New surveillance technology can track everyone in an area
for several hours at a time
By Craig Timberg, Wednesday, February 5, 1:28 PM
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
genial president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which collected the images
of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna.
“It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle, and you need to figure
out what happened before and after.”
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.
Defense contractors are developing similar technology for
the military, but its potential for civilian use is raising novel civil
liberties concerns. In Dayton, where Persistent Surveillance Systems is based,
city officials balked last year when police considered paying for 200 hours of
flights, in part because of privacy complaints.
“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.”
The Supreme Court generally has given wide latitude to
police using aerial surveillance as long as the photography captures images
visible to the naked eye.
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.
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.”
Technology in action
McNutt, a suburban father of four with a doctorate from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is not deaf to concerns about his
company’s ambitions. Unlike many of the giant defense contractors that are
eagerly repurposing wartime surveillance technology for domestic use, he sought
advice from the American Civil Liberties Union in writing a privacy policy.
It has rules on how long data can be kept, when images
can be accessed and by whom. Police are supposed to begin looking at the
pictures only after a crime has been reported. Fishing expeditions are
prohibited.
The technology has inherent limitations as well. From the
airborne cameras, each person appears as a single pixel indistinguishable from
any other person. What people are doing — even whether they are clothed or not
— is impossible to see. As technology improves the cameras, McNutt said he
intends to increase their range, not the precision of the imagery, so that
larger areas can be monitored.
The notion that McNutt and his roughly 40 employees are
peeping Toms clearly rankles. The company made a PowerPoint presentation for
the ACLU that includes pictures taken to assist the response to Hurricane Sandy
and the severe Iowa floods last summer. The section is titled: “Good People
Doing Good Things.”
“We get a little frustrated when people get so worried
about us seeing them in their backyard,” McNutt said in his operation center,
where the walls are adorned with 120-inch monitors, each showing a different
grainy urban scene collected from above. “We can’t even see what they are doing
in their backyard. And, by the way, we don’t care.”
Yet in a world of increasingly pervasive surveillance,
location and identity are becoming all but inextricable. One quickly leads to
the other for those with the right tools.
During one of the company’s demonstration flights over
Dayton in 2012, police got reports of an attempted robbery at a bookstore and
shots fired at a Subway sandwich shop. The cameras revealed a single car moving
between the two locations.
By reviewing the images frame by frame, analysts were
able to help police piece together a larger story: A man had left a residential
neighborhood at midday and attempted to rob the bookstore, but fled when
somebody hit an alarm. Then he drove to Subway, where the owner pulled a gun
and chased him off. His next stop was a Family Dollar Store, where the man
paused for several minutes. He soon returned home, after a short stop at a gas
station where a video camera captured an image of his face.
A few hours later, after the surveillance flight ended,
the Family Dollar Store was robbed. Police used the detailed map of the man’s
movements, along with other evidence from the crime scenes, to arrest him for
all three crimes.
On another occasion, Dayton police got a report of a
burglary in progress. The aerial cameras spotted a white truck driving away
from the scene. Police stopped the driver before he got home and found the
stolen goods in the back of the truck. A witness identified him soon afterward.
Privacy concerns
In addition to normal cameras, the planes can carry
infrared sensors that permit analysts to track people, vehicles or wildlife at
night — even through foliage and into some structures, such as tents.
Courts have put stricter limits on technology that can
see things not visible to the naked eye, ruling that they can amount to
unconstitutional searches when conducted without a warrant. But the lines
remain fuzzy as courts struggle to apply old precedents — from a single
overflight carrying an officer equipped with nothing stronger than a telephoto
lens, for example — to the rapidly advancing technology.
“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.”
Police and private businesses have invested heavily in
video surveillance since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Although academics debate
whether these cameras create significantly lower crime rates, an overwhelming
majority of Americans support them. A Washington Post poll in November found
that only 14 percent of those surveyed wanted fewer cameras in public spaces.
But the latest camera systems raise new issues because of
their ability to watch vast areas for long periods of time — something even
military-grade aerial cameras have struggled to do well.
The military’s most advanced experimental research lab is
developing a system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras to watch
36-square-mile areas. McNutt offers his system — which uses 12 commercially
available Canon cameras mounted in an array — as an effective alternative
that’s cheap enough for local police departments to afford. He typically
charges between $1,500 and $2,000 per hour for his services, including flight
time, operation of the command center and the time that analysts spend
assisting investigations.
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
about 140,000 people, saw its police force dwindle from more than 400 officers
to about 350 in recent years, and there is little hope of reinforcements.
“We’re not going to get those officers back,” Biehl, the
police chief, said. “We have had to use technology as force multipliers.”
Still, the proposed contract, coming during Dayton’s
campaign season and amid a wave of revelations about National Security Agency
surveillance, sparked resistance. Biehl is looking for a chance to revive the
matter. But the new mayor, Nan Whaley, has reservations, both because of the
cost and the potential loss of privacy.
“Since 2001, we haven’t had really healthy conversations
about personal liberty. It’s starting to bloom about a decade too late,” Whaley
said. “I think the conversation needs to continue.”
To that end, the mayor has another idea: She’s
encouraging the businesses that own Dayton’s tallest buildings to mount rooftop
surveillance cameras capable of continuously monitoring the downtown and nearby
neighborhoods. Whaley hopes the businesses would provide the video feeds to the
police.
McNutt, it turns out, has cameras for those situations,
too, capable of spotting individual people from seven miles away.
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