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Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

buzzfeed.com

41–50 of 138 posts

Re: Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

#41
post #4

I have to admit, https://buzzfeednews.github.io/2016-04-federal-surveillance-... is not something I would expect from Buzzfeed. Huge surprise.

We are at the point now where if you are surprised by the serious journalism going on at Buzzfeed, it just means you have not been paying attention.

Re: Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

#44
post #29

Curious, anyone know why the FBI takes the weekends off?

They still fly on the weekends, just not as much. I captured fr24 data for most of 2014 and pulled out the 80 planes that were originally id'd. Here's a time lapse of where they went that year and some stats on how often they flew: https://craigulmer.com/index.pl?id=alleged_fbi_surveillance_...

Re: Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

#45
post #12
post #3

Map shows right over my house, the conspiracy theorist in me says 'they're watching me!'

If a circle is dead center around your house then you are probably not the focus. Check out the gifs lower down after the San Bernardino attacks. The locations they were investigating -- mosque, workplace, home of Farook -- are all offset from the center for the best combination of angle / proximity. Edit: Also, check out Los Angeles (if that's not where you are from). They are swarming LA! I'd be weirded out if I wa…

[deleted]

Re: Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

#49
post #31
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they need warrants for watching a person in a public place? You don't have an expectation of privacy in that situation.

There needs to be further refinement as to what actually constitutes "watching", e.g. with respect to duration, frequency, information monitored, etc. US v. Jones held that installing a GPS device on a car constituted a trespass against one's "personal effects". I think the similar argument here would be that a near constant observation of someone, even while in public, would amount to the same sort of search, even t…

Jones was based on the classic idea that when the government does what would be a trespass if a private person did it, then a warrant is required. Observing someone in public is not a trespass, no matter how much you do it.

Re: Maps Showing Where FBI Planes Are Watching from Above

#50
Here's my guess based on the following info:

- The article points out that the planes are typically only seen M-F, which suggests that what they are doing is usually not time-sensitive.

- They mention the planes have a very high quality camera on board.

- From the flight patterns, you can see they repeatedly circle the same location, but not apparently for hours and hours at time.

When Apple first released their Maps product, it was revealed that they also flew planes at low altitude to capture super high quality pictures of cities at different angles. They would then process the data later and create 3D models. [1]

Satellites are too expensive to use for this sort of thing, are affected by cloud cover and non-optimal angles, and won't be higher quality than what you can capture from a plane.

So my guess is they are doing exactly what Apple was doing: capturing high quality images of various points of interest and then creating 3D models in case they need to use them later.

Another thing they are probably looking for (from the mention of the FLIR camera) is people growing drugs in their basement or perhaps where people congregate in a building.

They probably find this useful for among other things, having very up to date photography of a particular area, and also in case they need it for some operation like a raid.

[1] http://www.applegazette.com/apple-inc/how-apple-creates-3d-f...

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