SurveillanceAdoption of battlefield surveillance system in urban settings raises privacy concerns
More cities are adopting an aerial surveillance system first developed for the military. The surveillance cameras, fitted on a small plane, can record a 25-square-mile area for up to six hours, and cost less than the price of a police helicopter. The system also has the capability of watching 10,000 times the area that a police helicopter could watch. Privacy advocates are concerned. “There are an infinite number of surveillance technologies that would help solve crimes, but there are reasons that we don’t do those things, or shouldn’t be doing those things,” said one of them.
Compton, California has adopted a wide-area surveillance system as a means of monitoring criminal activities. Built by Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), the system provided the U.S. military an aerial view which allows soldiers to hunt down bombing suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Networkworld reports that with the system’s success on the battlefield, Ross McNutt, retired Air Force veteran and president of PSS, convinced the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department to use PSS’s high-resolution system to monitor the city of Compton. “We literally watched all of Compton during the time that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,” McNutt said. “Our goal was to basically jump to where reported crimes occurred and see what information we could generate that would help investigators solve the crimes.”
According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the surveillance cameras, fitted on a small plane, can record a 25-square-mile area for up to six hours, and cost less than the price of a police helicopter. The PSS system also has the capability of watching 10,000 times the area that a police helicopter could watch. McNutt estimates that PSS’s advanced cameras could capture up to fifty crimes per six-hour flight if the system were employed in high crime areas of Washington, D.C.
Operators using the system are able to rewind footage and track the movement of residents and cars as they conduct daily commutes and transactions. “With wide-area surveillance, all the activity in an entire community or area is monitored with a single camera system,” states a PSS “Airborne” brochure. In Philadelphia, the system was used to track the killer’s and accomplice’s vehicles hours after the murder of a gang member. The Dayton, Ohio SWAT team also used the system in a dogfighting operation raid.
Despite successful operations with the PSS system, privacy advocates are concerned that law enforcement may develop a database of footage showing innocent residents. “There are an infinite number of surveillance technologies that would help solve crimes . . . but there are reasons that we don’t do those things, or shouldn’t be doing those things,” said Joel Pruce, a University of Dayton postdoctoral fellow in human rights who opposed the plan. “You know where there’s a lot less crime? There’s a lot less crime in China.”
Responding to concerns about privacy, McNutt notes that he sought advice from the American Civil Liberties Union when writing the privacy policy for PSS. The policy contains rules governing length of data storage and who may access images and footage from the PSS.
