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).
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.
> 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?
Why should the police be accountable, indeed? That's honestly my whole point, my whole issue with police having drones. They're not accountable, and when they get caught, they lie or ignore. They have power over you and I, they're in a special position, and for that reason we should both be fighting them and holding them accountable wherever and whenever they step over the line (which, I'm sure you're aware, is constantly).
> 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.
The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get. They get training to use these drones. They get the tacit permission of our governments to use these drones in their pursuit of us, to record video of us going about our daily lives.
Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail. Meanwhile, the police themselves can fly a drone outside your window, or use drones to stalk you if you're a woman, and people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
In terms of photography there's no expectation of privacy in a public place. Maybe in some countries that's different but that's how it is here. If you take a picture in public you don't need the consent of everyone in the background. So the police aren't doing anything that joe bloggs couldn't do.
Personally, I feel the police keep me safe. 99 times out of 100 when there's some kind of shitty headline about police there turns out to be a lot of missing information from the story. I've been pulled over plenty when I was younger and had other interactions and have always been dealt with reasonably. My only complaint about the police is that there isn't more of them. So I guess we're going to disagree on this issue.
How are you defining public? When a drone flies over my backyard and records me naked in my hot tub, is that public now?
Mind you that scenario is explicitly forbidden by law, the drones are only supposed to record at the scene but the police are illegally recording for the entire flight.
Should the police be allowed to break the law when they feel like it? Or should they be held to the same (or higher) standard as the general population because of the extra authority we give them
That's true about the hot tub. We already have helicopters but I can appreciate there's room for the drones to be more pervasive because of their lower cost.
Holding police to standards isn't easy. We ask people to go out and pull long shifts, to react in complex and life and death situations both for themselves and for the public in a split second, should we hold them to a high standard? yes, should we give them a break for split second mistakes bearing in mind what we're asking them to do - also yes.
> should we give them a break for split second mistakes bearing in mind what we're asking them to do - also yes
I disagree. Those we empower to take life must be held to the highest possible standard. After all, there is no returning from that path once it's taken.
>Why should the police be accountable, indeed? That's honestly my whole point, my whole issue with police having drones. They're not accountable, and when they get caught, they lie or ignore. They have power over you and I, they're in a special position, and for that reason we should both be fighting them and holding them accountable wherever and whenever they step over the line (which, I'm sure you're aware, is constantly). Given the option and an inch, the police would establish a surveillance panopticon, all in the name of "safety."
The police are accountable, this is one of the big reasons they wear bodycams—so that there is a video record of if they were abusing their power. If they don't have the bodycam on, this would look very bad in front of a jury. If they're actually stalking you that's an abuse of power and you can sue the city/state.
The key difference is that they aren't accountable to you on the street because they need the special privilege to do their job.
Given the option (shown time and time again) police will sit on their ass and rack up overtime for their ridiculous pension. They aren't paid by crimes avoided so I don't think they would care to proactively fix it.
> The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get.
This is a real problem in America, where tools that could potentially be used for nefarious purposes become illegal for the general population "for their own good". If you're arguing we should have access to specialized surveillance drones and other police equipment on the market you have my complete support.
Also training for a drone, using a drone, recording video in public spaces, surveilling you in a public space are not privileges.
Surveilling you in your apartment needs a warrant, unless you have your window open, at which case it doesn't.
>Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail.
Anyone can walk up to you and kill you, it doesn't mean there aren't legal consequences for it.
>people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
This is because we've heard these arguments a million times and know it's a trojan for some harebrained ideology, which is unfortunate, because police oversight is an important topic—especially considering police unions wield a lot of political power.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line between what police can and can't do?
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.
'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.
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.
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).
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.
“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!
Hopefully one day society can lift itself to your lofty ideals of tasteless food, oppressive surveillance and no crimes against the state. I wonder if anyone has written about such a world before.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"?
Nice niche cherry pick too bad there isn't even a mention of "same amount of crime" if you just look at average crime rates by race, logic would tell you why that might be the case, in the same way men are WAY more likely to be pulled over than women.
What destroys trust is breaking it e.g. a specific group of people committing unproportional amount of crime per capita.
What about profiling based on sex or age? Should there be a perfect equal amount of times a 8 year old girl or a 80 year old man be question by the police just so you can feel good about yourself?
Don't waste my time with your sophistry. We both know what you actually want to say, so stop pussyfooting around like you don't already have your bullshit 13% statistic memorized by rote and just come out and say it.
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.
my opinion: we need a lot more context here. It is dystopian to have advanced and arguably “stealth in an urban environment” drones conducting surveillance for benign activities. What was the suspicion? Matching the skin colour of an APB, or something more?
I’m sure most people have no problems with drones being used for hot pursuit, appending those charged with murder, etc; but this is highly advanced technology that deserves more scruinty and accountability.
> 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
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 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.
> It’s also true that they have those powers because we’ve decided the alternative is worse.
I don't ever remembering getting the option to vote on whether my police department could use drones and surveillance tech or not. We can't possibly conclude that society has decided the alternative is worse – society never got a choice, the police departments are just spending their budgets on cool military shit and then going on to abuse it like they always do.
When I drive on the freeway, any time a police car gets behind me and turns on its lights, I have to stop. If I don't stop, I can ultimately be charged with evading arrest, or fleeing police, or some similar offense. I can be fined and even put in jail, even if a judge decides that the officer didn't actually have a valid reason to stop me.
