9 ms·

Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

148 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

dmoo 14y ago
Maybe it's time to move some where with a lot of fog and rain. You could also encourage everyone to buy the same umbrella just to make it challenging for this thing...
SparrowOS 14y ago
Relax! God's right here! The world is perfectly just. God says... Replacement So This_is_confusing gate attain imprinted educated comforting sentences awaiting deepness sufficiently scroll thee vacation discovereth knocked narrower I'm_off_today replenish stories 98 etext00 insultingly spunky vintage-vacation excellency overcast chastened prayed miss thirtieth One possesses preferable conquered affects bestowed restrainest feeling field Was surprise_surprise what_a_mess condemned Jove sheep obeying rights precede Austria stumble tide contrition turned Cherubim banquetings commandeth abhorring freely hinder diving sons' Watch_this -unto narrower rested effect loosen ordered kindred opening wail unsound render strongholds ebb blood bitterness Files
mc32 14y ago
If this has the ability to track a good fraction of people from home to work in a given metro area, this could be a boon for optimizing traffic/transit resources and urban planning in general. If I were a DoT, I'd want this. W/re privacy. It's only a few years away from private companies having this tech available. So a bigger concern might be abuse of this information by an unregulated market.
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  Interesting point, but how does implementing a technology prevents others from doing the same? I would think if it needs to be regulated then new laws need to be written.
  - mc32 14y ago
    I would compare laws to stifle innovation in this field as effective as laws attempting to prevent SW copyright violation, or as effective as laws aimed at proscribing what you may and may not do on the internet. Aside from regulation, in this case the FAA could regulate this as their domain, I don't see why others could not. Anyhow, eventually this could improve such that it could be done from satellites. Since there is less regulation there (national and international) it could get a bit tricky.
    - notimetorelax 14y ago
      > FAA could regulate this as their domain This is similar to having a law and FAA enforcing it. They don't need to have the tech to prohibit others from using it. Surveillance satellites is a whole other can of works IMHO.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - mc32 14y ago
    It definitely has lots of possible good uses. It remains to be seen if some of the capabilities get abused and if they do whether people judge that as too high a price for the conveniences, or if they judge it to be, on the whole, worthwhile given the benefits (mostly conjecture till implemented, at this point). If they could put this along the drug routes (if they can deal with the difficulties of monitoring over water) this could have the potential to strangle superficial (surface) drug routes (now that small subs are gaining popularity with traffickers, maybe this would not matter much). Also could be used to cut down on cross border human trafficking. Certainly, it would seem, tracking a suspect just became much easier and in the future, cheaper then deploying a whole team of people on the ground staking someone out. Altho, I imagine, they would need to have multiple signals to have more certainty that they know who's who.
    - richardjordan 14y ago
      > It remains to be seen if some of the capabilities get abused I think it's axiomatic that whenever the tools for oppression are put in place it's only a matter of time before they are used. It'll start with something simple. Some national outrage which the party in government responds to by deploying the drones. Then it'll become normalized. And soon enough it'll become "but what have you to fear if you have nothing to hide" - which in a country with so many ways for everyday citizens to be in breach of its byzantine laws really means it becomes almost discretionary whether you're picked up for one thing or another unless you conform to the whims of the ruling elite. I think Europeans (of which I am one, prior to becoming an American) tend to have a closer relationship to the abuse of totalitarian tools under the guise of good intentions (particularly those of us over a certain age).
    - alan_cx 14y ago
      I don't care what the good is. I simply don't want to be policed by robots. And yes, I object to a lot of what is already deployed, including CCTV, speed cameras, etc. I don't mind so much on private sites, but it should never happen in public space unless, IMHO, its for a limited operation of some sort. Reading your contribution makes me think you have been willingly "divided" off in to one camp. For you its border protection. Other will have other issues, drugs, immigrants, terrorists, poor people, ghetto control.... Even so, the second you give an inch, the authorities will encourage mission creep. Then those who approved of the original spin will begin to disapprove, but by then, damage will be done and it will be far too late to reverse it. See, Im willing to be that the would be many who would approve of these things being armed and taking down targets on US soil. The public will accept it, until granny is taken out. If we carry on this way, it wont be long until we are all required to carry trackers so some creepy organisation can follow us 24/7 on bloody google maps. What continually worries me is watching old dystopian scifi films. They are like a check list of today's society. Watch them a year later and you'll be able to tick off more. But, then, we do keep consenting to it. We do keep voting for it. So, I guess we want it. And who am I to object to the democratic will of the people?
