Reports emerged this fall that the Baltimore Police Department had accepted private funding to secretly retain the services of Persistent Surveillance Systems and its wide area surveillance system to help it investigate crime. Persistent Surveillance Systems owns an airplane. On the belly of the plane is an array of cameras. At first light, a pilot flies the plane up to 10,000 feet and circles the city for hours. While it is circling the city, every second, the cameras take a still image of a 30 square mile area. The photos are instantly processed and downlinked to a command center on the ground. Operators on the ground can pull up the images, and from any specific moment, go backwards or forwards in time, second by second, and watch everything that the plane saw. Operators can follows cars and people fleeing a crime scene, and look backwards to see how they got there. The system’s developer, Ross McNutt, has called it “Google Earth with TiVo capability.”
The system was developed to determine who was killing American soldiers in Iraq with roadside bombs. Baltimore’s use followed shorter, but equally secret, law enforcement stints
Comments
Josh Blackmon pointed me to an article he published a couple of years ago considering the tort implications of google eart, google street view, and what he dubbed “omniveillance” – Josh Blackmon, Omniveillance, Google, Privacy in Public, and the Right to Your Digital Identity: A Tort for Recording and Disseminating an Individual’s Image over the Internet, 49 Santa Clara L. Rev. 313 (2012).
Posted by: Kevin Lapp | Dec 15, 2016 1:35:09 PM