I get where you're coming from, but it's not "unnecessary dragnet surveillance" to fly a drone over a hot zone in a city during a period of riots to monitor the state of the area, nor should the employees of companies who offer such services to these police departments "be ashamed".

What is a "hot zone"? People obstructing traffic and breaking a few windows merits recording the location of every cell phone (basically every person over the age of 10) for an extended period of time? That's textbook "unnecessary dragnet surveillance".

EDIT: How do you separate out:

1. People in the streets participating in marches. (maybe articuable suspicion)

2. People in the streets not participating in marches. (ipso facto no articuable suspicion)

3. People in their homes with their cell phones on. (ipso facto no articuable suspicion)

Do you see no difference between recording the location of every cell phone and taking video from the air of city streets?

I am not sure I understand your question. I do see a difference, and that's exactly what I'm pointing out. Video cameras cannot see into homes and they require their attention to be focused on a particular area. Video cameras' very nature forces them to be used in a more selective fashion. The same cannot be said for these hypothetical Stingray laden drones. Hence, they shouldn't be available for use for general "population control," which is what the use in Baltimore amounts to.

Video cameras no longer need to be aimed, the way you're thinking. Gigapixel camera arrays mentioned in the article make it possible to do wide-area visual surveillance, and storage! So, find a person of interest, and then rewind the last 20 hours of their video.

We need to consider the difference between ephemeral / archived (and searchable), not just public / private.

We're talking about a single organization having access to 24-hour video of every street in the city, with the ability to select and rewind every car and every person. It's fundamentally more powerful than public video snippets.

In the hypothetical situation where these drones were taking recorded video of publicly accessible areas of Baltimore ("the streets", so to speak), would you have a problem with that?

I would have a problem with that, as I still think that the PD should be required to have articuable suspicion to collect information on any and all who may be caught on camera. It's inevitable that some people caught on video camera will not be "potentially" committing a crime. Video cameras might be easier for the legal weasels to defend than the Stingrays (radio waves don't care about walls, and "oh, those people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and too bad if they are video taped"), but I still find it personally detestable. It's ridiculous for the Baltimore City PD to have the ability to video tape the whole of the Baltimore Metro area's landscape, merely under the guise of some crowds milling about in limited downtown areas. Compare to body-cameras: I have no problem with body-cameras and their potential to capture people in all walks of life. Presumably if a police officer's body camera is going to be focused on you, then the police officer him/herself will also be there, exercising judgment and discretion regarding which people are of interest or are potentially committing a crime. The same can't be said for the use of video cameras on drones.

I bet you find speeding cameras, the ones that only turn on if you're actively breaking a law in front of them, detestable too, don't you?

Instead of smarmily moving the goal posts with these decreasingly relevant questions, why not add some of your own opinions or retorts to the points I've been trying to make?

I don't find speeding cameras detestable, if indeed they are activated by staggered induction/magnetic sensors and are not simply 24/7 video recording cameras.

Nah, I guess I'm just too smarmy to keep going in this conversation.

Ok, no sweat off my back. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