- coldtea 14y ago
  >If this has the ability to track a good fraction of people from home to work in a given metro area, this could be a boon for optimizing traffic/transit resources and urban planning in general. If I were a DoT, I'd want this. Yes, definitely, this is what they are gonna use it for... to make your transport better...
jchavannes 14y ago
Previous ARGUS discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129332 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129332
jmeekr 14y ago
I'm trying to keep the Orwellian thoughts out of my head, but this skips a few steps of creepiness for me. Is this even deemed legal/illegal?
- richardjordan 14y ago
  We live in a nation which likes civil rights in the abstract but not in the implementation. This causes us all to lose. A plurality exists to clamp down on many freedoms. Use cases to deny first amendment rights are popularized - heck our biggest media companies built on the back of the first amendment now wish to see it neutered. Gun rights folks want the Obama administration to pursue second amendment restrictions, yet some of those most vocal about protecting such freedoms cheered on the Bush administration when it wanted to clamp down on speech, or when gay rights pushes are defeated. Security. Think of the children. Moral outrage. etc The rich powerful elites have successfully divided the nation to such a degree that they can push through any invasive law they like because they can always bundle together enough of us who hate enough more of us to gain a plurality in its support. More usually they don't need that even. They have the political class in pocket and when it comes to election we have no vote outside of the gerrymandered two sides of the same party system. Rambling but you get my point.
  - jmeekr 14y ago
    I agree and have a hard time convincing friends/family, polarized on either side, this same point. The agenda of the elites is being advanced by whichever party will take the lowest bid. And cleverly enough this just keeps us pitted against each other while allowing for small victories/defeats, depending on what side your on. I wonder if Roman/British common folk had discussions like these while they watched helplessly..
    - richardjordan 14y ago
      Bread & circuses.
  - alan_cx 14y ago
    Um, well, we know. Well, I know. You know. Others seem to know. We are not special people with special knowledge. So we must presume every one, or at least a majority know. Unless of course we clever people want to label them ignorant, or what ever. So, tell me, why are "we" voting for this? At some point, those with the vote need to take some responsibility for what we are voting for, and stop blaming those we give a mandate to.
cromwellian 14y ago
I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve. It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as ARGUS is centralized and easier to regulate, but the way people are sharing more and more of their life stream, it's probably going to be possible for organizations that watch social networks to track people's movements. I wonder if in some ways, this is a return to a kind of prehistoric small tribal life of everyone knowing where everyone is and what they are doing, and if anonymity and privacy of movement that we cherish is somewhat of a later invention at agriculture, and that modern technology is just increasing the size of our tribe.
- tekromancr 14y ago
  What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.
  - WA 14y ago
    All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
  - logn 14y ago
    No, this means that petty street crime, protests, rallys, etc. are being monitored but closed-door talks between politicians, lobbyists, and finance execs are not. It's directly targeting the blue-collar outdoors and protecting the white-collar. But in reality this isn't about fighting crime even. It's about making money. It's no secret that our wars our dying down. How will the drone manufacturers make money? They re-purpose their inventions for use at home and they'll begin selling them to foreign allies who will re-sell them to foreign enemies. Add to that the tremendous manpower behind these drones and there's billions to be made.
    - 14y ago
owksley 14y ago
This is, alas, the inevitable consequence of the technological progression that most of us here strive towards on a daily basis.
- hype7 14y ago
  And it's also why we shouldn't just be focused on creating the technology, but we should be increasingly focused on the system (society) into which it is being placed.
  - vdm 14y ago
    ... or art which helps people imagine it.
yk 14y ago
A 1.8 Gpixel sensor has at 24 frames/s and 24 bit/pixel a data rate of nearly a TBit/s. So I would actually like to see, how they are handling such a data rate (inside of the drone). And how they actually get the data out of the drone. And to look a bit more into this numbers ( and using the numbers from Backblaze [1]) it seems that the uncompressed video of a single drone over a year would cost $1.5e9, of course divided by the compression ratio. However for 14 days of video the storage cost would be in the ballpark of $60M per drone, that sounds actually quite possible ( especially given an additional factor of ~20 lower costs due to compression and a similar factor of ~20 for five years of HD development). So this seems actually be technology which could on a timescale of five years be available at costs comparable to two or three police cars (plus the costs of the drone, which should be in a similar range). And I for one find this quite creepy. [1]roughly $50/TB http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration...
- confluence 14y ago
