> 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.
I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Of course, the example chosen for the article didn’t involve anybody abusing their authority. It involved police doing what I’d expect them to do. But I’ll acknowledge that if all of the relevant details were different, then I’d also be concerned.
The problem is that police misuse every single power they have been given and public trust is very low for years now.
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
Yes, it is true that police have powers that can be abused, and police have abused them.
It’s also true that they have those powers because we’ve decided the alternative is worse. The example used in the article was a case where police did not obviously abuse their authority. If you want to get me worked up about police overreach, you’ll need a different example.
> I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move
How did the drone control anybody’s move in the example? It seems that the drone wasn’t even noticed.
The videos in question are full of actual crimes being committed and criminals being arrested.
San Francisco used to not investigate or prosecute any of those crimes. Laptop stolen out of a car? Nothing to do. Now they catch video of it happening, follow the license plate, arrest the perpetrators. Catalytic converter stolen? We don’t investigate that.
Yes, police have shitty track records of abusing authority and technology. Does that mean we throw out all authority and technology? If you do we get the chaotic lawlessness San Francisco experienced for years.
So what’s the middle way?
1) Use the tech to fight crime. (Check! They’re doing it)
2) prevent abuses of that technology and authority (in progress, let’s see how it goes)
I think it's an important distinction whether crime stops happening after all criminals are locked up or after preventative measures are taken to prevent criminal activity happening in the first place.
When criminals are locked up, they will get released and many of them don't have anything else to do other than returning to do crimes, with gained experience from the previous failures.
But it's possible to reduce crime by preventing it. Do not let dangerous districts form, build communities, reduce access to weapons and so on.
This is one of those ideas that gets thrown around and fits into one of two categories:
- Massive money sink that shows no results: See SF during covid and a bit after
- Dystopian policies that tank crime but flagrantly violate peoples rights: see stop and frisk, El Salvador, etc
Some people are going to be criminals no matter how much money you give them. I would argue that especially in functioning countries, the returns on carrot approaches to crime reduction are magnitudes weaker than stick ones.
What made the police think they were “suspicious”? Anybody can be suspicious if you want to tail them for another reason. When you leave the judgement entirely to the person who gets to initiate the surveillance, then you are saying anyone can be surveilled.
Yes, that’s what police do. They drive around and use their judgment to match known criminal activity to behaviors they see around them. Hopefully instances of false positives like two kids going to play basketball get dropped without undue interruptions of the lives of people just going about their lives. (As happened in this case)
Police drive around in patrol cars. They don’t call judges every time they look at other cars. There may be problems with this system, but adding drones hasn’t created a new loophole.
if you were a minority in America, you'd understand where suspicious leads to murder. so kinda understand where _you_ dont see a problem and so many other people will.
Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
The current reigning social script is that drone enthusiasts are piloting all the drones. I know this will change as articles like this come out but for now the police are in a very convenient bubble of essentially undetectable surveillance
They should have never been deployed to begin with.
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
You mean the reality of using patterns and data points such as statistics to determine likelihood of danger? Like you and me do every day even if you don't notice? Would the same have happened if they where two women which are statistically less likely to be a danger than men?
Read more closely, especially the bit about how they used daylight savings as a control, as it suddenly changes the written time of the incident but not the actual darkness levels at that time.
Can you just quote the part of the article that says something to the effect of "when it's dark, black and white motorists commit similar levels of traffic offenses"?
That they're well aware of the well-attested and evidenced prejudices within society in the wide, and law enforcement in the narrow, that are sadly still prevalent in the USA?
What does your oddly aggressive reply say about you? Other than your username is at best, aspirational, and good luck with that.
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.
I 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.
I 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.
And this is the perfect demonstration of what why police shouldn’t have access to this technology.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
We know that you don't need expansive welfare to reduce crime, because poor countries generally aren't plagued with crime. Brazil's homicide rate is 10x as high as Bangladesh's, even though Brazil has about 4x the average income.
Most people don't "resort to crime" because they lack necessities. They do it due to a confluence of socialization, cognitive factors, and opportunity to get away with crime.
I think this is basically a cherry-picking and oversimplification of the situation.
For one thing, income inequality in Brazil is significantly higher than in Bangladesh.
Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
> Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
That doesn't matter. If crime is caused by poverty, like you hypothesize, then poor countries like Bangladesh should have astronomical crime rates. But they don't.
> Do not travel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts due to unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. This area includes Khagrachari, Rangamati, and Bandarban Hill Tracts districts. Do not travel to this area for any reason.
The travel advisory is because people overthrew the government recently, which is a different problem than the ordinary crime we're talking about. And the Chittagong Hill Tracts are the Bangladeshi equivalent of Indian reservations. Neither supports the contention that poverty causes crime.
The homicide rate across Bangladesh is just over 2.0 per 100k. That's only a bit higher than Canada, a vastly richer country.
> It feels like that's a tiny challenge to your thesis.
Your thesis is that poverty causes crime. I'm pointing out that many poor countries have low crime rates. The existence of political dysfunction isn't a rebuttal, it's an attempt to change the subject to something else.
> One wonders if their homicide investigatory capabilities are comparable enough to compare such stats.
