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FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

theguardian.com

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Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#211

Post by tzs »

> Most flight patterns occurred in counter-clockwise orbits up to several miles wide and roughly one mile above the ground at slow speeds. A 2003 newsletter from the company FLIR Systems Inc, which makes camera technology such as seen on the planes, described flying slowly in left-handed patterns.

The way they mentioned counter-clockwise orbits and then talk about FLIR's newsletter mentioning left-handed patterns seems to be trying to use the left/counter-clockwise aspects to connect the two.

That seems rather a stretch. Pilots have better visibility to the left in most small planes, and so left turns are preferred. Also, propellers usually rotate clockwise, which causes some biases toward the left I believe, which may make it slightly easier to do left turns.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#212

Post by JoeAltmaier »

nitrogen wrote: post #206
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh anything really. Ranting on HN. Telling off sales clerks. Pushing to the head of the subway line. Anything you get away with because its anonymous. In the old days, you'd know every clerk, everybody in a line, and get harassed if you were antisocial.

You'd also be harassed if you deviated from any social norms, had the wrong religion/skin/... We should not want to return to such times.

That's very much a modern view. And not shared around the world at all. Racism is of course wrong. But social norms are the glue that holds us all together, to a degree. Its not black-and-white.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#213

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Terr_ wrote: post #184
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People for the first million years, lived in one anothers pockets. There was no anonymity. Arguably we're designed to be social because of that. The modern tendency toward outbursts of antisocial behavior might be a product of anonymity.

... So what? First, it's apples-to-oranges, because we lived in smaller groups. Second, our cultural-programming changes at a much faster rate than genetic-programming.

That's not actually clear! Homo Sapiens adaptation rate increased 100-fold once we started this civilization thing. And for most of that time our social evolution was very slow. I guess today it might have turned around, but that's a blink in the history of our race.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#214

Post by mirimir »

tonyhb wrote: post #176
verbin217 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymity sure. We're talking about privacy. It's always been at least non-zero available.

Live in a faraday cage. I'm only semi-joking; I think that it could be a solution to your issue if you're that concerned about it. Whatever the outcome technology is going to be persistently ubiquitous.

That's not necessary. Also, lack of emissions would attract attention, and so be counterproductive. But using shielded equipment in a shielded room, that would be prudent for private work.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#215

Post by ck2 »

If they actually had a warrant to look for some specific person or group of people I'd actually have no problem with this. Gangs, drug dealers, etc.

The problem is as usual, they feel they are above any judicial review, even if they know they would just get a rubber stamp from a "go to" judge.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#216

Post by tn13 »

walshemj wrote: post #132
tn13 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand an upper limit on total government spending as a % of GDP + upper limit for marginal tax rates for all individuals. Given the popularity of welfare very likely government will be forced to bring sense into its spending. That is the only way. Other way is to use your second amendment rights.

No they will cut benefits starting with single people just like the UK where you don't get any of this feather bedding of 99 week social security. 180 days is your lot - oh and you had better be spending 40 hours a week applying for jobs and be abele to prove it or that gets stopped

That is even better.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#217

Post by tn13 »

lazaroclapp wrote: post #126
tn13 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demand an upper limit on total government spending as a % of GDP + upper limit for marginal tax rates for all individuals. Given the popularity of welfare very likely government will be forced to bring sense into its spending. That is the only way. Other way is to use your second amendment rights.

What happens if you want government to spend money on things in general (infrastructure, healthcare, national and international aid in case of disasters, reasonable defense projects), just not on spying on civilians?

As I said put an upper limit, I did not say do away with government spending. Let the government manage in that much money by spending more judiciously then sucking our hard earned wealth. They can start for example by selling off the luxurious homes that our Congressman end up having for free.

For any other cause let people contribute out of their own volition.Which works much better.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#218

Post by pavel_lishin »

davnicwil wrote: post #158
pavel_lishin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of these things were possible 50 years ago. They are possible now. They will be possible in 50 years. But 50 years ago, these things were not trivial to accomplish. You couldn't just rewind a public feed, and find this information out about any given person - you had to dedicate manpower to tracking any one given individual.

That's very true - it's the point I address on the next line :-) > Increasingly advanced technology reduces the amount of effort, and to some extent, the prior knowledge about you required to do these things - but that doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.

I disagree that it doesn't automatically make them more likely to happen.

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#219

Post by jjwiseman »

bediger4000 wrote: post #3

How can an ordinary person tell if one of these spy planes is currently overhead? Is there some way to dink with them, similar to Matt Blaze's in-band signalling vulnerabilities discovery(s) ( http://www.crypto.com/papers/wiretap.pdf ) ? You know, use old phones that still have SIM cards, but have them try to register constantly? I'm a bit vague on cellphone protocol details, so spare me the nit picking, and get on w…

Someone needs to make these: https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/605888390182010880

Re: FBI operating fleet of surveillance aircraft flying over US cities

#220

Post by genericuser »

Retric wrote: post #168
genericuser wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You completely ignored my question to you. I asked how you got to the topic of license plate readers, I know how they work and an explanation of how they work does nothing to answer the question of how you transitioned to that topic.

I think you completely misunderstood my comment. If you have an hour of video footage of a blue car that you happen to collect from an aircraft while tracking a suspect then on it's own that says vary little. Historically you need to track a suspect to there car and then follow a car so together it's vary labor intensive to track large numbers of people. However, if the blue car passed a license plate reader it stops…

And how do they automatically detect the criminal wrongdoing being committed by that car or its occupants? That is the part I don't get. Yes if they decide to look for John Smith, License plate 1AMJ0HN, then they can probably automatically find his car in that footage, and they can watch that footage to see what he was up to. But watching that footage and figuring out if he did anything they can prosecute him for is not a simple task for any computer algorithm I can think of, and would require time to do manually. And with out doing it in an automated manner they can't possibly do this for 'everyone' which means they have to have reason to already suspect the people they do choose.

I see absolutely no way that bringing up the existence of license plate scanners created a situation where there was no slippery slope.

Also the recorded video collection grows to be a ridiculously large amount of data over time, even detecting all video of John Smith's car across the United States will become an expensive task to complete computationally. And for everyone? Well even more expensive.

Add on the concept that camera's will not be covering all of the United States at times, and if you are just using make, model, and color of cars to track people between license plate readers shell games where similar cars rearrange them selves in tunnels or garages will become extremely effective at defeating surveillance if license plate readers are not basically everywhere.

So in spite of you deciding to bring up license plate readers, and explain how they can be used to assist in tracking with airborne surveillance I still fail to see the relevance of how they ensure that 'everyone' will be monitored.

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