Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS

A plurality exists to clamp down on many freedoms. Use cases to deny first amendment rights are popularized - heck our biggest media companies built on the back of the first amendment now wish to see it neutered. Gun rights folks want the Obama administration to pursue second amendment restrictions, yet some of those most vocal about protecting such freedoms cheered on the Bush administration when it wanted to clamp down on speech, or when gay rights pushes are defeated.

Security. Think of the children. Moral outrage. etc

The rich powerful elites have successfully divided the nation to such a degree that they can push through any invasive law they like because they can always bundle together enough of us who hate enough more of us to gain a plurality in its support. More usually they don't need that even. They have the political class in pocket and when it comes to election we have no vote outside of the gerrymandered two sides of the same party system.

Rambling but you get my point.

In general one cannot expect any privacy while in public. That's been established many times over by the courts in the US. On the other hand, tracking recognizable people, I think without a probable cause, would be illegal. On the other hand if they just keep the footage and regressively backtrack activity after an activity was found to be illegal on the ground, then I don't see how using the generated footage would be illegal --and this would help law enforcement to some significant degree (i.e, someone was found stabbed on the sidewalk, no witnesses, let's backtrack the footage and track the attacker forward or backward).

And to look a bit more into this numbers ( and using the numbers from Backblaze [1]) it seems that the uncompressed video of a single drone over a year would cost $1.5e9, of course divided by the compression ratio. However for 14 days of video the storage cost would be in the ballpark of $60M per drone, that sounds actually quite possible ( especially given an additional factor of ~20 lower costs due to compression and a similar factor of ~20 for five years of HD development).

So this seems actually be technology which could on a timescale of five years be available at costs comparable to two or three police cars (plus the costs of the drone, which should be in a similar range). And I for one find this quite creepy.

[1]roughly $50/TB http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration...

This is similar to having a law and FAA enforcing it. They don't need to have the tech to prohibit others from using it. Surveillance satellites is a whole other can of works IMHO.