Homicides are thoroughly investigated in almost every country that has a government.
> Homicides are thoroughly investigated in almost every country that has a government.
People get away with homicides more when governments have less capacity to effectively investigate the questionable deaths. Not every homicide is a public shooting; some are "she fell down the stairs".
Note, for example, that we have gender-based differentiation for US stats, but not for Bangladesh, which well illustrates my point. https://imgur.com/a/oc9yiuN
Even in the US we have disappearances that never get resolved. Or cases where there were dozens of witnesses but no one saw anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
> Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
Police should be part of the community they are policing, not some invading force brought in and hovering over it. When the police live in the same place they are policing and know that community as neighbors, they'll treat it like home and not like some battlefield that they were shipped to, to fight enemies.
I 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.
I think the value of having the data on public spaces publicly available far outweighs the risk of privately held data, or editorializaed data from public spaces.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
The government is different from a person. I’m ok with cctv being recorded and stored for x days with protocols and laws that restrict who can access it and for what purposes. With audit logs and penalties for misuse.
The idea of Meta being able to track my every move creeps me the fuck out, sorry.
What right does the government have to give my data to randos? The public that's captured is not the same as the public that accesses the data. Just imagine the creepy implications.
Imagine what stalkers could do if they could follow a woman's every movement. Imagine robbers staking out houses from the comfort of their couch.
The government has an obligation to protect the data it has on its citizens, not to just give out willy-nilly. By your logic, public hospitals should share your medical files publicly.
The solution would be for less data to be collected in the first place, not to make the data leak as dystopian as possible.
-Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
-Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
-Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
-I agree that it would be a better world if there were no drone surveillance, however, in a world where there is drone surveillance--i.e., the world in which we exist--I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
> -Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
I've gone through great lengths to ensure it can't, I'd rather not have the government undo all that effort.
> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it for you and send you a nice notification.
> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
>> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from >the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
>
>Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
I strenuously object. But that's not this conversation. It's way upstream, as the SCOTUS has already decided that there is no public expectation of privacy.
>> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it >physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber >can already stake out a house.
>
>Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared >to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it >for you and send you a nice notification.
A rando can send a drone or a fleet of drones to do the same surveillance that you are worried about here. Perhaps you are just really anti-drone?
>> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided >panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
>
>I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be >changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
There is no such thing as an infinite-sided panopticon. Definitionally, a panopticon is one-sided.
I'd modify this to "all warrantless surveillance", so not just cameras. Warrantless surveillance should not be allowed for private activity, and making it public helps audit that.
My dad grew up in a rural village, and my wife grew up in a very small rural town. Both have mentioned to me that, in such places, people can see and keep track of basically everything that's going on in public spaces anyway. Drone surveillance can be viewed as replicating the oversight that exists in Mayberry in a large city.
If Sharia law is responsible, then that's a credit to sharia law! Despite their faults on macro-politics, rigidly Islamic countries are remarkably safe and peaceful at the micro level. Tehran has a half the homicide rate of Toronto!
But I think this isn't just about Sharia law. My dad's village in Bangladesh and the small Iowa town where my wife went to high school are the same in key respects: "Paranoid old bidd[ies]"--to use @ceejayoz's terminology--feed surveillance information to older men who impose order on the young men who commit most crime.
My dad remarked that he walked several miles to school each day, but wouldn't have been able to get away with anything because anyone within sight of the road would've immediately reported what they saw to his dad. Similarly, my wife once stalled her manual-shift Volvo waiting at a light, a fact which was observed and promptly conveyed to her step-dad.
>Despite their faults on macro-politics, rigidly Islamic countries are remarkably safe and peaceful at the micro level. Tehran has a half the homicide rate of Toronto!
This is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'll have to remember to tell my Ahmedi relatives from Peshawar and Gilgit that after they (separately) got out of Dodge after they heard their neighbors wanted their heads on pikes.
“The state should replace community” is an interesting take. What other powers should be added to the state? Should they cook our food too? Do you think there’s any downside to the government having these powers?
> > The bad food is a plus. The most orderly civilizations generally have the blandest food. Almost all societies with good food are chaotic and disorderly.
So yes, the state should probably take over cooking to maintain order!
> 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.]
Yea, "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.
Nothing 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.
I 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.
Scale. 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.
So 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")
> So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians?
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> 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")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
> I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
Yes, i understand what you're saying hence why i mentioned culture. American justice (and cultural cues that inform the policies) seems to be more about revenge than rehabilitation.
Agreed on American justice, our culture and thereby system really prefer to punish anyone who gets caught. But just to stick up for the US a little bit (although I'm not fond of our policies): it's not just America that prefers revenge over rehab. From what I understand, Central America and South America also prefer it – the "mano dura" (iron fist) policies that many countries have are harsh too.
Constraints 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.
>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.
Within the last year in Woolston Lyttelton and Brighton: I've been assualted unprovoked, I've had the outer unit of my split heatpump stolen (for Al, $$$ to fix), I've had outdoor plumbing damaged (for Cu, $$ to fix), I've had the rim stolen[1] off the back of my parked car, last week my friend had tools stolen that they can't afford to replace.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the above petty crimes are unacceptable to me or my friends.
