When Battlefield Surveillance Comes to Your Town
When Battlefield Surveillance Comes to Your Town
All-seeing 24/7 video surveillance technology, first
developed for use in war, is now affordable enough to be used domestically to
fight crime and terrorism. Some lawmakers are wary.
By Christopher Mims Aug. 3, 2019 12:09 am ET
Over a period of three months in 2016, a small aircraft
circled above the same parts of West Baltimore that so recently drew the ire of
President Trump. Operated by a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems,
the plane was equipped with 12 cameras which, at 8,000 feet, could take in 32
square miles of city in minute detail.
This system is an update of one originally designed for
the Air Force, which was used in Iraq to provide aerial intelligence to Marines
as they rolled into Fallujah, says Ross McNutt, founder and president of
Persistent Surveillance Systems. Only this time, it was being used to catch
criminals in the U.S.
Across 300 hours of flight time, the system captured 23
shootings, five of them fatal. In some instances, detective could use this
192-megapixel gods’-eye view to trace suspects to their getaway cars, then
rewind to points when those cars had passed in front of one of the city’s 744
closed-circuit cameras.
Mr. McNutt argues that this system could reduce crime in
Baltimore by up to 30%. There’s no research to back up that claim, only a 2017
review by the National Police Foundation recommending further study.
Persistent Surveillance Systems’ trial in Baltimore was
only disclosed to the public two weeks after its initial phase was completed,
which led to an uproar and backlash. Now, some activists and community leaders
want it to come back—after all, as of 2017, Baltimore has the highest
per-capita murder rate for a large city in the U.S.
Mr. McNutt says he’s eager to return to Baltimore, and
that his efforts there would be funded by Texas philanthropists interested in
data-driven approaches to crime prevention. Scholars say that aerial
surveillance by police and private firms alike is legal in some circumstances
but not in others—and that this area of law remains unresolved. In this case
all that would be needed, Mr. McNutt says, would be the blessing of the city’s
mayor, Bernard Young. But the mayor is not interested in pursuing this
technology, says a spokesman for his office.
Other mayors may soon have to make similar decisions.
This technology, broadly known as wide-area surveillance, addresses the problem
of police not being able to get to where they’re needed when they’re needed.
It’s rapidly falling in price, and finding a variety of new applications.
So far, local law enforcement has been wary of the
potential political blowback of using drones for persistent surveillance, but
drones aren’t strictly necessary. Many of our cities are blanketed by
surveillance cameras monitoring a specific area—New York City has more than
8,000 of them. Most wide-area surveillance tech fits somewhere between CCTV
cameras and all-seeing eyes in the sky.
With enough cameras, these systems could produce
explorable, three-dimensional maps, where analysts could follow persons of
interest as if a drone were hovering over them at all times, says Arthur
Holland Michel, founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard
College and author of “Eyes in the Sky,” a book about this technology. The
question is, will privacy-minded citizens accept it?
Companies like Aqueti Inc. are now selling cameras that
are mounted on buildings, where they can gaze down like Batman on huge swaths
of a city. Aqueti’s cameras are currently being tested in the U.S. by a public
transportation system and on a university campus.
These cameras can be equipped with built-in AI that can
count people and vehicles, and their data can also be streamed to services that
can be used to search feeds for anomalous behavior by people and vehicles, or
for arbitrary things like everyone wearing a blue T-shirt who’s walking in a
certain direction, says Scott McCain, CTO of Aqueti.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Labs in
2019 licensed wide-area surveillance technology—originally developed at Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory—to a private company called Consolidated Resource
Imaging. The resulting camera clusters have multiple lenses and up to a
360-degree field of view. Each cluster generates enormous panoramic images that
allow analysts to zoom in virtually on any area of interest.
The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for
ensuring the safety of professional football stadiums, and as such, was
instrumental in getting a test system installed at CenturyLink Field in
Seattle. On the stadium’s exterior, two sensors—each consisting of 16
cameras—peer out at the parking lot that surrounds the stadium and the main
road next to it. The cameras have been active 24/7 for 15 months. They have
helped stadium security identify and intercept suspicious individuals, CRI
founder and president Nathan Crawford says. They retain a month’s worth of
recordings at a time.
Multiple federal and state agencies have conducted tours
to familiarize themselves with the technology, and DHS plans to roll the
cameras out across all National Football League stadiums, he adds. (Although
NFL benefits from the stadium security measures, the league is not responsible
for deploying them, and declined to comment.)
These systems generate the kind of visual data that can
be parsed by AI, says Mr. Crawford. The ultimate goal is to spot suspicious
behavior, triggering an alarm before a crime actually happens—no psychics
necessary.
These cameras used to cost a half a million dollars, but
their price has fallen to between $82,000 and $140,000, and the next version will
cost half that, says Mr. Crawford. Because these are DHS contracts, the
technology must be mostly made in the U.S. If CRI could use Chinese components,
they would only cost only $30,000.
While they’re a harder sell, drones aren’t out of the
picture either.
Precision Integrated Programs, a private company in
McMinville, Ore., recently purchased four camera systems from a company called
PreVision Corp., each of which weighs less than five pounds and can be mounted
on a drone that weighs less than 25 pounds, says company president Matt Parker.
At an altitude of 3,000 feet, each drone can view one square kilometer at a
time. Precision plans to use the cameras for applications ranging from wildlife
protection to overseas U.S. Department of Defense contracts.
PreVisions’s chief executive, Steve Suddarth, says one of
his company’s goals is to blanket entire cities with small drones.
Currently, politics is the biggest limiter on these
large-scale surveillance efforts. Legal scholars agree that the Fourth
Amendment, which protects people in the U.S. against “unreasonable searches and
seizures,” only applies to law enforcement watching our behavior in public in
certain circumstances. But as the technology rolls out—and roll out it
will—it’s likely to stoke considerable debates about a new definition of
privacy.
“These wide-area surveillance systems give the government
unprecedented power. It gives them a time machine to look into peoples’ past
and learn details about their private lives,” says Matt Cagle, technology and
civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “Again and again
this technology has jumped ahead of where the courts are. This is qualitatively
different than other forms of aerial surveillance we’ve seen in the past.”
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