
- easytiger 3mo agoIncredibly in one comment you've managed to do all of 1. It's not happening 2. It's a good thing 3. Peddle false information Impressive
- Simulacra 4mo agoI remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes. They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time. It was really fascinating… In 2016. At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing. Instead of planes, they are using drones… https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-surveillance/ https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
- pineapplepizza6 4mo agoAn unmanned plane is also called a drone.
- bell-cot 4mo agoDrones are cheap & reliable. Vs. blimps, balloons, and such have repeatedly proven themselves quite fragile.
- inigyou 4mo agoQuadcopters, you mean? They are cheap, and reliable enough given that they are cheap, but that's all.
- tencentshill 4mo agoCheap while China allows them to be cheap.
- inigyou 4mo agoTrue, but that's true of everything. Western countries willingly forgot how to manufacture stuff.
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- cebert 4mo agoWith mass drone surveillance and online safety acts, we will finally be able to keep our children truly safe for the small cost of privacy.
- _davide_ 4mo agoTo balance it, the police need to be extremely accountable, but so far they get away with murder pretty easily...so...
- chrismcb 4mo agoAnd a couple of ES-209s as well
- vatsachak 4mo agoNow that's what we call bait
- rayiner 4mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 4mo ago"We're bringing the paranoid old biddy HOA worldview to everyone, non-consensually!" is your upside?
- dannyw 4mo ago> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs. https://archive.is/dychh https://archive.is/dychh
- lazide 4mo agoI mean, they evaluated and left? What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
- vrganj 4mo agoI can't help but wonder what skin color those young men had that made the police suspicious in the first place...
- lazide 4mo agoWell, everyone knows white boys can’t jump.
- stronglikedan 4mo ago[flagged]
- vrganj 4mo agoThanks! It's important to be aware of how unjust an organization who's origins are groups that hunt for escaped slaves is, and how fucked up the way they treat black people is to this very day.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
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- bobthebob 4mo agoHelicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?
- inigyou 4mo agoScale. The possibility of surveillance was far less worrying when three police officers had to tail you, because they'd only expend that effort when they were pretty sure you'd done a crime.
- maerF0x0 4mo agoSo we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians? I'd rather a drone follows the car until it stops and the police arrive to retrieve it and give a hand slap to the offender. I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
- inigyou 4mo agoConstraints can be good when they constrain both sides. E2EE chat protocols are good even though they effectively prohibit large groups, because they also prohibit intermediaries from reading your chats.
- jplusequalt 4mo ago>the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. >If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times. Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
- kotaKat 4mo agoAnd the amazing thing is that DJI was the ones lambasted for their shitty security practices. But here we are, with Skydio users openly using public sharing links to their drone feeds 24x7x365 apparently. Sounds like another vendor needs to get added to the Covered List, methinks, but the lobbyists won't let that one fly.
- inigyou 4mo agoOr rather, lobbyists will let it fly as long as it's got a camera.
- creaturemachine 4mo agoThe only thing insecure was the market position of the domestic competition.
- iamnothere 4mo agoUseful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau https://github.com/lc/gau
- ThatMedicIsASpy 4mo agoAm I missing something? I can click the 'article' but its a big picture and a single paragraph. That reads like a picture description.
- hutattedonmyarm 4mo agoThey paywalled the article, that’s why you can only see the first paragraph
- nozzlegear 4mo agoDidn't realize it was paywalled when I posted it. I read it in Apple News where it's not paywalled: https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
- maerF0x0 4mo ago>Exposes reality of urban surveillance Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ... This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ... The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.
- pluralmonad 4mo agoThere will always be those who make excuses for the panopticon. Is yours that reducing auto theft is worth the tradeoffs?
- maerF0x0 4mo agoAFAIK there is no right to privacy in public, no? What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used. Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically). In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
- infecto 4mo ago+1. I think having cameras is good. In this case these are active calls and it’s great for all parties. How it’s used after the fact is what matters imo. I could even get comfortable with tech like Flock if it was not so ripe for abuse.
- inigyou 4mo agoCivilized countries do have limited rights to privacy in public. For example, it may be illegal to publish a photograph of a person without their consent.
- aftbit 4mo agoGreat, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.
- infecto 4mo agoI don’t think I have a problem with drones. There is a line to be drawn regarding auditing access of footage and how we are analyzing it historically (prevent from misusing the tech) but for things like active reporting it has the potential to be pretty helpful. Cops used to be a lot more visible (or maybe greater in number) and this type of tech has the potential to help get that back. I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
- buellerbueller 4mo agoAll camera footage should be publicly available.
- Gigachad 4mo agoI really don’t agree. Especially in this day where anyone, or any business could run it all through AI and profile everyone to work out the exact best moment to send you a push notification for a Big Mac or whatever.