Nothing has been reported because that just costs time and doesn't resolve the problems.
In small groups of people society is surveillance (yes, often detrimentally). I've lived in small towns and the surveillance is extreme. Society has got worse at encouraging/enforcing good society.
I loath surveillance capitalism, but systemically I'm unsure what the answer is.
I finally gave in and installed a Eufy brand camera (my security friend used that brand and installed it, although I can't recommend the UI). I don't think that it will even help. Ironically the security friend was broken into recently and had their security camera stolen.
None of the above was motivated by hunger or good reasons: it was real scumbags for the situations I know the perp, and likely drug users for the metal thefts (or perhaps kids - two brass taps are not worth it).
I agree with you 100% if the number of average drone surveillance incidents per year stays the same as the average number of high speed chases per year that took place before drones.
This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
It's because ignoring rights happens faster than they can be protected.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
I mean, helicopters are a limited and expensive resource.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
I believe in a "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. A drone could hover outside my window watching me, but I don't think that would make people feel comfortable.
Per the article, that doesn't appear to be the use case.
> 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.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
I 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.
Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
Sad 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.
Wait 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).
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.
nah, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is IMO until the police have something to hide (besides their crappy securing of the usage) It's not really a news piece.
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
we don't have to wait for one. But anti-corruption practices like watch dogs / transparency et al are the next steps before jumping to conclusions.
Like IMO the real recourse is to come down hard on the abuses of power, and that includes things like getting Citizens united taken down so that police union(s) are not so powerful etc.
I'm generally more interested in root causes than pruning the leaves. Which I realize often is not the "pragmatic" choice.
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).
+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.
> 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).
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> 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).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
Civilized 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.
I think there is a valid discussion for devices like Flock. The CEO is a detriment to their company and the lack of police guardrails and auditing make it ripe for abuse.
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
I 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.
I 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?
I 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.
Same 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.
This 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."
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)
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?
> 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)
What about we keep the drones to reduce crime and just selectively never investigate black suspects?
>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.
There are such things as plain-clothed police officers. Not that police officers have to announce their presence to you when they are driving on a public road anyways.
> 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.
If they ask YOU what crime YOU'RE committing you don't have to answer. Why would they have to answer you or even admit to following you?
You say slippery slope when what I think you really mean is that it shifts the overton window of what is and isn't acceptable. That is a valid concern, but unless the police are allowed to fly drones in places where gen pop aren't allowed to, they aren't getting any special privileges from their position so I thin the point is moot. Slippery slope imo only starts when the police get NEW privileges.
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.
There should be no optimization on police resources. When Katz v. USA (no expectation of privacy in public) was decided, surveillance was done by an officer who needed to be paid a middle class salary, maybe armed with a camera and a telephoto lens if we’re lucky. The average city police department barely knew what SIGINT meant.
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
These drones are “piloted” but it can be in a semiautonomous way. Your argument makes sense for Flock cameras but not for this style of drone. I think first response with a drone to an active call is a great use of resources for all parties. Flock cameras constantly tracking every movement, probably not given the severe lack of audits and guardrails.
It’s still far too scalable compared to what was accessible back then. The police should be handcuffed to paying for a full ass helicopter if they want to do surveillance
Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only. Can you describe how this breaks the 4th? Does it really matter if it’s a human tracking down a suspect or a drone.
If you have any case law that shows general cameras break the 4th I would love to read.
> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
I'm the person who posted the article lol. The article lists several cases where the drones were used to investigate random people – not active calls. They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside.
The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
> Can you describe how this breaks the 4th?
Put me on the Supreme Court and I'd be happy to do that for you. Until then, there are more qualified people to do it and the rest of us will just know it when we see it. :)
edit: removed the part where I said u/infecto didn't read the article – it's clear we both read it and came away with different conclusions.
Yup I did and it was not clear. I think those two examples are worthy of a discussion on scope creep but not clear policy violations atm. The intent is to be used on active calls which I believe is a great idea. A clear violation would be the drones actively patrolling and identify suspicious behavior. That’s bad and a clear violation of the policy.
Please let us know how this violates the 4th. I would love to learn more about it.
This is one of those areas that can be a slippery slope. Look at the UK and the terrible state it’s in. On the flip side I would hope that so long as the guardrails are in place that first response drones can be good for all parties.
Maybe similar trajectory but fundamentally Chatrie is about compelling stored data from a third party. I don’t believe there is any meaningful overlap between that and direct visual observation from police. Folks should argue it in court if so but I don’t see the link to 4th violations.
> Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places.
A certain level of drone surveillance would seem likely to rise to this level of intrusion, and I think ALPR cameras already do.
Agree I wish the article focused more on the storage and availability of the data instead of the narrative they wrote. It’s in there but not the focus which imo is the issue. I think it’s great to have the drones as active response but like ALPR, it’s ripe for abuse after the fact. These systems can have great value but are ripe for abuse, I hope organizations catchup to build the proper guardrails.
'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.
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.
So 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.
