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" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems

" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is trying to sell it to local police departments." I know this is an unpopular opinion these days but the people working for these companies should be ashamed. There is little use for this technology, especially on US soil, except mass surveillance of the population.

comrade1 11y ago
There are used in drug interdiction and other coast guard functions. My brother was an Air Force test pilot that tested these for that purpose (he was originally a surveillance pilot flying kc-135s). They are basically a kc-135 in a small jet (e.g., leer jet 35) form factor, and not carrying a team of technicians in the back but instead just equipment, or maybe a technician or two. Officially he's not supposed to know.
- psykovsky 11y ago
  Officially he's not supposed to know and that was the unofficial excuse they gave him before he started asking too many questions. And then he gave you the information he wasn't even supposed to have, facing unemployment and disciplinary actions. How naive can you be?
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  Do you mean an RC-135? KC-135 just carries a bunch of fuel, which doesn't seem useful for surveillance.
  - comrade1 11y ago
    Yes, sorry, RC-135.
Kalium 11y ago
Or any form of wide-area surveillance, which isn't necessarily the same as surveillance of mass amounts of people. From an article I read yesterday, the first documented use of FBI domestic surveillance planes was a bribery case that involved a payoff package tossed out of a train in the 30s. So, these things do have other uses.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Really any of the modern battlefield surveillance and situational awareness systems could theoretically be turned to the purposes of mass surveillance of civilian populations, given the motivation and resources.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    Or that heartbeat detection system used in Nepal by NASA.
    - digikata 11y ago
      I would guess that system would actually be very bad at mass surveillance. The radar system would be tuned to detect very small movements (the heartbeat), and reject clutter in the category of anything not moving and static (debris). So in a wide area with lots of movement, it's ability to determine if something was a separate object or person, and interesting on top of that would be severely limited. But this is just a SWAG.
      - Kalium 11y ago
        By itself, yes. Coupled with other systems, it could potentially be very useful for its ability to determine person-ness of a given thing.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    A local police department outside one of the worst areas in the Northeast has the same surveillance systems they used in Baghdad. They like to brag about it in the papers.
vonmoltke 11y ago
Also an unpopular opinion is that some people (I am not one of them FYI) think mass surveillance of the population is a good thing. It can be hard to understand that position, but there are people who believe mass surveillance, security theater, and the like really are protecting them and that it is all for their own good. As long as sufficient numbers of these people exist there will be not shortage of people who are not ashamed to staff the government agencies implementing these things and the private companies that support them. Some will even see it as a duty.
- rhino369 11y ago
  It a tool like any other. It can be used for good or evil. What you are doing in the middle of a Baltimore street isn't in any way private information. It's a public as you get. Sure, it could be used to perpetrate a Holocaust or something, but so could the 101st airborne. If the government wanted to go all Hitler on us, they already can get google data, facebook data, medical records, essentially everything that is kept on you. Hell, I bet google location services tracks me better than a drone does (if the war in the Pakistan tribal areas is an example). And drones are way easier to shoot down than googles datacenters.
  - task_queue 11y ago
    Do we really want to tie a noose at the end of all the rope we already hand the authorities? There are tools people with power shouldn't have access to, because people with power do not have a good track record of using them in good faith.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      On the other hand, if I ever disappear in the woods on a hiking trip, I really want the local PD to have twenty drones on standby they can use to canvass the area instead of hoping their one helicopter spots me.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      We trust the federal government with the power to, no exaggeration, annihilate the world. If the government were going to use its power for evil, it'd go knocking on google/facebook/visa/amazon/comcast/grocery store/school/medical/whatever database to find its enemy. What do you honestly think is a bigger risk for you? Getting murdered by a criminal or the US government via drone. Cause it's like 40k:2 for the past couple year.
diminoten 11y ago
You basically say mass surveillance is (figuratively) "literally Hitler", and you think that's an "unpopular opinion" on HN? Well, have I got some fortunate news for you... The fact is, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a police department flying an airplane over an area under their jurisdiction with the intent of surveying the area as an intelligence gathering activity. What's actually absurd is the idea that they shouldn't do this. What the hell might you cite as a reason they shouldn't?
- cryoshon 11y ago
  The cops are already flying their choppers all over Baltimore and back in order to keep track of the protests/rioters. This is something a bit more insidious than simple crowd/crime spotting for ground units. As the article states, this airplane was likely utilizing a few privacy-smashing technologies such as an aerial Stingray (dirtbox) or an ARGOS camera suite, complete with individual identification and tracking for sustained periods of time. Basically, imagine that airplane having the ability to identify individuals, then track their movements and actions around the city for the duration of its loiter time. Without a warrant. Without any oversight. See the problem?
  - diminoten2 11y ago
    Anything the BPD is doing to circumvent warrants is obviously bad and needs to stop. I'm not arguing they should be allowed to do any of that stuff. What I am saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with arial surveillance, to the point where everyone who works for companies offering such services is "evil".
