Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied On a Whole City 190
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes with some concerning news from the Atlantic. From the article: "In a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren't told about the spying, which happened in 2012. 'We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,' Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time."
Re:Apropos of "ethical dilemmas programmers face". (Score:4, Informative)
but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity
Their whole job is dealing with people who do crime and ask for forgiveness later. I don't condone what they are doing, but I can see how they could slip in that direction.
Which is why we have this thing called the United States Constitution, and why that constitution has an amendment (the 4th one, in fact) that deals with this sort of thing. That same constitution also has a concept of separation of powers, and defines what branch of government has what power. Law enforcement (under the executive branch) are only doing half of their job - they're sworn to uphold the law but the are ignoring the highest law, the constitution The judicial branch exists to prevent that, but they don't seem to be very good at doing the part of their job that involves upholding the constitution.