I see your distinction better now. The Reynolds essay speaks a little more to the issue at hand. Essentially the technology allows for scope creep. Previously the limiting factor for physical police surveillance was officer FTEs, which creates a lower bound for the conditions that predicate an "active call." When this constraint is lifted, then Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”
Agree, which is why these discussions need to happen. I am a big proponent of this kind of tech but also welcome the discussion to figure out appropriate boundaries.
> 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
I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
Part of the problem is it leads to stuff like this:
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Or this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgia-deputy-charged-with...
Or this: https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwauke...
Or this: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/10/pasadena...
You are describing a crime. The solution to police committing crimes is police oversight, not neutering policing powers completely.
That’s a valid concern.
Of course, the example chosen for the article didn’t involve anybody abusing their authority. It involved police doing what I’d expect them to do. But I’ll acknowledge that if all of the relevant details were different, then I’d also be concerned.
> I’ll acknowledge that if all of the relevant details were different, then I’d also be concerned.
Relevant detail: Cops have done this with every new tech they're given.
The problem is that police misuse every single power they have been given and public trust is very low for years now.
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
Yes, it is true that police have powers that can be abused, and police have abused them.
It’s also true that they have those powers because we’ve decided the alternative is worse. The example used in the article was a case where police did not obviously abuse their authority. If you want to get me worked up about police overreach, you’ll need a different example.
> I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move
How did the drone control anybody’s move in the example? It seems that the drone wasn’t even noticed.
The videos in question are full of actual crimes being committed and criminals being arrested.
San Francisco used to not investigate or prosecute any of those crimes. Laptop stolen out of a car? Nothing to do. Now they catch video of it happening, follow the license plate, arrest the perpetrators. Catalytic converter stolen? We don’t investigate that.
Yes, police have shitty track records of abusing authority and technology. Does that mean we throw out all authority and technology? If you do we get the chaotic lawlessness San Francisco experienced for years.
So what’s the middle way? 1) Use the tech to fight crime. (Check! They’re doing it) 2) prevent abuses of that technology and authority (in progress, let’s see how it goes)
I think it's an important distinction whether crime stops happening after all criminals are locked up or after preventative measures are taken to prevent criminal activity happening in the first place.
When criminals are locked up, they will get released and many of them don't have anything else to do other than returning to do crimes, with gained experience from the previous failures.
But it's possible to reduce crime by preventing it. Do not let dangerous districts form, build communities, reduce access to weapons and so on.
This is one of those ideas that gets thrown around and fits into one of two categories:
- Massive money sink that shows no results: See SF during covid and a bit after - Dystopian policies that tank crime but flagrantly violate peoples rights: see stop and frisk, El Salvador, etc
Some people are going to be criminals no matter how much money you give them. I would argue that especially in functioning countries, the returns on carrot approaches to crime reduction are magnitudes weaker than stick ones.
What made the police think they were “suspicious”? Anybody can be suspicious if you want to tail them for another reason. When you leave the judgement entirely to the person who gets to initiate the surveillance, then you are saying anyone can be surveilled.
Yes, that’s what police do. They drive around and use their judgment to match known criminal activity to behaviors they see around them. Hopefully instances of false positives like two kids going to play basketball get dropped without undue interruptions of the lives of people just going about their lives. (As happened in this case)
Police drive around in patrol cars. They don’t call judges every time they look at other cars. There may be problems with this system, but adding drones hasn’t created a new loophole.
if you were a minority in America, you'd understand where suspicious leads to murder. so kinda understand where _you_ dont see a problem and so many other people will.
Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.
I'm a minority in America. I have no problem with Police drones.
No drone has ever followed me when I am on the way to go play hockey.
How would you know? From the article:
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
The current reigning social script is that drone enthusiasts are piloting all the drones. I know this will change as articles like this come out but for now the police are in a very convenient bubble of essentially undetectable surveillance
Yet.
>suspicious person in a vehicle
suspicious; odds of it just being a minority? 1:100.
I mean, they evaluated and left?
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
They should have never been deployed to begin with.
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
They didn't do anything to even be "evaluated", but you already knew that...
I can't help but wonder what skin color those young men had that made the police suspicious in the first place...
Well, everyone knows white boys can’t jump.
[flagged]
That they're not willfully blind to the reality we live in?
You mean the reality of using patterns and data points such as statistics to determine likelihood of danger? Like you and me do every day even if you don't notice? Would the same have happened if they where two women which are statistically less likely to be a danger than men?
Somehow, when it's dark, black and white motorists commit similar levels of traffic offenses, but when it's light out, there's a disparity.
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...
That's a pattern/data point/statistic, for sure, but I'd happily assert it supports my point effectively.
>when it's dark, black and white motorists commit similar levels of traffic offenses
The article you linked does not support this claim. It says the proportion of blacks stopped is less in the dark around 7pm.
Read more closely, especially the bit about how they used daylight savings as a control, as it suddenly changes the written time of the incident but not the actual darkness levels at that time.
Can you just quote the part of the article that says something to the effect of "when it's dark, black and white motorists commit similar levels of traffic offenses"?
That I'm aware of how big of a problem racial discrimination is in policing?
