Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance

technewssss

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.

fortran77

It's nice to see SFPD taking car break-ins seriously.

Simulacra

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...

cebert

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.

dannyw

> 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

bobthebob

Helicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?

kotaKat

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.

iamnothere

Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau

ThatMedicIsASpy

Am I missing something? I can click the 'article' but its a big picture and a single paragraph. That reads like a picture description.

maerF0x0

>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.

aftbit

Great, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.

infecto

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.

buellerbueller

What are the safeguards that are in place here? What happens when this surveillance capability falls into the hands of an autocratic government?

emsign

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.

scottlamb

> 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.]

josefritzishere

I'm sure this wont be misused frequently with total impunity, right?

NoSalt

James Cameron is prophetic: https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel

charlie90

On the other hand, https://youtu.be/iY4nx5zuvPA?si=rrPxlC92sUDJYvmO . SFPD posts a number of videos showing that drones are stopping crime, violent crime.