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Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

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Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#51

Post by rmxt »

diminoten2 wrote: post #42
rmxt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand fast by the notion that they shouldn't be performing general "intelligence operations", nor should they be recruiting the FBI to so on their behalf. They should be proactively fighting crime, but that doesn't need to (and legally shouldn't) entail wholesale monitoring of everyone in their jurisdiction (and then some, judging by the range of the drones and the involvement of the FBI). Do you actually think tha…

I get where you're coming from, but it's not "unnecessary dragnet surveillance" to fly a drone over a hot zone in a city during a period of riots to monitor the state of the area, nor should the employees of companies who offer such services to these police departments "be ashamed".

What is a "hot zone"? People obstructing traffic and breaking a few windows merits recording the location of every cell phone (basically every person over the age of 10) for an extended period of time? That's textbook "unnecessary dragnet surveillance".

EDIT: How do you separate out:

1. People in the streets participating in marches. (maybe articuable suspicion)

2. People in the streets not participating in marches. (ipso facto no articuable suspicion)

3. People in their homes with their cell phones on. (ipso facto no articuable suspicion)

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#52

Post by ska »

diminoten2 wrote: post #37
cryoshon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cops are already flying their choppers all over Baltimore and back in order to keep track of the protests/rioters. This is something a bit more insidious than simple crowd/crime spotting for ground units. As the article states, this airplane was likely utilizing a few privacy-smashing technologies such as an aerial Stingray (dirtbox) or an ARGOS camera suite, complete with individual identification and tracking f…

Anything the BPD is doing to circumvent warrants is obviously bad and needs to stop. I'm not arguing they should be allowed to do any of that stuff. What I am saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with arial surveillance, to the point where everyone who works for companies offering such services is "evil".

I think the problem a lot of people have is with the "mass" part, not the "surveillance" part, of mass-surveillance.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#53

Post by badsock »

dogma1138 wrote: post #49
MattGrommes wrote: post #4

" Among the companies offering this technology are major defense contractors working for the Pentagon and an Ohio company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is trying to sell it to local police departments." I know this is an unpopular opinion these days but the people working for these companies should be ashamed. There is little use for this technology, especially on US soil, except mass surveillance of…

That can be said for people who are working for Google, Facebook and any other major tech company out there. All of them milk the heck out of every piece of data they got and each service they put out is designed to milk as much data as possible in the future. Like it or not personal data and clever means of working with it is the new currency for many companies on the market these days. And some of the stuff they pu…

The critical difference, in my view, is that Google et al. do not have the authority to incarcerate people.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#54

Post by task_queue »

rhino369 wrote: post #24
vonmoltke wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also an unpopular opinion is that some people (I am not one of them FYI) think mass surveillance of the population is a good thing. It can be hard to understand that position, but there are people who believe mass surveillance, security theater, and the like really are protecting them and that it is all for their own good. As long as sufficient numbers of these people exist there will be not shortage of people who ar…

It a tool like any other. It can be used for good or evil. What you are doing in the middle of a Baltimore street isn't in any way private information. It's a public as you get. Sure, it could be used to perpetrate a Holocaust or something, but so could the 101st airborne. If the government wanted to go all Hitler on us, they already can get google data, facebook data, medical records, essentially everything that is…

Do we really want to tie a noose at the end of all the rope we already hand the authorities?

There are tools people with power shouldn't have access to, because people with power do not have a good track record of using them in good faith.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#55

Post by genericuser »

tomswartz07 wrote: post #2

If you're big into crowd-sourcing: There are super-inexpensive RTL-SDR dongles[1] that can be used to track airplanes such as this. I'm not a lawyer, but I've fooled around with these dongles and a few programs enough to discern that Gov't aircraft absolutely need to broadcast their info on the 1090MHz band. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to have a few people pop these up and see if they could monitor the airplanes…

1030 mhz will give you some more info in regards to what is being sent to the aircraft.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#56

Post by task_queue »

vonmoltke wrote: post #16
Kalium wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or any form of wide-area surveillance, which isn't necessarily the same as surveillance of mass amounts of people. From an article I read yesterday, the first documented use of FBI domestic surveillance planes was a bribery case that involved a payoff package tossed out of a train in the 30s. So, these things do have other uses.

Really any of the modern battlefield surveillance and situational awareness systems could theoretically be turned to the purposes of mass surveillance of civilian populations, given the motivation and resources.

