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:...and this is our cue... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't care about being recorded in public locations so long as I can also record everyone else.
I do, if it's the government. You should, because it makes it even more trivial for the government to harass its targets.
Looks like the future is going to be all about masks. But they'll just ban those, won't they?
Re:Apropos of "ethical dilemmas programmers face". (Score:5, Interesting)
"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.
Re:...and this is our cue... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the land of the free and the home of the brave for you. So brave. So free.
Keeping it from mainsteam (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine the only thing keeping it from going mainstream is the ability to make sure it doesn't record any pesky illegal/immoral activity by police/upper government officials. Kind of like that license plat reader system that was suspended indefinitely in Boston because a reporter was able to get a severely limited dataset from the system and still find "mistakes" (ignoring a stolen motorcycle that went past the same intersection regularly while using the system primarily to write tickets, ignoring the most dense area for overdue tickets the police employee parking lot, etc). Or like all of those police dash cams that have a tendency to have malfunctions/accidents when they might have caught "misconduct" (Hollywood Florida framing, Michael DeHerra Beating, Mark Byrge Arrest,Anthony Warren beating & the Prince George’s County, Maryland incident where SEVEN dashcams "malfunctioned" at once.)