    - ska 11y ago
      I think the problem a lot of people have is with the "mass" part, not the "surveillance" part, of mass-surveillance.
      - diminoten2 11y ago
        Really? That's news to me, I thought the issue primarily revolved around "surveillance".
dogma1138 11y ago
That can be said for people who are working for Google, Facebook and any other major tech company out there. All of them milk the heck out of every piece of data they got and each service they put out is designed to milk as much data as possible in the future. Like it or not personal data and clever means of working with it is the new currency for many companies on the market these days. And some of the stuff they pull off is just as shady as what the NSA and similar organizations do. Heck at this point a better bet will to worry more about those companies than the NSA since for better or for worse the NSA still works for you, they are not planning a coup. Google and every other company out there wants to know as much as they can to not only "own you" financially but to ensure that they can direct virtually every step you take online and offline.
- badsock 11y ago
  The critical difference, in my view, is that Google et al. do not have the authority to incarcerate people.
  - genericuser 11y ago
    The NSA and those organization's aren't usually making the products like Google is they are usually contracting it out. It isn't the companies doing the work incarcerating people in either case, it is simply that when the user of the product being sold is the Government they have that power.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    These days nope, but agreements like the TTIP actually give countries quite a bit of power that used to be reserved to nation states. I'm not some dystopian future conspiracy nut but many companies out there have more power over what i do on a daily basis than any government organization out there. Yes the NSA (not directly) can put me in jail, but and that's a big but there still has to be a good enough reason to do it. The NSA isn't some shadow government wanting to rule the world, they did some nasty stuff, some of it is probably illegal and for the rest they've surely stepped out of their boundaries with very loose interpretations of laws and executive orders but even the biggest critic of the NSA can't say they've done it for their own reasons and not in order to ensure the security of the United States. And when people say well what if country X will become a brutal dictatorship, well in that case they can put you in jail on a whim, again this isn't a case for mass surveillance, or for the NSA it's just a simple truth. So while i do see the NSA spying on Americans on US soil a violation of their mandate, i don't see it as some mile stone in the US becoming North Korea or East Germany for that matter. But back to Google et al, everything i buy, every peace of information i consume, half the people i talk to, how i get from place to place and what i get exposed to in the process, where i am know, and heck even what i type as we speak is being tracked, analyzed and stored not by the NSA but by the 100's of various companies from Google to that brand new hot machine learning add network startup that just won TechCruch Disrupt last week. Yes they can't put me in jail, but the amount of control they can exert on you isn't that far from incarceration when you actually use it in it's broadest term, there are countries with prison systems that don't look like Riker's check out Bastøy Prison for example. ;) If you want to go full on tin foil hat then 1984 describes an incarcerated society, and sorry but if you compare what the NSA to what Google et al. are doing to they the latter is much much closer to a proto 1984 society than the former.
Houshalter 11y ago
There are plenty of people that support mass surveillance, they are just in the minority and unlikely to speak up about it in a place like HN. I'm torn between the two positions. I really like the libertarian idea that the government's power should be limited and surveillance is scary and intrusive. On the other hand I think the technologies are really cool. When license plate readers first started coming out I read a bunch of stuff about them and thought they were really fascinating. Same with facial recognition or speech recognition, etc. I love the sci fi idea that we will eventually have a society with zero crime, besides crimes of passion or insane people. Anytime a crime happens, police could go back and see everything that happened. The utopia in the novel Manna had an extreme version of this. I thought it was really cool and challenged the standard cultural trope that surveillance is evil. People today are so afraid of crime that they refuse to let their kids go outside (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1202/1579/4m/i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/06_02/playgraphicDM1406_468x518.jpg https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1202/1579/4m/i.dailymail.co.uk/i...). People lock their doors and buy guns and live in fear. You can argue that it's not rational but that's not relevant. I'd really love to see the fear of crime disappear and this is a practical way to achieve that. It should of course be a local issue. Some cities would have surveillance drones and others wouldn't. People could then vote with their feet to some extent and raise families where they felt the safest, and I think that's a desirable thing. I think there should be balance. What most people fear is someone constantly watching them or listening to them. I think the cameras should only be reviewed after the fact when there is a crime, and the data deleted when they it's no longer relevant. But I've never posted about my opinion on this before and I'm not likely to again. I'd just get shouted at and voted down as I've seen happen to others. People don't want to have a rational debate about this. They don't have a reason to be against surveillance, they just feel it's wrong and creepy and intrusive and mistrust the government. Or are scared they might not be able to get away with a crime if they needed to. And I feel all of those things too, which is why I said I'm torn.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Be careful about desiring zero crime. Some professor did a study and found that on average every citizen commits 3 felonies a day. Enforce all laws 100% and society would cease to function. (And this is ignoring the problems with vague and contradictory laws.)

