Police are using new surveillance tech. that can track everyone in an area for several hours at a time

Dayton, Ohio — Shooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.

But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead.

“I’ve witnessed 34 of these,” said Ross McNutt, the president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which collected the images of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna.

Persistent Surveillance Systems has two spying technologies they're offering to police: One is called Wide-Area Aerial Surveillance Systems or Hawkeye,  the other is Vision- RL.

McNutt, a retired Air Force officer who once helped design a similar system for the skies above Fallujah, a battleground city in Iraq, hopes to win over officials in Dayton and elsewhere by convincing them that cameras mounted on fixed-wing aircraft can provide far more useful intelligence than police helicopters do, for less money.

Dayton police were enticed by McNutt’s offer to fly 200 hours over the city for a home-town discount price of $120,000. The city, with a population of only 140,000 people!

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.

Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said.

They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician, who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez.

“If you turn your country into a totalitarian surveillance state, there’s always some wrongdoing you can prevent,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union. “The balance struck in our Constitution tilts toward liberty, and I think we should keep that value.”

A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall. He said regular flights over the most dangerous parts of Washington — combined with publicity about how much police could see — would make a significant dent in the number of burglaries, robberies and murders. His 192-megapixel cameras would spot as many as 50 crimes per six-hour flight, he estimated, providing police with a continuous stream of images covering more than a third of the city.

“We watch 25 square miles, so you see lots of crimes,” he said. “And by the way, after people commit crimes, they drive like idiots.”

What McNutt is trying to sell is not merely the latest techno-wizardry for police. He envisions such steep drops in crime that they will bring substantial side effects, including rising property values, better schools, increased development and, eventually, lower incarceration rates as the reality of long-term overhead surveillance deters those tempted to commit crimes.

Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl, a supporter of McNutt’s efforts, has proposed inviting the public to visit the operations center to get a glimpse of the technology in action.

“I want them to be worried that we’re watching,” Biehl said. “I want them to be worried that they never know when we’re overhead.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-surveillance-technology-can-track-everyone-in-an-area-for-several-hours-at-a-time/2014/02/05/82f1556e-876f-11e3-a5bd-844629433ba3_print.html

Ohio police to begin using Persistent Surveillance (Spying) Systems:

It appears that the city of Dayton Ohio is considering actually deploying a system that is in many respects similar to ARGUS—and although it shares many of the features that are causing so much concern over drones around the country, it is not being held back by the FAA and its well-founded safety concerns around drones.

The reason? The surveillance at issue is based on a manned aircraft rather than unmanned drones.

According to a Dayton Police Department slide presentation obtained by Ohio activists and shared with the ACLU, the department is pursuing a program called “Trusted Situational Awareness” (such a mouthful of euphemisms for surveillance that it almost sounds like a parody). According to the slideshow, entitled “2013 Aerial Surveillance Project,” a test of the system was conducted for 8 days in June 2012 during daylight hours over Sinclair Community College.

The program is run by a company called “Persistent Surveillance Systems,” which also makes ground-based wide-area surveillance systems, as touted in this online brochure. According to the slideshow, the program is important because it “Can be utilized to prevent and minimize acts of terrorism, crime and murder.” From the slideshow:

“Forensic intelligence” usually means something like, “keeping records of everything everybody is doing so we can go back and carry out retroactive surveillance whenever we need it.”

The slideshow describes how the police “selected 18 incidents for aerial surveillance,” including a burglary in progress and a robbery spree at three commercial locations. “Analysts were able to track the primary suspect to all of these locations as well as to a Clark gas station prior to the robberies,” the police boast. Slides show aerial tracking of moving suspects:

In America we do not allow the government to look over everybody’s shoulders (literally or figuratively) just in case they engage in wrongdoing. We require the police to have individualized suspicion of wrongdoing before they invade our privacy in that way. There is no question that there are some crimes the police will solve if we allow our country to turn into a total surveillance state, but that is a bad tradeoff. The police here want to “identify” illegal activity, which is fine, but not if that’s accomplished by watching all activity.

A group of citizens assisted by the ACLU of Ohio have been pushing back against this program in Dayton. The police department gave them a proposed policy to cover the program, and after meeting with the citizens and receiving their feedback, provided an updated policy with “a few small changes. The policy has no warrant requirement, and it lacks clear retention and sharing policies as well as any provisions for independent oversight.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/ohio-aerial-surveillance-system-moving-forward-without