  The vast majority of the image doesn't change too much between frames. I'm no image compressing genius but calculating only the deltas between frames and transmitting only those pixels that actually change by an order of magnitude (with some type of filter) should dramatically reduce bandwidth and storage size and cost by an order of magnitude. Kind of like a large number of small git commits for slowly changing data - store large amounts of mostly duplicated data with progressive delta changes.
  - yk 14y ago
    It would of course be compressed, but I have the least confidence in the estimate in the compression ratio which is achievable in such a setting. So I did only add it in a handwaving way in the end.
- brigade 14y ago
  1.8 Gpixel sensors don't exist, due to physics. It's combining 368 sensors. No one stores or transmits uncompressed video outside of RAM. 15Mbps is decent for 1080p24, so 1.8 Gpixel 24fps would be decent at 15Gbps. Assuming say 14 hours of daylight (drones can't stay up indefinitely and night vision has different requirements), that's no more than ~100 TB per mission or day. As for getting the data out, I'd assume they swap an array of 50 HDs or so.
richardjordan 14y ago
I am sure the audience on here is mostly already familiar with the Panopticon, but it sure feels like our society is becoming it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
cantbecool 14y ago
What's the motive behind the U.S. government revealing this to the public? I can't seem to logically come to any conclusion.
- motters 14y ago
  To prepare people for what's coming in the next 5-10 years. If cities become panopticons overnight that would induce a greater degree of alarm and popular resistance to the idea. Introducing things gradually such that people become habituated is less likely to result in significant pushback.
namuol 14y ago
What about night surveillance? I doubt night-vision is possible at that altitude.
- lutusp 14y ago
  Of course it is. "Nght" (infrared) vision is possible in space, and anywhere else. Infrared light isn't limited to (or by) the atmosphere. In fact, infrared satellite images played an important part in the Bin Laden raid.
cromwellian 14y ago
The JSTARS aircraft which has been around for 20+ years is kind of interesting as a forerunner. It can track 600 ground targets (vehicles) over 50,000 sq km using radar. This was 20 years ago, and that is the unclassified portion. We don't really know how it's improved since then, or how many simultaneous targets it can actually track in 2012. During the DC Sniper incident, they were debating posse comitatus and whether or not to bring one of these craft into action to track cars in the vicinity of a reported sniper attack.
- gwern 14y ago
  Could JSTARS-like systems be on the RC-7Bs reportedly deployed (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1410493/Army-spy-planes-join-widened-hunt-for-Kalashnikov-sniper.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...)?
jrogers65 14y ago
Off-topic: I love SparrowOS's (dead) comments - they're so off the cuff and random. Trying to make sense of them is like doing a really hard crossword puzzle. I have noticed one thing about them, however - when he speaks as himself they make complete sense. E.g. > I had a problem with discipline. I worked at Ticketmaster while in college, but I know I wouldn't have studied more, just knowing my personal psychology. > If you love programming more than anything, you are probably the kind of person who wants to know assembly language. If your full heart is not into programming, maybe not. > I wrote my own compiler. Doesn't use REGs to pass values to functions. They only become incomprehensible when he is relaying, as he puts it, what God says. E.g. > Replacement So This_is_confusing gate attain imprinted educated comforting sentences awaiting deepness sufficiently scroll thee vacation discovereth knocked narrower I'm_off_today replenish stories 98 etext00 insultingly spunky vintage-vacation excellency overcast chastened prayed miss thirtieth One possesses preferable conquered affects bestowed restrainest feeling field Was surprise_surprise what_a_mess condemned Jove sheep obeying rights precede Austria stumble tide contrition turned Cherubim banquetings commandeth abhorring freely hinder diving sons' Watch_this -unto narrower rested effect loosen ordered kindred opening wail unsound render strongholds ebb blood bitterness Files It seems almost like his thinking is split into two modes - one rational and the other a stream of consciousness. The first makes sense to the rest of us since there are commonalities which we can relate to (i.e. logic) but the second must contain a great deal of personal references which only he can understand the meaning of. "God's words" are his feelings put into text in a completely unfiltered way.
- sciurus 14y ago
  There was a discussion with him in this metafilter comment thread which you may find interesting. http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Songs-from-God http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...
tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Presumably named after this fellow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes
uptown 14y ago
This is the state of consumer-level tech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mDsgJaAwE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mDsgJaAwE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCqLWq1nr4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCqLWq1nr4 (notice the stabilizer)
greghinch 14y ago
Eh, the UK has had cameras covering every square inch of their cities for years, hasn't turned into a dystopian hell scape yet
- unkoman 14y ago
  It can't become what it already is.
- veb 14y ago
  That's probably because they can't actually see anything on their cameras or man them very well.
daniel-cussen 14y ago
Enhance...enhance...
jrochkind1 14y ago