comrade1 11y ago

There are used in drug interdiction and other coast guard functions. My brother was an Air Force test pilot that tested these for that purpose (he was originally a surveillance pilot flying kc-135s). They are basically a kc-135 in a small jet (e.g., leer jet 35) form factor, and not carrying a team of technicians in the back but instead just equipment, or maybe a technician or two. Officially he's not supposed to know.

psykovsky 11y ago
Officially he's not supposed to know and that was the unofficial excuse they gave him before he started asking too many questions. And then he gave you the information he wasn't even supposed to have, facing unemployment and disciplinary actions. How naive can you be?
ceejayoz 11y ago
Do you mean an RC-135? KC-135 just carries a bunch of fuel, which doesn't seem useful for surveillance.
- comrade1 11y ago
  Yes, sorry, RC-135.

Kalium 11y ago

Or any form of wide-area surveillance, which isn't necessarily the same as surveillance of mass amounts of people. From an article I read yesterday, the first documented use of FBI domestic surveillance planes was a bribery case that involved a payoff package tossed out of a train in the 30s. So, these things do have other uses.

vonmoltke 11y ago
Really any of the modern battlefield surveillance and situational awareness systems could theoretically be turned to the purposes of mass surveillance of civilian populations, given the motivation and resources.
- Kalium 11y ago
  Or that heartbeat detection system used in Nepal by NASA.
  - digikata 11y ago
    I would guess that system would actually be very bad at mass surveillance. The radar system would be tuned to detect very small movements (the heartbeat), and reject clutter in the category of anything not moving and static (debris). So in a wide area with lots of movement, it's ability to determine if something was a separate object or person, and interesting on top of that would be severely limited. But this is just a SWAG.
    - Kalium 11y ago
      By itself, yes. Coupled with other systems, it could potentially be very useful for its ability to determine person-ness of a given thing.
- task_queue 11y ago
  A local police department outside one of the worst areas in the Northeast has the same surveillance systems they used in Baghdad. They like to brag about it in the papers.

