> 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 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?
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.”
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 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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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" [¹] who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops.
'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.
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.
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...
> 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
No drone has ever followed me when I am on the way to go play hockey.
I mean, they evaluated and left?
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
I can't help but wonder what skin color those young men had that made the police suspicious in the first place...
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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")
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.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
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
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
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?
Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau
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. I read it in Apple News where it's not paywalled:
https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
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.
>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.
There will always be those who make excuses for the panopticon. Is yours that reducing auto theft is worth the tradeoffs?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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...
domestically we use the RQ-4 and MQ-4 and lie about it
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...
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.
An unmanned plane is also called a drone.
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.
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?
Great, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.
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" [¹] who were just going to a basketball court to shoot hoops.
[¹] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_while_black
Sweet, you've invented pre-crime.
This isn’t Reddit, one-liner jokes aren’t contributing
We don't surveil everyone all the time just in case they do a crime. It's not a joke.
You know he was talking about taxes...
What liberty does a drone with a camera break? Seems like a nice optimization on police resources.
'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...