I expected the 'drone nightmare scenario' would be when they kill us, not just look at us. You know, like folks in parts of Pakistan are already living.
bane 14y ago
With pervasive cameras everywhere, your only hope is that your signal gets lost in the noise.
mrleinad 14y ago
"You're being watched. The government has a secret system. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day."
- chill1 14y ago
  Are we talking about drones or cell phones?
shoki 14y ago
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi talked about this sort of fear a few years ago in his boot Bursts[1]. He figured Google would be the one to do it. Even with dropouts occurring when someone goes into a bus, people's movements tend to have low entropy[2]. Since most people's movements follow pretty predictable routines, over time the system can learn to predict most people's positions given noisy data. It might not work well for criminals trying to avoid being seen by arial cameras during the day, hiding out away from their usual haunts and obscuring their faces. It will probably be a big win for marketing data analytics firms. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Patterns-Everything-mail-Crusades/dp/B0064XDKTA http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Patterns-Everything-mail-Crusad... [2] http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201002-19_Science-Predictability/201002-19_Science-Predictability.pdf http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201002...
ctdonath 14y ago
4th Amendment anyone? ...anyone?
- logn 14y ago
  It's been steadily eroded after a couple hundred years of court cases. It's really depressing to see almost all our constitutional rights now gone by this same process. When the government can explain their right to kill citizens extra-judicially in 16 pages, something's gone wrong. I think we need a second bill of rights which re-establishes our rights in detail (and updates them for the digital age) and explicitly voids all contradicting precedence. That should last us another 200 years. Specifically to your point, from what I know, surveillance is ok in public places. These drones clearly violate that since they could be watching your backyard BBQ. Worse, they could peer through skylights, into courtyards, through your sunroof, etc. But I'm sure the wise judges will find another reason based on precedent that this is ok.
brownbat 14y ago
Just listened to the last two episodes of This American Life, about a school in Chicago where there have been 29 kids shot over the last year.[1] On seeing this, immediately wondered if you could combine drones with gunshot detection systems.[2] The drone could hone in on gunshots and follow any vehicle in a drive by in real time without a dangerous car chase.[3] By implication, the drone "nightmare" scenario probably kicks in in full when we all put license plates on roofs. On the upside, no more drive-bys. We stop raising whole classes of kids with PTSD. On the downside, the returns are probably greater for police who use drones to monitor traffic offenses. So we're probably immediately fined $700 for any rolling stop. Worse case, drones network with traffic signals to turn lights red right before we pass through.[4] I'm conflicted. I know there's a famous quote about people who trade privacy for security, and how they're all Nazis. But I'm really on board with helping those kids. I know that before Miranda and some similar cases, there was an epidemic of rubber hose interrogations in police station backrooms. I know there's still a lot of improvement to be made, but some simple changes in the courtroom made sweeping changes to the ways law enforcement interacted with suspects. Maybe some legal scholar can come up with a few guidelines that help the police to use these sorts of technologies to do some good, while still restricting their ability to abuse them. 1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_(countermeasure) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_(countermeasure) 3. Chase related crashes from just the last few months: http://theadvocate.com/news/police/4714718-123/police-chase-ends-with-fatal http://theadvocate.com/news/police/4714718-123/police-chase-... http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=8954550 http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=... http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-4-cars-crash-in-police-chase-near-hendricks-county http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-4-cars-... http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/breaking/chi-suspects-car-crashes-after-police-chase-2-hurt-20130211,0,1604618.story http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/breaking/chi-suspects-car-... 4. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/red_light_cams_red_light_cam_0NJ954EGA2bSvVQcalErXJ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/red_light_cams_red_light_...
- ahallock 14y ago
mrdub 14y ago
If you want to see the kinds of tech research the military has been funding for the ARGUS platform: http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/technology?term=argus http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/technology?term=argus A few of these include: Near-realtime Forensic Analysis Capabilities for Moving Target Indicator (MTI) Data High Resolution 3D Reconstruction from Wide-Area Video Wide Area Video Image Storage Techniques
drucken 14y ago
Mass surveillance of individuals by governments in many developed countries is already done via the mobile phone system, and increasingly even by private companies via smartphones. That cat has been out of the bag for a long time. Drones are just one more cog in this respect.
Cieplak 14y ago
I wonder how long it will take for these to start issuing speeding tickets.