> Black Californians are more than twice as likely to be searched as white Californians, at about 20 percent versus 8 percent of all stops
https://www.ppic.org/publication/racial-disparities-in-law-e...
You'll get people going "well that's because they do more crimes" to this.
IMO, the toughest study to argue with is https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2020/05/veil-darkness-redu...
They studied traffic stops around the daylight savings transition, which is a perfect natural control for "could the cops see the car occupants?"
When DST switches, the on-paper racial disparity moves by an hour. The Earth's orbit, obviously, does not.
Interesting, thank you.
Sure, some number of police officers are racist. I've never denied that, and it's sad, as no one should be racist.
In my experience, the ones who mention race first, are usually racists themselves.
> I've never denied that, and it's sad, as no one should be racist.
> In my experience, the ones who mention race first, are usually racists themselves.
How does one address racism without first mentioning its existence?
Unfortunately there are enough racists, that they bring it up themselves.
That they're well aware of the well-attested and evidenced prejudices within society in the wide, and law enforcement in the narrow, that are sadly still prevalent in the USA?
What does your oddly aggressive reply say about you? Other than your username is at best, aspirational, and good luck with that.
That says a lot about you, frankly.
Thanks!
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.
I 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.
All camera footage should be publicly available.
I 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.
And this is the perfect demonstration of what why police shouldn’t have access to this technology.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
[2] Doesn’t even cost money, it saves money.
We know that you don't need expansive welfare to reduce crime, because poor countries generally aren't plagued with crime. Brazil's homicide rate is 10x as high as Bangladesh's, even though Brazil has about 4x the average income.
Most people don't "resort to crime" because they lack necessities. They do it due to a confluence of socialization, cognitive factors, and opportunity to get away with crime.
I think this is basically a cherry-picking and oversimplification of the situation.
For one thing, income inequality in Brazil is significantly higher than in Bangladesh.
Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
> Also remember that I was speaking in the context of the wealthiest country on earth. We could perhaps assume that Brazil may not have the resources to end poverty and crime, but the USA definitely does.
That doesn't matter. If crime is caused by poverty, like you hypothesize, then poor countries like Bangladesh should have astronomical crime rates. But they don't.
https://travel.state.gov/en/international-travel/travel-advi...
> Travel advisory - People's Republic of Bangladesh: Level 3 - Reconsider travel
And a little spot of Level 4:
> Do not travel to the Chittagong Hill Tracts due to unrest, crime, terrorism, and kidnapping. This area includes Khagrachari, Rangamati, and Bandarban Hill Tracts districts. Do not travel to this area for any reason.
The travel advisory is because people overthrew the government recently, which is a different problem than the ordinary crime we're talking about. And the Chittagong Hill Tracts are the Bangladeshi equivalent of Indian reservations. Neither supports the contention that poverty causes crime.
The homicide rate across Bangladesh is just over 2.0 per 100k. That's only a bit higher than Canada, a vastly richer country.
> The travel advisory is because people overthrew the government recently, which is a different problem than the ordinary crime we're talking about.
It feels like that's a tiny challenge to your thesis.
> The homicide rate across Bangladesh is just over 2.0 per 100k. That's only a bit higher than Canada, a vastly richer country.
One wonders if their homicide investigatory capabilities are comparable enough to compare such stats.
> It feels like that's a tiny challenge to your thesis.
Your thesis is that poverty causes crime. I'm pointing out that many poor countries have low crime rates. The existence of political dysfunction isn't a rebuttal, it's an attempt to change the subject to something else.
> One wonders if their homicide investigatory capabilities are comparable enough to compare such stats.
Homicides are thoroughly investigated in almost every country that has a government.
> I'm pointing out that many poor countries have low crime rates.
"We're very safe, we just violently overthrow the shitty government a lot."
(And I'd note you're conflating low crime rates and low reported crime rates.)
> Homicides are thoroughly investigated in almost every country that has a government.
People get away with homicides more when governments have less capacity to effectively investigate the questionable deaths. Not every homicide is a public shooting; some are "she fell down the stairs".
> "We're very safe, we just violently overthrow the shitty government a lot."
Basically. Religious and political conflicts that cause people to overthrow their government are unrelated to why people rob and kill their neighbors.
> People get away with homicides more when governments have less capacity to effectively investigate the questionable deaths.
Homicide rates are studied by the UN, which does a lot of work to produce numbers that can be compared across countries: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-stud....
> Religious and political conflicts that cause people to overthrow their government are unrelated to why people rob and kill their neighbors.
Religious and political conflicts often literally start that way.
> Homicide rates are studied by the UN, which does a lot of work to produce numbers that can be compared across countries…
And they'll very openly tell you it's tough to do.
For example, https://data.unodc.org/datareport/hom-victim.
Note, for example, that we have gender-based differentiation for US stats, but not for Bangladesh, which well illustrates my point. https://imgur.com/a/oc9yiuN
Even in the US we have disappearances that never get resolved. Or cases where there were dozens of witnesses but no one saw anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
> Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
Police should be part of the community they are policing, not some invading force brought in and hovering over it. When the police live in the same place they are policing and know that community as neighbors, they'll treat it like home and not like some battlefield that they were shipped to, to fight enemies.