vonmoltke 11y ago

Also an unpopular opinion is that some people (I am not one of them FYI) think mass surveillance of the population is a good thing. It can be hard to understand that position, but there are people who believe mass surveillance, security theater, and the like really are protecting them and that it is all for their own good. As long as sufficient numbers of these people exist there will be not shortage of people who are not ashamed to staff the government agencies implementing these things and the private companies that support them. Some will even see it as a duty.

rhino369 11y ago
It a tool like any other. It can be used for good or evil. What you are doing in the middle of a Baltimore street isn't in any way private information. It's a public as you get. Sure, it could be used to perpetrate a Holocaust or something, but so could the 101st airborne. If the government wanted to go all Hitler on us, they already can get google data, facebook data, medical records, essentially everything that is kept on you. Hell, I bet google location services tracks me better than a drone does (if the war in the Pakistan tribal areas is an example). And drones are way easier to shoot down than googles datacenters.
- task_queue 11y ago
  Do we really want to tie a noose at the end of all the rope we already hand the authorities? There are tools people with power shouldn't have access to, because people with power do not have a good track record of using them in good faith.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    On the other hand, if I ever disappear in the woods on a hiking trip, I really want the local PD to have twenty drones on standby they can use to canvass the area instead of hoping their one helicopter spots me.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    We trust the federal government with the power to, no exaggeration, annihilate the world. If the government were going to use its power for evil, it'd go knocking on google/facebook/visa/amazon/comcast/grocery store/school/medical/whatever database to find its enemy. What do you honestly think is a bigger risk for you? Getting murdered by a criminal or the US government via drone. Cause it's like 40k:2 for the past couple year.

diminoten 11y ago

You basically say mass surveillance is (figuratively) "literally Hitler", and you think that's an "unpopular opinion" on HN? Well, have I got some fortunate news for you... The fact is, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a police department flying an airplane over an area under their jurisdiction with the intent of surveying the area as an intelligence gathering activity. What's actually absurd is the idea that they shouldn't do this. What the hell might you cite as a reason they shouldn't?

cryoshon 11y ago
The cops are already flying their choppers all over Baltimore and back in order to keep track of the protests/rioters. This is something a bit more insidious than simple crowd/crime spotting for ground units. As the article states, this airplane was likely utilizing a few privacy-smashing technologies such as an aerial Stingray (dirtbox) or an ARGOS camera suite, complete with individual identification and tracking for sustained periods of time. Basically, imagine that airplane having the ability to identify individuals, then track their movements and actions around the city for the duration of its loiter time. Without a warrant. Without any oversight. See the problem?
- diminoten2 11y ago
  Anything the BPD is doing to circumvent warrants is obviously bad and needs to stop. I'm not arguing they should be allowed to do any of that stuff. What I am saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with arial surveillance, to the point where everyone who works for companies offering such services is "evil".
  - ska 11y ago
    I think the problem a lot of people have is with the "mass" part, not the "surveillance" part, of mass-surveillance.
    - diminoten2 11y ago
      Really? That's news to me, I thought the issue primarily revolved around "surveillance".

dogma1138 11y ago

That can be said for people who are working for Google, Facebook and any other major tech company out there. All of them milk the heck out of every piece of data they got and each service they put out is designed to milk as much data as possible in the future. Like it or not personal data and clever means of working with it is the new currency for many companies on the market these days. And some of the stuff they pull off is just as shady as what the NSA and similar organizations do. Heck at this point a better bet will to worry more about those companies than the NSA since for better or for worse the NSA still works for you, they are not planning a coup. Google and every other company out there wants to know as much as they can to not only "own you" financially but to ensure that they can direct virtually every step you take online and offline.