148 points by jamesbritt 14y ago

dmoo 14y ago

Maybe it's time to move some where with a lot of fog and rain. You could also encourage everyone to buy the same umbrella just to make it challenging for this thing...

SparrowOS 14y ago

Relax! God's right here! The world is perfectly just. God says... Replacement So This_is_confusing gate attain imprinted educated comforting sentences awaiting deepness sufficiently scroll thee vacation discovereth knocked narrower I'm_off_today replenish stories 98 etext00 insultingly spunky vintage-vacation excellency overcast chastened prayed miss thirtieth One possesses preferable conquered affects bestowed restrainest feeling field Was surprise_surprise what_a_mess condemned Jove sheep obeying rights precede Austria stumble tide contrition turned Cherubim banquetings commandeth abhorring freely hinder diving sons' Watch_this -unto narrower rested effect loosen ordered kindred opening wail unsound render strongholds ebb blood bitterness Files

mc32 14y ago

If this has the ability to track a good fraction of people from home to work in a given metro area, this could be a boon for optimizing traffic/transit resources and urban planning in general. If I were a DoT, I'd want this. W/re privacy. It's only a few years away from private companies having this tech available. So a bigger concern might be abuse of this information by an unregulated market.

notimetorelax 14y ago
Interesting point, but how does implementing a technology prevents others from doing the same? I would think if it needs to be regulated then new laws need to be written.
- mc32 14y ago
  I would compare laws to stifle innovation in this field as effective as laws attempting to prevent SW copyright violation, or as effective as laws aimed at proscribing what you may and may not do on the internet. Aside from regulation, in this case the FAA could regulate this as their domain, I don't see why others could not. Anyhow, eventually this could improve such that it could be done from satellites. Since there is less regulation there (national and international) it could get a bit tricky.
  - notimetorelax 14y ago
    > FAA could regulate this as their domain This is similar to having a law and FAA enforcing it. They don't need to have the tech to prohibit others from using it. Surveillance satellites is a whole other can of works IMHO.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- mc32 14y ago
  It definitely has lots of possible good uses. It remains to be seen if some of the capabilities get abused and if they do whether people judge that as too high a price for the conveniences, or if they judge it to be, on the whole, worthwhile given the benefits (mostly conjecture till implemented, at this point). If they could put this along the drug routes (if they can deal with the difficulties of monitoring over water) this could have the potential to strangle superficial (surface) drug routes (now that small subs are gaining popularity with traffickers, maybe this would not matter much). Also could be used to cut down on cross border human trafficking. Certainly, it would seem, tracking a suspect just became much easier and in the future, cheaper then deploying a whole team of people on the ground staking someone out. Altho, I imagine, they would need to have multiple signals to have more certainty that they know who's who.
  - richardjordan 14y ago
    > It remains to be seen if some of the capabilities get abused I think it's axiomatic that whenever the tools for oppression are put in place it's only a matter of time before they are used. It'll start with something simple. Some national outrage which the party in government responds to by deploying the drones. Then it'll become normalized. And soon enough it'll become "but what have you to fear if you have nothing to hide" - which in a country with so many ways for everyday citizens to be in breach of its byzantine laws really means it becomes almost discretionary whether you're picked up for one thing or another unless you conform to the whims of the ruling elite. I think Europeans (of which I am one, prior to becoming an American) tend to have a closer relationship to the abuse of totalitarian tools under the guise of good intentions (particularly those of us over a certain age).
  - alan_cx 14y ago
    I don't care what the good is. I simply don't want to be policed by robots. And yes, I object to a lot of what is already deployed, including CCTV, speed cameras, etc. I don't mind so much on private sites, but it should never happen in public space unless, IMHO, its for a limited operation of some sort. Reading your contribution makes me think you have been willingly "divided" off in to one camp. For you its border protection. Other will have other issues, drugs, immigrants, terrorists, poor people, ghetto control.... Even so, the second you give an inch, the authorities will encourage mission creep. Then those who approved of the original spin will begin to disapprove, but by then, damage will be done and it will be far too late to reverse it. See, Im willing to be that the would be many who would approve of these things being armed and taking down targets on US soil. The public will accept it, until granny is taken out. If we carry on this way, it wont be long until we are all required to carry trackers so some creepy organisation can follow us 24/7 on bloody google maps. What continually worries me is watching old dystopian scifi films. They are like a check list of today's society. Watch them a year later and you'll be able to tick off more. But, then, we do keep consenting to it. We do keep voting for it. So, I guess we want it. And who am I to object to the democratic will of the people?
coldtea 14y ago
>If this has the ability to track a good fraction of people from home to work in a given metro area, this could be a boon for optimizing traffic/transit resources and urban planning in general. If I were a DoT, I'd want this. Yes, definitely, this is what they are gonna use it for... to make your transport better...

jchavannes 14y ago

Previous ARGUS discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129332 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5129332

jmeekr 14y ago

I'm trying to keep the Orwellian thoughts out of my head, but this skips a few steps of creepiness for me. Is this even deemed legal/illegal?