I 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.
Ok, thats simple: no commercial use licensing. This already exists, via various copyleft mechanisms.
And 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.
I think the value of having the data on public spaces publicly available far outweighs the risk of privately held data, or editorializaed data from public spaces.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
The government is different from a person. I’m ok with cctv being recorded and stored for x days with protocols and laws that restrict who can access it and for what purposes. With audit logs and penalties for misuse.
The idea of Meta being able to track my every move creeps me the fuck out, sorry.
What right does the government have to give my data to randos? The public that's captured is not the same as the public that accesses the data. Just imagine the creepy implications.
Imagine what stalkers could do if they could follow a woman's every movement. Imagine robbers staking out houses from the comfort of their couch.
The government has an obligation to protect the data it has on its citizens, not to just give out willy-nilly. By your logic, public hospitals should share your medical files publicly.
The solution would be for less data to be collected in the first place, not to make the data leak as dystopian as possible.
-Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
-Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
-Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
-I agree that it would be a better world if there were no drone surveillance, however, in a world where there is drone surveillance--i.e., the world in which we exist--I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
> -Meta can already track your every move; that ship has sailed. Not sure why it is relevant to this discussion.
I've gone through great lengths to ensure it can't, I'd rather not have the government undo all that effort.
> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy.
Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber can already stake out a house.
Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it for you and send you a nice notification.
> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen.
I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
>> -Your medical data is private, whereas this is a discussion about data from >the public sphere, where there is no legal expectation of privacy. > >Maybe there should be? There is in other parts of the world.
I strenuously object. But that's not this conversation. It's way upstream, as the SCOTUS has already decided that there is no public expectation of privacy.
>> -Randos can already observe your every movement, They just have to do it >physically. A stalker can already follow a woman's public movements. A robber >can already stake out a house. > >Doing that in person is a much different thing in terms of commitment compared >to doing it from the comfort of your couch, or hell, having an AI model do it >for you and send you a nice notification.
A rando can send a drone or a fleet of drones to do the same surveillance that you are worried about here. Perhaps you are just really anti-drone?
>> I would prefer public data available to all, rather than a one-sided >panopticon. With the former, at least we can watch the watchmen. > >I would rather limit access to a power that can - at least theoretically - be >changed democratically, instead of having an infinite-sided panopticon.
There is no such thing as an infinite-sided panopticon. Definitionally, a panopticon is one-sided.
I'd modify this to "all warrantless surveillance", so not just cameras. Warrantless surveillance should not be allowed for private activity, and making it public helps audit that.
With mass drone surveillance and online safety acts, we will finally be able to keep our children truly safe for the small cost of privacy.
My dad grew up in a rural village, and my wife grew up in a very small rural town. Both have mentioned to me that, in such places, people can see and keep track of basically everything that's going on in public spaces anyway. Drone surveillance can be viewed as replicating the oversight that exists in Mayberry in a large city.
"We're bringing the paranoid old biddy HOA worldview to everyone, non-consensually!" is your upside?
It's less like HOA and more like sharia law if I remember his background correct.
If Sharia law is responsible, then that's a credit to sharia law! Despite their faults on macro-politics, rigidly Islamic countries are remarkably safe and peaceful at the micro level. Tehran has a half the homicide rate of Toronto!
But I think this isn't just about Sharia law. My dad's village in Bangladesh and the small Iowa town where my wife went to high school are the same in key respects: "Paranoid old bidd[ies]"--to use @ceejayoz's terminology--feed surveillance information to older men who impose order on the young men who commit most crime.
My dad remarked that he walked several miles to school each day, but wouldn't have been able to get away with anything because anyone within sight of the road would've immediately reported what they saw to his dad. Similarly, my wife once stalled her manual-shift Volvo waiting at a light, a fact which was observed and promptly conveyed to her step-dad.
>Despite their faults on macro-politics, rigidly Islamic countries are remarkably safe and peaceful at the micro level. Tehran has a half the homicide rate of Toronto!
This is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'll have to remember to tell my Ahmedi relatives from Peshawar and Gilgit that after they (separately) got out of Dodge after they heard their neighbors wanted their heads on pikes.
A system that works well given resource constraints should be recognized as such even if its benefits don’t extend to everyone.
People generally recognize Mayberry as the ideal of where to live.
People generally recognize there isn't a universal ideal place to live, because people are often different.
Some people leave the rural paniopticon where half of the dating pool are cousins for a reason, for example.
Why'd your Dad leave?
There is a tremendous difference between residents being aware of what's happening in their community and mass governmental surveillance.
“The state should replace community” is an interesting take. What other powers should be added to the state? Should they cook our food too? Do you think there’s any downside to the government having these powers?
> Should they cook our food too?
Unironically, also GP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46559004
> > The bad food is a plus. The most orderly civilizations generally have the blandest food. Almost all societies with good food are chaotic and disorderly.
So yes, the state should probably take over cooking to maintain order!
Now that's what we call bait
And a couple of ES-209s as well
To balance it, the police need to be extremely accountable, but so far they get away with murder pretty easily...so...
I believe the post was intended to be ironic, implying that privacy isn't really a small cost.
