[Liz]

I’ve heard unsettling things about DARPA.

[philman_36]

I’ve heard unsettling things about DARPA.
They are into some weird stuff!

For consideration...Preventing an Aerial Panopticon Over American Cities
Imagine a world where a small plane flies miles above a city, effectively invisible to its inhabitants while looking down on them in close detail. Meanwhile, a series of drones, flown in a semi-automated pattern by a single operator, hover over the surrounding suburbs. A select group of monitors—no more than a dozen members of the local police force—pinpoint areas of interest in real time, including a large protest, several doctors’ and lawyers’ offices, and a mosque. These officers are able to zoom in from cameras on the high-flying aircraft to identify individuals by their faces and log their activities. Meanwhile, a small group of federal agents review footage from these planes recorded over the course of the last sixth months, creating a precise map of the movements of hundreds of “persons of interest” over that entire period, and cataloging the places they visited and people they interacted with.

Sounds like recent history, yet it's a mental creation from 2017 about possibilities.

Looking for any current domestic law enforcement use now...

[philman_36]

2019 reality...

Airborne Argus?: St. Louis, Persistent Surveillance Systems, and Stabilizing the Lofty Aims of Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence
McNutt’s three-plane, 36-camera system monitors thirty square miles from 10,000 feet, taking one photograph a second. When a crime occurs, the operator zooms in on the area, targets a suspect, and zooms out, backtracking the photo-log to follow the pixelized perp. The system can also be used as a live feed.
PSS was implemented in Baltimore without residents’ knowledge from 2016 to 2019. Even so, residents chose to reimplement beginning May, 2020. Residents of Dayton, Ohio, strongly opposed implementation.