richardjordan 14y ago
We live in a nation which likes civil rights in the abstract but not in the implementation. This causes us all to lose. A plurality exists to clamp down on many freedoms. Use cases to deny first amendment rights are popularized - heck our biggest media companies built on the back of the first amendment now wish to see it neutered. Gun rights folks want the Obama administration to pursue second amendment restrictions, yet some of those most vocal about protecting such freedoms cheered on the Bush administration when it wanted to clamp down on speech, or when gay rights pushes are defeated. Security. Think of the children. Moral outrage. etc The rich powerful elites have successfully divided the nation to such a degree that they can push through any invasive law they like because they can always bundle together enough of us who hate enough more of us to gain a plurality in its support. More usually they don't need that even. They have the political class in pocket and when it comes to election we have no vote outside of the gerrymandered two sides of the same party system. Rambling but you get my point.
- jmeekr 14y ago
  I agree and have a hard time convincing friends/family, polarized on either side, this same point. The agenda of the elites is being advanced by whichever party will take the lowest bid. And cleverly enough this just keeps us pitted against each other while allowing for small victories/defeats, depending on what side your on. I wonder if Roman/British common folk had discussions like these while they watched helplessly..
  - richardjordan 14y ago
    Bread & circuses.
- alan_cx 14y ago
  Um, well, we know. Well, I know. You know. Others seem to know. We are not special people with special knowledge. So we must presume every one, or at least a majority know. Unless of course we clever people want to label them ignorant, or what ever. So, tell me, why are "we" voting for this? At some point, those with the vote need to take some responsibility for what we are voting for, and stop blaming those we give a mandate to.

cromwellian 14y ago

I'm afraid the genie is out of the bottle. ARGUS uses mobile phone sensors. Cameras are becoming almost "too cheap to meter", and too small to notice. Billions of people now walk around with mobile phone cameras, so chances are you're going to be recorded by someone in public, especially as cameras continue to evolve. It may be some small consolation that consumer cameras are ground level, and decentralized, where as ARGUS is centralized and easier to regulate, but the way people are sharing more and more of their life stream, it's probably going to be possible for organizations that watch social networks to track people's movements. I wonder if in some ways, this is a return to a kind of prehistoric small tribal life of everyone knowing where everyone is and what they are doing, and if anonymity and privacy of movement that we cherish is somewhat of a later invention at agriculture, and that modern technology is just increasing the size of our tribe.

tekromancr 14y ago
What if we went the completely opposite way? Forgo ALL privacy? Everyone has access to everyone else's data and metrics. If the genie is all ready out of the bottle, this might be the best outcome.
- WA 14y ago
  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
- logn 14y ago
  No, this means that petty street crime, protests, rallys, etc. are being monitored but closed-door talks between politicians, lobbyists, and finance execs are not. It's directly targeting the blue-collar outdoors and protecting the white-collar. But in reality this isn't about fighting crime even. It's about making money. It's no secret that our wars our dying down. How will the drone manufacturers make money? They re-purpose their inventions for use at home and they'll begin selling them to foreign allies who will re-sell them to foreign enemies. Add to that the tremendous manpower behind these drones and there's billions to be made.
  - 14y ago

owksley 14y ago

This is, alas, the inevitable consequence of the technological progression that most of us here strive towards on a daily basis.

hype7 14y ago
And it's also why we shouldn't just be focused on creating the technology, but we should be increasingly focused on the system (society) into which it is being placed.
- vdm 14y ago
  ... or art which helps people imagine it.

yk 14y ago

A 1.8 Gpixel sensor has at 24 frames/s and 24 bit/pixel a data rate of nearly a TBit/s. So I would actually like to see, how they are handling such a data rate (inside of the drone). And how they actually get the data out of the drone. And to look a bit more into this numbers ( and using the numbers from Backblaze [1]) it seems that the uncompressed video of a single drone over a year would cost $1.5e9, of course divided by the compression ratio. However for 14 days of video the storage cost would be in the ballpark of $60M per drone, that sounds actually quite possible ( especially given an additional factor of ~20 lower costs due to compression and a similar factor of ~20 for five years of HD development). So this seems actually be technology which could on a timescale of five years be available at costs comparable to two or three police cars (plus the costs of the drone, which should be in a similar range). And I for one find this quite creepy. [1]roughly $50/TB http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration...