A local police department outside one of the worst areas in the Northeast has the same surveillance systems they used in Baghdad. They like to brag about it in the papers.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#57

Post by strictnein »

beat wrote: post #31
strictnein wrote: post #18

Have these folks ever been to a major sporting event? Like a MLB all star game, for instance? Same planes are there as well. They just circle around slowly to give security an eye in the sky. If you have an important event or large scale protests, this seems like a logical thing to have. This article is a little out there and belongs on some conspiracy website. Reads like an Infowars piece.

It's the ACLU. I imagine they're more circumspect than Infowars. If they're concerned, there's good reason to be concerned.

Ehh... it's written by one of their writers, who doesn't seem to have a great grasp of technology in general.

This alone disqualifies him:

> "super-high, gigapixel resolution cameras on planes, which are then used to monitor entire cities"

> "Every moving pedestrian and vehicle can be tracked: the beginning and end everyone’s journeys, and the route taken in between"

> "This gives the authorities the power to press "rewind" on anybody's movements"

Sorry, but he's watched too many bad TV shows and movies. Can you imagine the storage needed to record gigapixel level video that would allow you to do this? The real explanation is in the middle of the story, but it's so benign that it hardly merits any discussion:

> "the flights were apparently carried out by the FBI at the request of local law enforcement, and that they were using infrared cameras of some kind "to monitor movements of people in the vicinity.""

So, you had a large amount of people out at night, spread out in a city, with some acting violently. Not using this type of technology to get a handle on the situation would be negligent. It's not some super secret mass surveillance tech, it's fairly basic cameras that can be used to help police, fire, and medical services respond as necessary. But the ACLU can't fund raise and get clicks off that, so this guy wrapped it in nonsense and now its getting lots of clicks.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#58

Post by genericuser »

badsock wrote: post #53
dogma1138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can be said for people who are working for Google, Facebook and any other major tech company out there. All of them milk the heck out of every piece of data they got and each service they put out is designed to milk as much data as possible in the future. Like it or not personal data and clever means of working with it is the new currency for many companies on the market these days. And some of the stuff they pu…

The critical difference, in my view, is that Google et al. do not have the authority to incarcerate people.

The NSA and those organization's aren't usually making the products like Google is they are usually contracting it out. It isn't the companies doing the work incarcerating people in either case, it is simply that when the user of the product being sold is the Government they have that power.

Re: Mysterious Planes Over Baltimore Spark Surveillance Suspicions

#60

Post by dogma1138 »

badsock wrote: post #53
dogma1138 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can be said for people who are working for Google, Facebook and any other major tech company out there. All of them milk the heck out of every piece of data they got and each service they put out is designed to milk as much data as possible in the future. Like it or not personal data and clever means of working with it is the new currency for many companies on the market these days. And some of the stuff they pu…

The critical difference, in my view, is that Google et al. do not have the authority to incarcerate people.

These days nope, but agreements like the TTIP actually give countries quite a bit of power that used to be reserved to nation states. I'm not some dystopian future conspiracy nut but many companies out there have more power over what i do on a daily basis than any government organization out there.

Yes the NSA (not directly) can put me in jail, but and that's a big but there still has to be a good enough reason to do it. The NSA isn't some shadow government wanting to rule the world, they did some nasty stuff, some of it is probably illegal and for the rest they've surely stepped out of their boundaries with very loose interpretations of laws and executive orders but even the biggest critic of the NSA can't say they've done it for their own reasons and not in order to ensure the security of the United States. And when people say well what if country X will become a brutal dictatorship, well in that case they can put you in jail on a whim, again this isn't a case for mass surveillance, or for the NSA it's just a simple truth. So while i do see the NSA spying on Americans on US soil a violation of their mandate, i don't see it as some mile stone in the US becoming North Korea or East Germany for that matter.

But back to Google et al, everything i buy, every peace of information i consume, half the people i talk to, how i get from place to place and what i get exposed to in the process, where i am know, and heck even what i type as we speak is being tracked, analyzed and stored not by the NSA but by the 100's of various companies from Google to that brand new hot machine learning add network startup that just won TechCruch Disrupt last week. Yes they can't put me in jail, but the amount of control they can exert on you isn't that far from incarceration when you actually use it in it's broadest term, there are countries with prison systems that don't look like Riker's check out Bastøy Prison for example. ;) If you want to go full on tin foil hat then 1984 describes an incarcerated society, and sorry but if you compare what the NSA to what Google et al. are doing to they the latter is much much closer to a proto 1984 society than the former.

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