- infecto 4mo agoI think I agree. I think this is the type of data that should be able to be requested (and given if the context is correct) but not simply freely out there. Some third party commercial party will just use and abuse it.
- buellerbueller 4mo agoOk, thats simple: no commercial use licensing. This already exists, via various copyleft mechanisms.
- infecto 4mo agoAnd very easy to ignore. Not an easy solve. Once the cat is out of the bag you cannot put it back. Similar to how LLMs have massive training sets on copyright material.
- buellerbueller 4mo agoWhat are the safeguards that are in place here? What happens when this surveillance capability falls into the hands of an autocratic government?
- alistairSH 4mo agoSame as ALPRs and anything else related to policing. We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.
- emsign 4mo agoI think they also use planes with state of the art optics and cameras in other major US cities, especially before certain events, to go back in time later. If a crime happens they can trace back cars and suspects in the video archive. And I guess they might also do number plate recognition by default, to get even quicker results.
- scottlamb 4mo ago> In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.” In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras. That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
- ryandrake 4mo agoYea, "adheres to a strict policy" could mean anything. They have policies[1] posted publicly. I wonder if any of the footage will be found to violate their policies, and if so, what accountability looks like. 1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-department/drones https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...
- tim-tday 4mo agoNothing in this report indicates that policy was being broken. There was a misconfiguration of the tool. They didn’t realize that the internal sharing link was publicly accessible.
- scottlamb 4mo agoI read ryandrake's comment as saying this accidental sharing is a rare opportunity for wired to audit actual video of (some) drone use, and they might yet review it more and find some drone use policy violation not obvious from flight logs alone. I agree that if that happens, it'd be very interesting to see how the violation is handled. But since you brought it up, SFPD should also have a policy on when they share drone footage, and I'm going to assume they violated that. In this case I think it's reasonable to take them at their word that it was accidental and they are learning from it. And I'd be a lot more concerned anyway if it were ubiquitous surveillance of ordinary citizens, not just incidental captures during scoped, presumed legitimate operations.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoI'm sure this wont be misused frequently with total impunity, right?
- tim-tday 4mo agoI have a healthy mistrust of authority and surveillance and police. As far as I can tell this program is addressing a real crime problem in SF, it is getting real criminals off the streets and helping police do their jobs. If some policeman abuses his authority and misuses the tech we should 100% prosecute them for that crime. There is as yet no report of a police officer misusing that tech. There are however thousands of examples of police using that tech to arrest real criminals, criminals who commit property crime and violent crime. Those people are off the streets. I am cautiously optimistic about this program and so far fully support it. We should pay some pen testers to attempt to misuse the system and see if the internal controls are sufficient to catch them.
- tavavex 4mo agoI strongly disagree. For one, people don't just have an issue with individual cops abusing that power, it's just one of the easiest things to point to and one of the most common types of misuse that occurs in real life. The bigger issue is that drones are extremely cheap, and there is nothing limiting their use to actual crimes. It starts as cautiously testing the waters by using the drones to assist people in hunting down actual crime, but there is nothing to prevent it from being scaled into a precrime mass surveillance machine. Much the opposite, this would make the job of the police a lot easier, so if drone surveillance is fully entrenched in our societies, they will start incrementally pushing for it. Do you not see the issue? But let's also come back to the individuals misusing drones argument - something that's a lot more immediate and perceptible. Whenever there's arguments about expanding police powers, proponents always hand-wave these concerns by suggesting that some systematic or technological changes be made. But neither the police nor the government above them have an incentive to do these things beyond the shallowed need for good PR. Police would like the least restrictions and oversight on their actions to 'increase efficiency', governments would like the same to squash 100% of crime. There's no mechanism that moves the ratchet back. You know these measures will not be implemented. The only method to prevent this that seems powerful enough seems to be denying them the power altogether. Most importantly, it frustrates me that in these arguments, it's always presented as a two-choice space. Either you get the status quo, or the incredibly dangerous new mass surveillance tech. Crime waves have existed in the past. How did cops manage to deal with them without a thousand eyes quietly recording everyone doing everything? In many places, crime has been going down well before any mass surveillance doodads could even have existed. Don't you think there's other actions that can be taken to improve things outside of just allowing them whatever they want?
- NoSalt 4mo agoJames Cameron is prophetic: https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel
- charlie90 4mo agoOn the other hand, https://youtu.be/iY4nx5zuvPA?si=rrPxlC92sUDJYvmO https://youtu.be/iY4nx5zuvPA?si=rrPxlC92sUDJYvmO. SFPD posts a number of videos showing that drones are stopping crime, violent crime.