Police Launch Drones Over LA 496
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that law enforcement officials have launched a new form of drone aircraft to patrol the skies above Los Angeles. From the article: 'Police say the drone, called the SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions. "This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone," said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. "The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives."'"
1984? (Score:5, Interesting)
You're already screwed, but you don't have anything to worry about unless you have something to hide. You don't have something to hide do you citizen?
Dropping the paranoia. I've been into a surveilance center in a major city and, as you would expect, half the time the people working there are too busy checking out the hot women walking about to notice any crimes...
it's good and it's bad (Score:5, Interesting)
* It frees up man power
* It saves money on paying pilots and buying more aircraft
* They can cover more are quickly plus relay constant feed back and be remotely controlled to travel certain ares faster.
There are some bad things.
* It could, theoretically, be a privacy issue as they take pictures of people's yards (I'm sure pictures will be wide lens)
* Let's say they can hover and ease drop on a building
* I'm sure taxes will come into play (howerver this may be on neutral ground if it really beneifts the residents).
Umm, no thanks (Score:5, Interesting)
At least someone is asking the right questions.
I don't have a problem with private businesses using cameras to monitor their property as long as the cameras are not government sanctioned stations to monitor the public. I would hope that tapes from those business cameras would at least take a subpoena to be viewed. Where I do have a problem is when an officer seems to justify unwarranted surveillance devoid of probable cause using unmanned drones patrolling my backyard. What happened to my Constitutional rights regarding search and seizure?
And do you know how they sell this to the public?
It's for the children stupid!!! How long until this is used to collect even more information on the citizen of our US? Land of the free and home of the brave indeed...
Re:We'll ideally it even saves lives... (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, it's pretty easy to tell you're being followed in public by a person. The ease of stalking/photographing/recording/spying with drones makes it a different issue altogether.
Re:They'll get distracted (Score:5, Interesting)
At least until it crashes and kills someone. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ideally that is. At least until it crashes and kills someone.
cost effectiveness (Score:2, Interesting)
General Aviation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pointing out the obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
Say it like it is (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, drones are by definition dumb and sooner or later one will crash. That is not necessarily "protecting" the public, will probably hurt more people than it saves, but as long as you can argue that's the idea behind it, it will fly. Hell, the "war on terror" was supposed to protect US people, and more people died during that war than in terrorist acts before 9/11. But hey, it was the idea behind it.
Danger to aircraft! (Score:5, Interesting)
difficult to see, especially when the hover stationary at the end of runways. There
have been several crashes with loss of life in LA due to light planes hitting helos.
Perhaps since UAVs fly lower than helos, they will reduce crash danger to my son.
I'm curious if UAVs are exempt from all FAA regulations or do they require any
notification tonearby towers when they are launched?
Re:Umm, no thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, you're not doing anything illegal. But tell me that video isn't going to get on the Internet.
Why should a drone be peeking in my backyard? To make sure that I'm not doing anything illegal? But, at least the last time I checked, I was innocent until proven guilty. It's the same idea. Would it be okay for the police to enter and search your house if they didn't bash down your door and tear things up? Suppose they were nice and polite and put everything back the way they found it. Would it still be okay? After all, you're not inconvenienced...
Let me give you a fun example: I used to drive a Jeep. I hate having a top on my car, so I often leave the top down. I've come back to my Jeep and found all sorts of entertaining things stuck in there (eg porno magazines). Once, I found a bunch of marijuana joints. I assume that some kids had them and were afraid of getting caught with them, so they stuck them in my Jeep figuring they'd come back later and pick them up.
I've been pulled over by the police. They've asked to search my vehicle and I refuse. Why? Because I don't know what some people might have hidden in the vehicle and I don't want to be responsible for anything that the cops might find. One time I had a cop who tried to tell me that my attitude was "suspicious," that was "probable cause" for him to search my vehicle, and I should just make life easier on myself and cooperate because if I made him go through the hassle, he'd have me thrown in jail for sure. After all, why should I decline a search? I have nothing to hide, do I?
I told him he had to get his captain down here. The captain came down, listened to my story, and agreed with me. The vehicle is open, anything could be in there, and declining a search does not constitute probable cause.
These rules exist to protect all of us.
Re:Pretty Cool... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that we're discussing the Los Angeles fucking Police Department I'd say the question answers itself.... (Rodney King, anyone? How about Rampart?)
Seriously, my "Army vet buddy" also worked as an LAPD cop. Now he's a private investigator who specializes in cases where the defense has suspicions regarding police corruption.
One such case involved a Latino who was stopped by police while he was walking down the street. The man had no priors, but vaguely fit the description (Latino) of a suspect. When the police proceeded to arrest the man, he protested that he had done nothing wrong. The cops then beat him up, forced him to kneel on the ground and shot him, point blank, several times in the legs.
Here's the funny/sick part. The police reported that the man broke and ran from the police (resisting arrest) and that they only shot him in the legs to stop him from fleeing. Furthermore, they claimed he was physically violent when they tried to cuff him at that point, so they had to "subdue" him. The guy was screwed, yes?
No. My PI and ex-cop friend was working for the defense attorney, and he noticed that the angle of the gunshot wounds had an extremely steep downward angle. It didn't fit the police report of the incident
From his hospital bed, the man practically cried, "Why, oh why did they have to shoot me so many times?"
To which my friend explained to him, "Simple, mister: YOU DIDN'T DIE. When cops shoot you at point blank range like that, you're supposed to die. So when they kept shooting you and you kept *not dying* you pissed them off. Don't you know better than to piss off an LAPD cop?" My friend was, of course, joking.
To this day, my PI / Army vet buddy never runs out of work.
Re:Pointing out the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure it should. It's not the "removing the human" element, it's the "adding the machine" element. It's the "law enforcement database" thing, the "CCTV" thing, all over again. When you have an automated information-collection system, you have FAR, FAR more potential for abuse. A view which has been confirmed time and time again.
The British government is getting a lot of flack lately, for their own CCTV system, as people say the police are using it to prosecute trivial infractions, while serious crimes continue unabaited. Video after video gets released of someone getting repeated beaten and/or stabbed under the watchful eye of CCTV cameras, and perhaps a half hour elapses before any officers arrive. Not to mention repeated misidentification through the CCTV system, leading to innocent people being arrested, shot, etc.
Up until the modern era, it wasn't that you had privacy, it was that it was prohibitively expensive/difficult for police to piece together your every move, as they can now at trivial cost. At least with a police helicopter, you know they aren't going to go through the trouble of hovering over private homes, waiting for trivial laws to be broken.
lost hikers? in Los Angeles? (Score:3, Interesting)
"Nigger Control!"
To put it bluntly, in their words [in hushed whispers], not mine.
Do they really have such a big problem that they need all this Kafkaesque technology? Or are they really just a bunch of paranoid psychopathic cowboys with too much money to spend on death machines?
All this weird 'us vs. them' paranoia that infects the wealthy people of Los Angeles (more than anywhere else on Earth) is getting to be rather embarrassing. Do they really believe that their maids are gardeners are going to rise up and slaughter them in the middle of the night?
Get a grip, people, and come back down to the real world.
I'm beginning to think that the entire L.A. techno-fascist police state mentality is directly related to the local Hollywood fantasy mentality. Only it is the inverted nightmare that grows out of too much fantasy, too much money, and too many drugs.
Is there any other place where people live like this? God, let's hope that it doesn't spread.
Re:Pretty Cool... (Score:3, Interesting)
How about hacking the control system and taking it where the police doesn't want it to go? It would be sort of like the hackers making a PC Zombie, only this one flies.
In the article: "There must have been some sort of communication interference," said De La Torre as he inspected the multicolored wires and circuitry spilling out of his damaged drone.
Actually it was a hacker who made the $25K toy airplane crash into the empty lot.
Re:Pointing out the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
Authorized on unauthorized by whom? For the government, all information that is not securely encrypted, it is by definition authorized. If it is encrypted, the sender and recipients thereof are by definition suspects of a crime and need to be investigated.
FLIR and spotlamps on helicopters (Score:3, Interesting)
In Baltimore, the city routinely used video surveillance of public areas --particularly places known to be open air drug markets. The courts upheld the convictions of those caught on tape dealing in drugs.
My question to those who object to UAV surveillance: What do you think these things do that hasn't already been done? The courts have upheld the use of all these technologies. Does the placement on an unmanned aerial vehicle make any difference?
Re:They'll get distracted (Score:1, Interesting)
Television program? That was Totally Busted on Playboy TV. Does your wife know you watch that?
And the operators were random joes hired off the street. Law enforcement goes through a slightly more rigorous hiring procedure.
Re:Or it could be used (Score:4, Interesting)
Moreover, as others have pointed out, Griffith Park [wikipedia.org] is the second largest urban park in the the country at 4210 acres. It is definitely large enough to get lost in, especially in the dark if you don't know the trails.
I just get a little annoyed when people continually badmouth my town. East coasters tend to think LA is just like New York except with snotty movie stars. It's not - West-Coast big cities are very different from East Coast ones in that they are much more spread out instead of vertical and are usually completely surrounded by hundreds of miles of wilderness. Drive 90 minutes in any direction from LA and you are pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
It's one of the few cities anywhere where you can wake up on an April morning and decide that day if you're going to spend the day surfing/sunbathing at the beach