confluence 14y ago
The vast majority of the image doesn't change too much between frames. I'm no image compressing genius but calculating only the deltas between frames and transmitting only those pixels that actually change by an order of magnitude (with some type of filter) should dramatically reduce bandwidth and storage size and cost by an order of magnitude. Kind of like a large number of small git commits for slowly changing data - store large amounts of mostly duplicated data with progressive delta changes.
- yk 14y ago
  It would of course be compressed, but I have the least confidence in the estimate in the compression ratio which is achievable in such a setting. So I did only add it in a handwaving way in the end.
brigade 14y ago
1.8 Gpixel sensors don't exist, due to physics. It's combining 368 sensors. No one stores or transmits uncompressed video outside of RAM. 15Mbps is decent for 1080p24, so 1.8 Gpixel 24fps would be decent at 15Gbps. Assuming say 14 hours of daylight (drones can't stay up indefinitely and night vision has different requirements), that's no more than ~100 TB per mission or day. As for getting the data out, I'd assume they swap an array of 50 HDs or so.

richardjordan 14y ago

I am sure the audience on here is mostly already familiar with the Panopticon, but it sure feels like our society is becoming it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

cantbecool 14y ago

What's the motive behind the U.S. government revealing this to the public? I can't seem to logically come to any conclusion.

motters 14y ago
To prepare people for what's coming in the next 5-10 years. If cities become panopticons overnight that would induce a greater degree of alarm and popular resistance to the idea. Introducing things gradually such that people become habituated is less likely to result in significant pushback.

namuol 14y ago

What about night surveillance? I doubt night-vision is possible at that altitude.

lutusp 14y ago
Of course it is. "Nght" (infrared) vision is possible in space, and anywhere else. Infrared light isn't limited to (or by) the atmosphere. In fact, infrared satellite images played an important part in the Bin Laden raid.

cromwellian 14y ago

The JSTARS aircraft which has been around for 20+ years is kind of interesting as a forerunner. It can track 600 ground targets (vehicles) over 50,000 sq km using radar. This was 20 years ago, and that is the unclassified portion. We don't really know how it's improved since then, or how many simultaneous targets it can actually track in 2012. During the DC Sniper incident, they were debating posse comitatus and whether or not to bring one of these craft into action to track cars in the vicinity of a reported sniper attack.

gwern 14y ago
Could JSTARS-like systems be on the RC-7Bs reportedly deployed (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1410493/Army-spy-planes-join-widened-hunt-for-Kalashnikov-sniper.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...)?

jrogers65 14y ago

Off-topic: I love SparrowOS's (dead) comments - they're so off the cuff and random. Trying to make sense of them is like doing a really hard crossword puzzle. I have noticed one thing about them, however - when he speaks as himself they make complete sense. E.g. > I had a problem with discipline. I worked at Ticketmaster while in college, but I know I wouldn't have studied more, just knowing my personal psychology. > If you love programming more than anything, you are probably the kind of person who wants to know assembly language. If your full heart is not into programming, maybe not. > I wrote my own compiler. Doesn't use REGs to pass values to functions. They only become incomprehensible when he is relaying, as he puts it, what God says. E.g. > Replacement So This_is_confusing gate attain imprinted educated comforting sentences awaiting deepness sufficiently scroll thee vacation discovereth knocked narrower I'm_off_today replenish stories 98 etext00 insultingly spunky vintage-vacation excellency overcast chastened prayed miss thirtieth One possesses preferable conquered affects bestowed restrainest feeling field Was surprise_surprise what_a_mess condemned Jove sheep obeying rights precede Austria stumble tide contrition turned Cherubim banquetings commandeth abhorring freely hinder diving sons' Watch_this -unto narrower rested effect loosen ordered kindred opening wail unsound render strongholds ebb blood bitterness Files It seems almost like his thinking is split into two modes - one rational and the other a stream of consciousness. The first makes sense to the rest of us since there are commonalities which we can relate to (i.e. logic) but the second must contain a great deal of personal references which only he can understand the meaning of. "God's words" are his feelings put into text in a completely unfiltered way.

sciurus 14y ago
There was a discussion with him in this metafilter comment thread which you may find interesting. http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Songs-from-God http://www.metafilter.com/119424/An-Operating-System-for-Son...

tragomaskhalos 14y ago

Presumably named after this fellow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argus_Panoptes

uptown 14y ago

This is the state of consumer-level tech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PKG8q94D98 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mDsgJaAwE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1mDsgJaAwE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCqLWq1nr4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvCqLWq1nr4 (notice the stabilizer)

greghinch 14y ago

Eh, the UK has had cameras covering every square inch of their cities for years, hasn't turned into a dystopian hell scape yet

unkoman 14y ago
It can't become what it already is.
veb 14y ago
That's probably because they can't actually see anything on their cameras or man them very well.

