Leaked San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Urban Surveillance Reality
Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance
Security researchers discovered that San Francisco Police Department drone feeds were accidentally livestreamed to the public via a Skydio link. This leak revealed real-time footage of arrests, thermal imaging, and pilot data, exposing how four drones tracked a single suspect in an hour. The incident highlights severe privacy concerns as police utilized these tools for minor incidents without public oversight.
When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests.
- dannyw
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
- cebert
With mass drone surveillance and online safety acts, we will finally be able to keep our children truly safe for the small cost of privacy.
- infecto
I don’t think I have a problem with drones. There is a line to be drawn regarding auditing access of footage and how we are analyzing it historically (prevent from misusing the tech) but for things like active reporting it has the potential to be pretty helpful. Cops used to be a lot more visible (or maybe greater in number) and this type of tech has the potential to help get that back.
I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
- Simulacra
I remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes.
They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.
It was really fascinating… In 2016.
At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.
Instead of planes, they are using drones…
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
- iamnothere
Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau
- scottlamb
> In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
- bobthebob
Helicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?
- NoSalt
James Cameron is prophetic: