Which suspects are they parking the surveillance planes over?

The fear is that the answer is "none"--they're flying planes continuously to see what they can see across the whole city.

What if they started parking a surveillance van with listening equipment outside of EVERY single house in the city? Still ok?

Americans are ok with surveillance technology as long as its use is limited. The American system for limiting it has always been focused on the exclusion of evidence. If the state violated the 4th Amendment (like parking a listening van without a warrant), the evidence could be excluded from trial and the surveilled person is less likely to convicted.

The government is now pivoting to the concept of national security to get around all these limitations. If the FBI is not investigating a crime, it does not care about the 4th Amendment. Terrorism is defined as an act of war--not a crime--so as long as the FBI is doing "counter-terrorism" it can just collect all information about whatever it wants, whenever it wants, with no limitations. And it can keep the entire process secret.

I think HN and the public are extra sensitive to the concepts of "mass surveillance" by the government. A van parked out of a house doesn't seem like mass surveillance (even though it probably could be) but a plane "circling US cities" for some reason, raises these concerns to a higher level.

Also, the story is just ripe for the viral nature of the current news cycle: Mix in one part government entity (FBI), one part privacy (seeming mass surveillance) and one part secrecy (hidden corps) and you've got yourself a recipe for media success in 2015! In all seriousness, if the planes were "drones" you'd have a social media sharing grand slam.

Definitely reminds me of this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v111/suspense/flowers_by_i...

Because now they can spy on millions vs 1. I think that makes the difference.

What if the target (being monitored by said van) took off and "lost" the van in the sidestreets of US city? The FBI would be criticized for it's ineffective surveillance techniques. The plan is just an upgrade - the laws and controls (or lack thereof) are what is important - not so much the tech.

The FBI can easily follow one suspect, but it's an expensive provision. The issue is when you decrease the costs you can start following thousands of suspects for the same net cost so it takes a much lower standard of evidence to start. Suspect > suspect’s friend > friend of friend and you quickly hit the point where everyone is being watched.

Worse large lists quickly become meaningless. Both the 9/11 hijackers and the Boston Marathon bombers where on a list, but that list was simply too large to be useful because 99.9% of everyone on those lists ended up doing nothing.

Now consider something like a DNA database. With 100 million random people on it a 99.999% accurate test going to report a false positive every single time and most tests are nowhere near that accurate.

Getting from the admitted targeted surveillance with to 'everyone is being watched' seems like a bit of a slippery slope argument to me.

I think, as you point out, that the overwhelming quantity of Data that would be produced by such an approach prevents this by creating a cost/benefit equilibrium for the FBI on the number of people they monitor with any regularity to build their cases.

License plate scanners are actually just scanning everyone so there is no slippery slope involved. Right now we are all being watched. It's a pure cost issue; camera + OCR + database lookup is really cheap so just tag everyone.

How did we go from the FBI flying aircraft with video cameras to license plate scanners which scan 'everyone'?

I ask because there is no mention of license plate scanners in any of the parent comments to this, or the article.

Also while I assume by everyone you mean everyone who passes through the field of view of the scanner, and not actually everyone; phrasing things in false absolutes like that does not further your point.

It's hard to directly read a license plate from an aircraft. However that's not necessary as the plates are being recorded as part of a separate system all it takes is continuous footage of a car from aircraft and you are recording everyone. https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/location-trac...

Basically, aircraft follows car X, it passes by a scanner, you now know every car with timestamp that passed by the scanner and can look it up on the video. Doing this automatically is just a question of having enough video coverage and some fairly basic video analysis. They don’t even need to do this in real time as you can write the software after the fact.

In other words because they already have license plate scanners and are doing OCR + lookup they just need a video of the cars after that point.

Note: I doubt they have nearly enough footage to track everyone right now, but the cheaper it is to add one more camera and archive the footage the closer you get to that point.

PS: You can even back track cars so if you have a lot of footage of a car that then passes near a scanner you then know its path from wherever the footage starts.

You completely ignored my question to you. I asked how you got to the topic of license plate readers, I know how they work and an explanation of how they work does nothing to answer the question of how you transitioned to that topic.

I think you completely misunderstood my comment. If you have an hour of video footage of a blue car that you happen to collect from an aircraft while tracking a suspect then on it's own that says vary little. Historically you need to track a suspect to there car and then follow a car so together it's vary labor intensive to track large numbers of people.

However, if the blue car passed a license plate reader it stops being a random blue car and becomes license plate ABC-1234 registered to someone and your now "following" that specific car plus the original subjects car for that hour. Basicly, the readers enable you to track people not just where the reader physically is but wherever you have footage either leading up to that scan or after the fact. Together you can potentally follow millions of people for fairly low costs.

Granted, nothing says the person who the car is registered to is the actual driver, but you have someone who can probably tell you who was driving that car.

And how do they automatically detect the criminal wrongdoing being committed by that car or its occupants? That is the part I don't get. Yes if they decide to look for John Smith, License plate 1AMJ0HN, then they can probably automatically find his car in that footage, and they can watch that footage to see what he was up to. But watching that footage and figuring out if he did anything they can prosecute him for is not a simple task for any computer algorithm I can think of, and would require time to do manually. And with out doing it in an automated manner they can't possibly do this for 'everyone' which means they have to have reason to already suspect the people they do choose.

I see absolutely no way that bringing up the existence of license plate scanners created a situation where there was no slippery slope.

Also the recorded video collection grows to be a ridiculously large amount of data over time, even detecting all video of John Smith's car across the United States will become an expensive task to complete computationally. And for everyone? Well even more expensive.

Add on the concept that camera's will not be covering all of the United States at times, and if you are just using make, model, and color of cars to track people between license plate readers shell games where similar cars rearrange them selves in tunnels or garages will become extremely effective at defeating surveillance if license plate readers are not basically everywhere.

So in spite of you deciding to bring up license plate readers, and explain how they can be used to assist in tracking with airborne surveillance I still fail to see the relevance of how they ensure that 'everyone' will be monitored.

Did you forget about Speeding or the 1001 other traffic offences? Does anyone observe proper following distance for every second of every trip?

I suspect if you wanted to harass your ex-wife, or a dissident, then overhead footage of their car for a few hours would provide a multitude of crimes.

Sure, if you actually prosecuted everyone that's one thing, but selective enforcement plus mass surveillance is a very powerful and easy to abuse tool and you don't need anywhere near 100% coverage to make this effective.

How does more data hurt an investigation, if you are statistically literate? What is the conditional probability on that DNA test when it turns up a match with someone who also knew and was in recent contact with the murdered person and had a motive?

Same with watch lists, doesnt all the ineffectiveness go away if they have tiering or triage system?

> Same with watch lists, doesnt all the ineffectiveness go away if they have tiering or triage system?

If properly used, perhaps. However, the standards for government forensics have been... questionable.

Generally speaking, government "tests" seem more focused on confirming the prosecutor or investigator's theory than on actually resolving truth about facts.

You seem to be assuming a great deal of statistical literacy on the part of people utilizing these database tools, which I'm not sure is a solid assumption.

But a lot of arguments about surveillance tech seem to be really arguments about people not doing their jobs. If they get overwhelmed with the data, it's not the fault of technology. So preventing them from using new technology doesn't strike me as a right solution.

I don't think you can dismiss that argument until people actually do there jobs. Case in point there has been a big push to stop collecting SSN on so many forms. Not because you can't collect that information saftly in theory, but because people and systems have repeatedly failed to protect it in the past.

You’re now basing your case on circumstantial evidence which is considered near worthless for a reason.

If you have 5 suspects and then do DNA testing that's solid evidence. Ex: Paternity test. But, if you find someone with DNA testing you need to completely ignore that evidence after that point as 100% of its predictive power has already been used.

PS: To show just how easy it is to mess this stuff up. Suppose a murder occurred in NY city and the DB returned 20 people so you look at the closest 3 suspects and aha someone lives just 10 miles from the crime! However, note you already picked someone that was close by so you need to consider the odds that someone who lives close by happens to lives in the area. EX: A high percentage of people living in say NY state also live within 10 miles a crime in NY City.

That seems to be a textbook case of people failing to apply Bayes' theorem properly, not a fault of tests or technology. They, just like doctors analyzing cancer tests, need to remember to multiply one more number...

It's also the kind of information that's easily dropped or misunderstood by a jury at trial.

> Because now they can spy on millions

I didn't see that part of the article, can you link me to some resources for the planes having that level of camera and computer vision technology?

ARGUS-IS

"ARGUS is an advanced camera system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras in a mosaic to video and auto-track every moving object within a 36 square mile area.

ARGUS is a form of Wide Area Persistent Surveillance that allows for one camera to provide such detailed video that users can collect 'pattern-of-life' data and track individual people inside the footage anywhere within the field of regard."

[0] https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA?t=51s

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS

So I did the deep dive of the ARGUS-IS wikipedia article. The majority of sources were regarding the possibilities of such a system. The one authoritative source, from fbo.gov, was an RFP. It appears that such capability doesn't exist, though it is interesting that a government agency is actively working toward the capability.

However, since you asserted that such a thing could happen, your link supports your point. I think it should have been qualified that the technology doesn't exist yet in the interest of full disclosure.

I'm a little confused about what you're trying to say.

Light googling indicates that this is an extant system that has been fitted to aircraft since 2009:

"DARPA, working in partnership with the Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate, Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory and National Geospatial Agency, conducted its first test flights using the ARGUS system last year [2009]."

The DoD indicates that the system was operationally deployed to Afghanistan in Q1 2011. [0]

LLNL has an article describing the system's optics, technical specs, and their work on processing the data streams it generates. [1]

BAE released an IR upgrade in 2010:

"BAE System's first flight tests of ARGUS-IR's predecessor, ARGUS-IS, concluded last October aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter." [2]

[0] http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62138

[1] https://str.llnl.gov/AprMay11/vaidya.html

[2] http://www.baesystems.com/article/BAES_028152/bae-systems-wi...?

Thanks for the added info. I didn't do any googling; I limited my commentary to the source you provided (I didn't look at the youtube video, that method usually carries a low signal to noise ratio). The wikipedia article is light on actual information about the ARGUS IS; the primary source is an article with the title "drone nightmare" in it. Other advertised capabilities don't exist yet. I will add your sources to the wikipedia article, they are much better than what is there.

I don't think that it should be expected that I exhaustively comb search engines to find support for your point; I think that it's reasonable that I look solely at the source you gave me.

That said, I found the capabilities in your first (0th) source to be chilling. That source definitely supports your point.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_stare

Those links don't support the ability to active track a million people. It's just a 360 degree camera used to track insurgents during combat. It's not tracking every person in a city over a period of time.

  The array of cameras on the aircraft that flew over 
  Compton can record high-resolution images of a 25-square 
  mile area for up to six hours. It can track every person 
  and vehicle on the ground, beaming back the pictures in 
  real time.


  It’s city-wide surveillance on an unprecedented scale.


  What we essentially do is a live version of google earth 
  only with a full TIVO capability, it allows us to rewind 
  time and go back and see events that we didn’t know 
  occurred at the time they occurred.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/new-police-surveillance-techn...

Also in 5 years those vans will be self-driving.