daniel-cussen 14y ago

Enhance...enhance...

jrochkind1 14y ago

I expected the 'drone nightmare scenario' would be when they kill us, not just look at us. You know, like folks in parts of Pakistan are already living.

bane 14y ago

With pervasive cameras everywhere, your only hope is that your signal gets lost in the noise.

mrleinad 14y ago

"You're being watched. The government has a secret system. A machine that spies on you every hour of every day."

chill1 14y ago
Are we talking about drones or cell phones?

shoki 14y ago

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi talked about this sort of fear a few years ago in his boot Bursts[1]. He figured Google would be the one to do it. Even with dropouts occurring when someone goes into a bus, people's movements tend to have low entropy[2]. Since most people's movements follow pretty predictable routines, over time the system can learn to predict most people's positions given noisy data. It might not work well for criminals trying to avoid being seen by arial cameras during the day, hiding out away from their usual haunts and obscuring their faces. It will probably be a big win for marketing data analytics firms. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Patterns-Everything-mail-Crusades/dp/B0064XDKTA http://www.amazon.com/Bursts-Patterns-Everything-mail-Crusad... [2] http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201002-19_Science-Predictability/201002-19_Science-Predictability.pdf http://www.barabasilab.com/pubs/CCNR-ALB_Publications/201002...

ctdonath 14y ago

4th Amendment anyone? ...anyone?

logn 14y ago
It's been steadily eroded after a couple hundred years of court cases. It's really depressing to see almost all our constitutional rights now gone by this same process. When the government can explain their right to kill citizens extra-judicially in 16 pages, something's gone wrong. I think we need a second bill of rights which re-establishes our rights in detail (and updates them for the digital age) and explicitly voids all contradicting precedence. That should last us another 200 years. Specifically to your point, from what I know, surveillance is ok in public places. These drones clearly violate that since they could be watching your backyard BBQ. Worse, they could peer through skylights, into courtyards, through your sunroof, etc. But I'm sure the wise judges will find another reason based on precedent that this is ok.

brownbat 14y ago

Just listened to the last two episodes of This American Life, about a school in Chicago where there have been 29 kids shot over the last year.[1] On seeing this, immediately wondered if you could combine drones with gunshot detection systems.[2] The drone could hone in on gunshots and follow any vehicle in a drive by in real time without a dangerous car chase.[3] By implication, the drone "nightmare" scenario probably kicks in in full when we all put license plates on roofs. On the upside, no more drive-bys. We stop raising whole classes of kids with PTSD. On the downside, the returns are probably greater for police who use drones to monitor traffic offenses. So we're probably immediately fined $700 for any rolling stop. Worse case, drones network with traffic signals to turn lights red right before we pass through.[4] I'm conflicted. I know there's a famous quote about people who trade privacy for security, and how they're all Nazis. But I'm really on board with helping those kids. I know that before Miranda and some similar cases, there was an epidemic of rubber hose interrogations in police station backrooms. I know there's still a lot of improvement to be made, but some simple changes in the courtroom made sweeping changes to the ways law enforcement interacted with suspects. Maybe some legal scholar can come up with a few guidelines that help the police to use these sorts of technologies to do some good, while still restricting their ability to abuse them. 1. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/h... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_(countermeasure) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boomerang_(countermeasure) 3. Chase related crashes from just the last few months: http://theadvocate.com/news/police/4714718-123/police-chase-ends-with-fatal http://theadvocate.com/news/police/4714718-123/police-chase-... http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=8954550 http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=... http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-4-cars-crash-in-police-chase-near-hendricks-county http://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/police-4-cars-... http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/breaking/chi-suspects-car-crashes-after-police-chase-2-hurt-20130211,0,1604618.story http://www.redeyechicago.com/news/breaking/chi-suspects-car-... 4. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/red_light_cams_red_light_cam_0NJ954EGA2bSvVQcalErXJ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/red_light_cams_red_light_...

ahallock 14y ago

mrdub 14y ago

If you want to see the kinds of tech research the military has been funding for the ARGUS platform: http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/technology?term=argus http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/technology?term=argus A few of these include: Near-realtime Forensic Analysis Capabilities for Moving Target Indicator (MTI) Data High Resolution 3D Reconstruction from Wide-Area Video Wide Area Video Image Storage Techniques

drucken 14y ago

Mass surveillance of individuals by governments in many developed countries is already done via the mobile phone system, and increasingly even by private companies via smartphones. That cat has been out of the bag for a long time. Drones are just one more cog in this respect.

Cieplak 14y ago

I wonder how long it will take for these to start issuing speeding tickets.