> 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.]
Yea, "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-departm...
Nothing 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.
I 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.
Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau
Helicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?
Scale. 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.
So 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")
> So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians?
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> 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")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
> I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
Yes, i understand what you're saying hence why i mentioned culture. American justice (and cultural cues that inform the policies) seems to be more about revenge than rehabilitation.
Agreed on American justice, our culture and thereby system really prefer to punish anyone who gets caught. But just to stick up for the US a little bit (although I'm not fond of our policies): it's not just America that prefers revenge over rehab. From what I understand, Central America and South America also prefer it – the "mano dura" (iron fist) policies that many countries have are harsh too.
People will shoot themselves in the foot if it means criminals get harsher punishments, sometimes literally.
Constraints 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.
I would rather live on my feet in a dangerous world than live on my knees in a safe one.
>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.
> marginally higher petty crime rates
And what is a petty crime these days?
Within the last year in Woolston Lyttelton and Brighton: I've been assualted unprovoked, I've had the outer unit of my split heatpump stolen (for Al, $$$ to fix), I've had outdoor plumbing damaged (for Cu, $$ to fix), I've had the rim stolen[1] off the back of my parked car, last week my friend had tools stolen that they can't afford to replace.
I'm not sure what the answer is, but the above petty crimes are unacceptable to me or my friends.
Nothing has been reported because that just costs time and doesn't resolve the problems.
In small groups of people society is surveillance (yes, often detrimentally). I've lived in small towns and the surveillance is extreme. Society has got worse at encouraging/enforcing good society.
I loath surveillance capitalism, but systemically I'm unsure what the answer is.
I finally gave in and installed a Eufy brand camera (my security friend used that brand and installed it, although I can't recommend the UI). I don't think that it will even help. Ironically the security friend was broken into recently and had their security camera stolen.
None of the above was motivated by hunger or good reasons: it was real scumbags for the situations I know the perp, and likely drug users for the metal thefts (or perhaps kids - two brass taps are not worth it).
[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360962317/its-bit-epidemic-m...
I agree with you 100% if the number of average drone surveillance incidents per year stays the same as the average number of high speed chases per year that took place before drones.
It won't, obviously.
This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
It's because ignoring rights happens faster than they can be protected.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
I mean, helicopters are a limited and expensive resource.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered
And helicopters tracking you are hard to miss.
I believe in a "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. A drone could hover outside my window watching me, but I don't think that would make people feel comfortable.
In a wiretap scenario, yes that would be uncomforting and worrisome.
But these drones are used to chase active criminals. Unless you committed a crime and ran back to your apartment, I think you’d be fine
FTA: They are not used to chase active criminals.
Helicopters are expensive and thus rare.
Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.
Still don’t know how this affects me. The use here seems to be for criminals on the run
Per the article, that doesn't appear to be the use case.
> 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.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
So, we're back to the "if you don't break the law, you have nothing to worry about" argument for overbearing policing?
Again, the article says otherwise. So do the police.
To answer your question succinctly: The government is doing them, and that could be breaking the law.
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?
James Cameron is prophetic:
https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel
I 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-sur...
Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky
1. https://www.pss-1.com/
2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...
domestically we use the RQ-4 and MQ-4 and lie about it
Source?
An unmanned plane is also called a drone.
Drones are cheap & reliable. Vs. blimps, balloons, and such have repeatedly proven themselves quite fragile.
Quadcopters, you mean? They are cheap, and reliable enough given that they are cheap, but that's all.
Cheap while China allows them to be cheap.
Am I missing something? I can click the 'article' but its a big picture and a single paragraph. That reads like a picture description.
They paywalled the article, that’s why you can only see the first paragraph
Didn't realize it was paywalled when I posted it. I read it in Apple News where it's not paywalled:
https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
Sad 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.
Wait 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).
Are 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?
>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.
Classic example of the Nothing to hide argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
nah, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is IMO until the police have something to hide (besides their crappy securing of the usage) It's not really a news piece.
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
So do we need to wait for abuse with this specific piece of technology in order to be concerned?
we don't have to wait for one. But anti-corruption practices like watch dogs / transparency et al are the next steps before jumping to conclusions.
Like IMO the real recourse is to come down hard on the abuses of power, and that includes things like getting Citizens united taken down so that police union(s) are not so powerful etc.
I'm generally more interested in root causes than pruning the leaves. Which I realize often is not the "pragmatic" choice.
They already do use tech to spy on exes, though
Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner Using License Plate Reader: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/milwaukee-police-offic...
Nope. This is a classic example of crimes being committed in public and police using technology to catch the perpetrators.
Passive surveillance would be your example. This program is specifically activated when an active investigation is in progress.
There will always be those who make excuses for the panopticon. Is yours that reducing auto theft is worth the tradeoffs?
AFAIK 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).
+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.
> 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).
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> 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).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
Civilized 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.
For the record, most states have publicity rights (with exceptions) so that publishing a photo may still require somebody’s permission.
But the police don’t need a warrant to follow me in public, and even take pictures that they have no intention of publishing.
I think there is a valid discussion for devices like Flock. The CEO is a detriment to their company and the lack of police guardrails and auditing make it ripe for abuse.