badsock 11y ago
The critical difference, in my view, is that Google et al. do not have the authority to incarcerate people.
- genericuser 11y ago
  The NSA and those organization's aren't usually making the products like Google is they are usually contracting it out. It isn't the companies doing the work incarcerating people in either case, it is simply that when the user of the product being sold is the Government they have that power.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  These days nope, but agreements like the TTIP actually give countries quite a bit of power that used to be reserved to nation states. I'm not some dystopian future conspiracy nut but many companies out there have more power over what i do on a daily basis than any government organization out there. Yes the NSA (not directly) can put me in jail, but and that's a big but there still has to be a good enough reason to do it. The NSA isn't some shadow government wanting to rule the world, they did some nasty stuff, some of it is probably illegal and for the rest they've surely stepped out of their boundaries with very loose interpretations of laws and executive orders but even the biggest critic of the NSA can't say they've done it for their own reasons and not in order to ensure the security of the United States. And when people say well what if country X will become a brutal dictatorship, well in that case they can put you in jail on a whim, again this isn't a case for mass surveillance, or for the NSA it's just a simple truth. So while i do see the NSA spying on Americans on US soil a violation of their mandate, i don't see it as some mile stone in the US becoming North Korea or East Germany for that matter. But back to Google et al, everything i buy, every peace of information i consume, half the people i talk to, how i get from place to place and what i get exposed to in the process, where i am know, and heck even what i type as we speak is being tracked, analyzed and stored not by the NSA but by the 100's of various companies from Google to that brand new hot machine learning add network startup that just won TechCruch Disrupt last week. Yes they can't put me in jail, but the amount of control they can exert on you isn't that far from incarceration when you actually use it in it's broadest term, there are countries with prison systems that don't look like Riker's check out Bastøy Prison for example. ;) If you want to go full on tin foil hat then 1984 describes an incarcerated society, and sorry but if you compare what the NSA to what Google et al. are doing to they the latter is much much closer to a proto 1984 society than the former.

Houshalter 11y ago

There are plenty of people that support mass surveillance, they are just in the minority and unlikely to speak up about it in a place like HN. I'm torn between the two positions. I really like the libertarian idea that the government's power should be limited and surveillance is scary and intrusive. On the other hand I think the technologies are really cool. When license plate readers first started coming out I read a bunch of stuff about them and thought they were really fascinating. Same with facial recognition or speech recognition, etc. I love the sci fi idea that we will eventually have a society with zero crime, besides crimes of passion or insane people. Anytime a crime happens, police could go back and see everything that happened. The utopia in the novel Manna had an extreme version of this. I thought it was really cool and challenged the standard cultural trope that surveillance is evil. People today are so afraid of crime that they refuse to let their kids go outside (https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1202/1579/4m/i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/06_02/playgraphicDM1406_468x518.jpg https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/1202/1579/4m/i.dailymail.co.uk/i...). People lock their doors and buy guns and live in fear. You can argue that it's not rational but that's not relevant. I'd really love to see the fear of crime disappear and this is a practical way to achieve that. It should of course be a local issue. Some cities would have surveillance drones and others wouldn't. People could then vote with their feet to some extent and raise families where they felt the safest, and I think that's a desirable thing. I think there should be balance. What most people fear is someone constantly watching them or listening to them. I think the cameras should only be reviewed after the fact when there is a crime, and the data deleted when they it's no longer relevant. But I've never posted about my opinion on this before and I'm not likely to again. I'd just get shouted at and voted down as I've seen happen to others. People don't want to have a rational debate about this. They don't have a reason to be against surveillance, they just feel it's wrong and creepy and intrusive and mistrust the government. Or are scared they might not be able to get away with a crime if they needed to. And I feel all of those things too, which is why I said I'm torn.

WalterBright 11y ago
Be careful about desiring zero crime. Some professor did a study and found that on average every citizen commits 3 felonies a day. Enforce all laws 100% and society would cease to function. (And this is ignoring the problems with vague and contradictory laws.)