If a police officer approaches me (when I'm not in a car) and tells me that I'm under arrest, I don't have the legal permission to leave. Even if I know I didn't break any laws. Even if I happen to know why the officer wants to arrest me and I know that it's not a valid reason for an arrest.
Why? Why does the law require me to obey without question, especially when honest mistakes that I might make are treated very differently from honest mistakes the trained officer might make? Fundamentally, because we have decided that the alternative is worse.
Do officers abuse their authority? Of course they do. But we've decided that toothless police departments aren't worth anything (and, in fact, lead to more vigilantism and crime). And we've decided that "self help" solutions (e.g., giving people the right to violently resist arrest if the officer is in the wrong, while punishing people who resist valid arrests) are worse.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 it isn'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. And can anything be a "training exercise"?
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.
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?
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] thread1. It's not happening
2. It's a good thing
3. Peddle false information
Impressive
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?
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.
Why should the police be accountable, indeed? That's honestly my whole point, my whole issue with police having drones. They're not accountable, and when they get caught, they lie or ignore. They have power over you and I, they're in a special position, and for that reason we should both be fighting them and holding them accountable wherever and whenever they step over the line (which, I'm sure you're aware, is constantly).
> 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.
The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get. They get training to use these drones. They get the tacit permission of our governments to use these drones in their pursuit of us, to record video of us going about our daily lives.
Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail. Meanwhile, the police themselves can fly a drone outside your window, or use drones to stalk you if you're a woman, and people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
Mind you that scenario is explicitly forbidden by law, the drones are only supposed to record at the scene but the police are illegally recording for the entire flight.
Should the police be allowed to break the law when they feel like it? Or should they be held to the same (or higher) standard as the general population because of the extra authority we give them
I disagree. Those we empower to take life must be held to the highest possible standard. After all, there is no returning from that path once it's taken.
The police are accountable, this is one of the big reasons they wear bodycams—so that there is a video record of if they were abusing their power. If they don't have the bodycam on, this would look very bad in front of a jury. If they're actually stalking you that's an abuse of power and you can sue the city/state.
The key difference is that they aren't accountable to you on the street because they need the special privilege to do their job.
Given the option (shown time and time again) police will sit on their ass and rack up overtime for their ridiculous pension. They aren't paid by crimes avoided so I don't think they would care to proactively fix it.
> The police do, literally, have special drone privileges. They get access to special, high-powered surveillance drones that the public does not get.
This is a real problem in America, where tools that could potentially be used for nefarious purposes become illegal for the general population "for their own good". If you're arguing we should have access to specialized surveillance drones and other police equipment on the market you have my complete support.
Also training for a drone, using a drone, recording video in public spaces, surveilling you in a public space are not privileges.
Surveilling you in your apartment needs a warrant, unless you have your window open, at which case it doesn't.
>Go fly a drone outside of a police officer's house and you'll end up dead or in jail.
Anyone can walk up to you and kill you, it doesn't mean there aren't legal consequences for it.
>people like some of the commenters in this thread will lay down their lives to defend them from public criticism.
This is because we've heard these arguments a million times and know it's a trojan for some harebrained ideology, which is unfortunate, because police oversight is an important topic—especially considering police unions wield a lot of political power.
Out of curiosity, where do you draw the line between what police can and can't do?
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.
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...
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.”
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.
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...
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...
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!
https://archive.is/dychh
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
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.
What does your oddly aggressive reply say about you? Other than your username is at best, aspirational, and good luck with that.
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.
The article you linked does not support this claim. It says the proportion of blacks stopped is less in the dark around 7pm.
Nice niche cherry pick too bad there isn't even a mention of "same amount of crime" if you just look at average crime rates by race, logic would tell you why that might be the case, in the same way men are WAY more likely to be pulled over than women.
What about profiling based on sex or age? Should there be a perfect equal amount of times a 8 year old girl or a 80 year old man be question by the police just so you can feel good about yourself?
> 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...
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.
I’m sure most people have no problems with drones being used for hot pursuit, appending those charged with murder, etc; but this is highly advanced technology that deserves more scruinty and accountability.
> 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.”
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.
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.
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.
I don't ever remembering getting the option to vote on whether my police department could use drones and surveillance tech or not. We can't possibly conclude that society has decided the alternative is worse – society never got a choice, the police departments are just spending their budgets on cool military shit and then going on to abuse it like they always do.
When I drive on the freeway, any time a police car gets behind me and turns on its lights, I have to stop. If I don't stop, I can ultimately be charged with evading arrest, or fleeing police, or some similar offense. I can be fined and even put in jail, even if a judge decides that the officer didn't actually have a valid reason to stop me.
If a police officer approaches me (when I'm not in a car) and tells me that I'm under arrest, I don't have the legal permission to leave. Even if I know I didn't break any laws. Even if I happen to know why the officer wants to arrest me and I know that it's not a valid reason for an arrest.
Why? Why does the law require me to obey without question, especially when honest mistakes that I might make are treated very differently from honest mistakes the trained officer might make? Fundamentally, because we have decided that the alternative is worse.
Do officers abuse their authority? Of course they do. But we've decided that toothless police departments aren't worth anything (and, in fact, lead to more vigilantism and crime). And we've decided that "self help" solutions (e.g., giving people the right to violently resist arrest if the officer is in the wrong, while punishing people who resist valid arrests) are worse.
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)
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.
- 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.
See also: racial profiling and Driving While Black.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.
suspicious; odds of it just being a minority? 1:100.
Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.
> 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.
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?
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.
https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
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.
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.
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.
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 it isn'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. And can anything be a "training exercise"?
1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...
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.
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.
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?
https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel