For 9 days in 2012, a spy plane recorded low-resolution images of every corner of a US city
Source: latimes.com
L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept. used spy plane to watch ComptonTo the 96,000 residents of Compton, the little Cessna would have looked like scores of other small planes that flew over the city each day.
But anyone paying close attention might have noticed the single-engine craft kept circling the city in a continuous loop. What they could not have known was that it packed unusual cargo — a bank of a dozen wide-angle industrial imaging cameras. They recorded low-resolution images of every corner of the 10.1-square-mile city.For nine days in early 2012, the small plane beamed the images to the local Sheriff’s Department station, where deputies observed fender benders, necklace snatchings and a shooting.
The test was part of a larger effort by the Sheriff’s Department to use aerial surveillance for crime-fighting in the sprawling collection of communities it patrols. Around the same time, the sheriff was launching a similar aircraft observation program 80 miles north in the desert city of Lancaster.
But while Lancaster’s effort was publicized and debated at City Council meetings, the Sheriff’s Department didn’t notify either Compton residents or elected leaders about the test in that city.
And that has left some bad feelings in Compton.
"There is nothing worse than believing you are being observed by a third party unnecessarily," Compton Mayor Aja Brown said Wednesday. "We want to assure the peace of mind of our citizens."
After learning this week of the surveillance pilot program, Brown proposed a "citizen privacy protection policy," to require public notification the next time authorities deploy monitoring equipment.
Revelations about the video monitoring of Compton provoked complaints by civil libertarians as well as doubts from a technologist about whether the video images were intrusive enough to truly thwart crime.
The discussion comes at a time of increasing debate about the powers and pitfalls of techno-surveillance, which can be used to observe citizens from afar, to identify individuals based on their unique facial characteristics and to keep samples of a citizen’s unique biology via their DNA.
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Read the full article at: latimes.com