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
I'm sure this wont be misused frequently with total impunity, right?
I 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.
I 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?
I 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.
What are the safeguards that are in place here? What happens when this surveillance capability falls into the hands of an autocratic government?
Same 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.
It's nice to see SFPD taking car break-ins seriously.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Is it essential liberty to be able to run around doing crime without being surveiled?
This 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."
How would this be different to following a suspicious car to see what it's intent is?
A 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)
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?
> 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)
What about we keep the drones to reduce crime and just selectively never investigate black suspects?
>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.
There are such things as plain-clothed police officers. Not that police officers have to announce their presence to you when they are driving on a public road anyways.
> 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.
If they ask YOU what crime YOU'RE committing you don't have to answer. Why would they have to answer you or even admit to following you?
You say slippery slope when what I think you really mean is that it shifts the overton window of what is and isn't acceptable. That is a valid concern, but unless the police are allowed to fly drones in places where gen pop aren't allowed to, they aren't getting any special privileges from their position so I thin the point is moot. Slippery slope imo only starts when the police get NEW privileges.
> 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.
Sweet, you've invented pre-crime.
Nobody's being punished, only (briefly) surveiled.
[flagged]
It's not a one-liner joke.
I believe citizens being able to run around without being continually surveilled is an essential liberty.
We don't surveil everyone all the time just in case they do a crime. It's not a joke.
What liberty does a drone with a camera break? Seems like a nice optimization on police resources.
There should be no optimization on police resources. When Katz v. USA (no expectation of privacy in public) was decided, surveillance was done by an officer who needed to be paid a middle class salary, maybe armed with a camera and a telephoto lens if we’re lucky. The average city police department barely knew what SIGINT meant.
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
These drones are “piloted” but it can be in a semiautonomous way. Your argument makes sense for Flock cameras but not for this style of drone. I think first response with a drone to an active call is a great use of resources for all parties. Flock cameras constantly tracking every movement, probably not given the severe lack of audits and guardrails.
It’s still far too scalable compared to what was accessible back then. The police should be handcuffed to paying for a full ass helicopter if they want to do surveillance
If I had to pick one, I'd go with the Fourth Amendment.
Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only. Can you describe how this breaks the 4th? Does it really matter if it’s a human tracking down a suspect or a drone.
If you have any case law that shows general cameras break the 4th I would love to read.
> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
I'm the person who posted the article lol. The article lists several cases where the drones were used to investigate random people – not active calls. They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside.
The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
> Can you describe how this breaks the 4th?
Put me on the Supreme Court and I'd be happy to do that for you. Until then, there are more qualified people to do it and the rest of us will just know it when we see it. :)
edit: removed the part where I said u/infecto didn't read the article – it's clear we both read it and came away with different conclusions.
[dead]
> Did you read the article… These are being used for active calls only.
Did you? The article provides clear counterexamples to that policy.
Yup I did and it was not clear. I think those two examples are worthy of a discussion on scope creep but not clear policy violations atm. The intent is to be used on active calls which I believe is a great idea. A clear violation would be the drones actively patrolling and identify suspicious behavior. That’s bad and a clear violation of the policy.
Please let us know how this violates the 4th. I would love to learn more about it.
This is one of those areas that can be a slippery slope. Look at the UK and the terrible state it’s in. On the flip side I would hope that so long as the guardrails are in place that first response drones can be good for all parties.
> Please let us know how this violates the 4th.
It seem awfully similar to the geofence surveillance SCOTUS just said requires a warrant.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
Maybe similar trajectory but fundamentally Chatrie is about compelling stored data from a third party. I don’t believe there is any meaningful overlap between that and direct visual observation from police. Folks should argue it in court if so but I don’t see the link to 4th violations.
Chatrie has sections like this:
> Second, Location History allows police to reconstruct “retrospective[ly],” and with no real effort, people’s comings and goings in any area, enabling “tireless and absolute surveillance” of any number of people in any number of places.
A certain level of drone surveillance would seem likely to rise to this level of intrusion, and I think ALPR cameras already do.
Agree I wish the article focused more on the storage and availability of the data instead of the narrative they wrote. It’s in there but not the focus which imo is the issue. I think it’s great to have the drones as active response but like ALPR, it’s ripe for abuse after the fact. These systems can have great value but are ripe for abuse, I hope organizations catchup to build the proper guardrails.
'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/
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/Rey...
So 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.
> So these are only being used on active calls.
I see your distinction better now. The Reynolds essay speaks a little more to the issue at hand. Essentially the technology allows for scope creep. Previously the limiting factor for physical police surveillance was officer FTEs, which creates a lower bound for the conditions that predicate an "active call." When this constraint is lifted, then Prosecutors could easily fall prey to the temptation of “picking the man, and then searching the law books . . . to pin some offense on him.”
Agree, which is why these discussions need to happen. I am a big proponent of this kind of tech but also welcome the discussion to figure out appropriate boundaries.
You know he was talking about taxes...
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Great, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.
And 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.
The only thing insecure was the market position of the domestic competition.
Or rather, lobbyists will let it fly as long as it's got a camera.