Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance

https://www.wired.com/story/sfpd-drone-video-leak-surveillance/

by nozzlegear • 10 days ago

115 173 10 days ago

Sad to see. Here in Europe it's definitely not any better. Despite the GDPR’s safeguards, tech surveillance is set to become one of the defining civil liberties battlegrounds in across the World. Even with the EU AI act, the people of europe are significantly at risk.

easytiger2• 9 days ago

Wait until you find out what the EU want/have asked the GAM trio of big tech corps to do to your phone and private messaging platforms. (Coincidentally they suddenly don't think so big an anti competition problem exists anymore).

inigyou9• 9 days ago

Are you referring to Chat Control 2.0 which has repeatedly failed to pass the Parliament and is illegal to implement today?

Or to the requirement for RCS for which certificates are only issued to trusted parties?

fortran772• 9 days ago

It's nice to see SFPD taking car break-ins seriously.

malfist5• 9 days ago

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"

Neil445• 9 days ago

Is it essential liberty to be able to run around doing crime without being surveiled?

infecto13• 9 days ago

What liberty does a drone with a camera break? Seems like a nice optimization on police resources.

tqi• 9 days ago

You know he was talking about taxes...

Simulacra• 9 days ago

I remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes.

They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.

It was really fascinating… In 2016.

At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.

Instead of planes, they are using drones…

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...

pineapplepizza6• 9 days ago

An unmanned plane is also called a drone.

bell-cot• 9 days ago

Drones are cheap & reliable. Vs. blimps, balloons, and such have repeatedly proven themselves quite fragile.

inigyou9• 9 days ago

Quadcopters, you mean? They are cheap, and reliable enough given that they are cheap, but that's all.

iamtheworstdev2• 9 days ago

domestically we use the RQ-4 and MQ-4 and lie about it

rationalist• 9 days ago

Source?

adolph3• 9 days ago

Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].

An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).

0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky

1. https://www.pss-1.com/

2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...

cebert• 9 days ago

With mass drone surveillance and online safety acts, we will finally be able to keep our children truly safe for the small cost of privacy.

_davide_2• 9 days ago

To balance it, the police need to be extremely accountable, but so far they get away with murder pretty easily...so...

stvltvs3• 9 days ago

I believe the post was intended to be ironic, implying that privacy isn't really a small cost.

chrismcb• 9 days ago

And a couple of ES-209s as well

vatsachak• 9 days ago

Now that's what we call bait

dannyw2• 9 days ago

The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.

https://archive.is/dychh

lazide2• 9 days ago

I mean, they evaluated and left?

What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?

vrganj3• 9 days ago

I can't help but wonder what skin color those young men had that made the police suspicious in the first place...

fitblipper• 9 days ago

They should have never been deployed to begin with.

How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.

stronglikedan• 9 days ago

They didn't do anything to even be "evaluated", but you already knew that...

dannyw2• 9 days ago

my opinion: we need a lot more context here. It is dystopian to have advanced and arguably “stealth in an urban environment” drones conducting surveillance for benign activities. What was the suspicion? Matching the skin colour of an APB, or something more?

I’m sure most people have no problems with drones being used for hot pursuit, appending those charged with murder, etc; but this is highly advanced technology that deserves more scruinty and accountability.

01284a7e• 9 days ago

No drone has ever followed me when I am on the way to go play hockey.

ceejayoz11• 9 days ago

How would you know? From the article:

Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”

EdwardDiego• 9 days ago

Yet.

maxlybbert7• 9 days ago

I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.

I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.

ceejayoz11• 9 days ago

Part of the problem is it leads to stuff like this:

https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...

The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

Or this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgia-deputy-charged-with...

Or this: https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwauke...

Or this: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/10/pasadena...

greenleafone7• 9 days ago

The problem is that police misuse every single power they have been given and public trust is very low for years now.

I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.

ryandrake3• 9 days ago

What made the police think they were “suspicious”? Anybody can be suspicious if you want to tail them for another reason. When you leave the judgement entirely to the person who gets to initiate the surveillance, then you are saying anyone can be surveilled.

cyanydeez3• 9 days ago

if you were a minority in America, you'd understand where suspicious leads to murder. so kinda understand where _you_ dont see a problem and so many other people will.

Generating false positives is not something society should actively cultivate, nor does it make anyone safer.

cyanydeez3• 9 days ago

suspicious person in a vehicle

suspicious; odds of it just being a minority? 1:100.

bobthebob4• 9 days ago

Helicopters already exist, and so do consumer drones - so why is this an issue?

inigyou9• 9 days ago

Scale. The possibility of surveillance was far less worrying when three police officers had to tail you, because they'd only expend that effort when they were pretty sure you'd done a crime.

maerF0x06• 9 days ago

So we'd rather a high speed chase, crashes, danger to cyclists and pedestrians? I'd rather a drone follows the car until it stops and the police arrive to retrieve it and give a hand slap to the offender.

I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")

bobthebob4• 9 days ago

I mean, helicopters are a limited and expensive resource.

And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap

At least, that’s what I’ve gathered

maxlybbert7• 9 days ago

This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.

Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.

ceejayoz11• 9 days ago

Helicopters are expensive and thus rare.

Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.

bobthebob4• 9 days ago

Still don’t know how this affects me. The use here seems to be for criminals on the run

aqme28• 9 days ago

I believe in a "reasonable expectation of privacy" standard. A drone could hover outside my window watching me, but I don't think that would make people feel comfortable.

bobthebob4• 9 days ago

In a wiretap scenario, yes that would be uncomforting and worrisome.

But these drones are used to chase active criminals. Unless you committed a crime and ran back to your apartment, I think you’d be fine

jasonlotito3• 9 days ago

To answer your question succinctly: The government is doing them, and that could be breaking the law.

If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?

kotaKat• 9 days ago

And the amazing thing is that DJI was the ones lambasted for their shitty security practices.

But here we are, with Skydio users openly using public sharing links to their drone feeds 24x7x365 apparently.

Sounds like another vendor needs to get added to the Covered List, methinks, but the lobbyists won't let that one fly.

inigyou9• 9 days ago

Or rather, lobbyists will let it fly as long as it's got a camera.

creaturemachine• 9 days ago

The only thing insecure was the market position of the domestic competition.

iamnothere• 9 days ago

Useful URL mapping tool mentioned in the article, hadn’t seen this before: https://github.com/lc/gau

ThatMedicIsASpy• 9 days ago

Am I missing something? I can click the 'article' but its a big picture and a single paragraph. That reads like a picture description.

hutattedonmyarm• 9 days ago

They paywalled the article, that’s why you can only see the first paragraph

nozzlegear14• 9 days ago

Didn't realize it was paywalled when I posted it. I read it in Apple News where it's not paywalled:

https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA

maerF0x06• 9 days ago

Exposes reality of urban surveillance

Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ...

This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ...

The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.

pluralmonad2• 9 days ago

There will always be those who make excuses for the panopticon. Is yours that reducing auto theft is worth the tradeoffs?

maerF0x06• 9 days ago

AFAIK there is no right to privacy in public, no?

What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used.

Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).

In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).

infecto13• 9 days ago

I think there is a valid discussion for devices like Flock. The CEO is a detriment to their company and the lack of police guardrails and auditing make it ripe for abuse.

Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.

normalaccess• 9 days ago

Classic example of the Nothing to hide argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

maerF0x06• 9 days ago

nah, that's not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is IMO until the police have something to hide (besides their crappy securing of the usage) It's not really a news piece.

If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.

tim-tday5• 9 days ago

Nope. This is a classic example of crimes being committed in public and police using technology to catch the perpetrators.

Passive surveillance would be your example. This program is specifically activated when an active investigation is in progress.

aftbit• 9 days ago

Great, just what I need - another reason to never leave my house.

infecto13• 9 days ago

I don’t think I have a problem with drones. There is a line to be drawn regarding auditing access of footage and how we are analyzing it historically (prevent from misusing the tech) but for things like active reporting it has the potential to be pretty helpful. Cops used to be a lot more visible (or maybe greater in number) and this type of tech has the potential to help get that back.

I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.

buellerbueller6• 9 days ago

All camera footage should be publicly available.

Gigachad2• 9 days ago

I really don’t agree. Especially in this day where anyone, or any business could run it all through AI and profile everyone to work out the exact best moment to send you a push notification for a Big Mac or whatever.

axus• 9 days ago

I'd modify this to "all warrantless surveillance", so not just cameras. Warrantless surveillance should not be allowed for private activity, and making it public helps audit that.

buellerbueller6• 9 days ago

What are the safeguards that are in place here? What happens when this surveillance capability falls into the hands of an autocratic government?

alistairSH2• 9 days ago

Same as ALPRs and anything else related to policing.

We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.

emsign• 9 days ago

I think they also use planes with state of the art optics and cameras in other major US cities, especially before certain events, to go back in time later. If a crime happens they can trace back cars and suspects in the video archive. And I guess they might also do number plate recognition by default, to get even quicker results.

scottlamb2• 9 days ago

In its statement, the SFPD notes that it adheres to a “strict policy” around drone use, and that “drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises.”

In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.

That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]

ryandrake3• 9 days ago

Yea, "adheres to a strict policy" could mean anything. They have policies[1] posted publicly. I wonder if any of the footage will be found to violate their policies, and if so, what accountability looks like.

1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...

tim-tday5• 9 days ago

Nothing in this report indicates that policy was being broken. There was a misconfiguration of the tool. They didn’t realize that the internal sharing link was publicly accessible.

josefritzishere• 9 days ago

I'm sure this wont be misused frequently with total impunity, right?

tim-tday5• 9 days ago

I have a healthy mistrust of authority and surveillance and police.

As far as I can tell this program is addressing a real crime problem in SF, it is getting real criminals off the streets and helping police do their jobs.

If some policeman abuses his authority and misuses the tech we should 100% prosecute them for that crime. There is as yet no report of a police officer misusing that tech.

There are however thousands of examples of police using that tech to arrest real criminals, criminals who commit property crime and violent crime. Those people are off the streets.

I am cautiously optimistic about this program and so far fully support it. We should pay some pen testers to attempt to misuse the system and see if the internal controls are sufficient to catch them.

tavavex• 9 days ago

I strongly disagree. For one, people don't just have an issue with individual cops abusing that power, it's just one of the easiest things to point to and one of the most common types of misuse that occurs in real life. The bigger issue is that drones are extremely cheap, and there is nothing limiting their use to actual crimes. It starts as cautiously testing the waters by using the drones to assist people in hunting down actual crime, but there is nothing to prevent it from being scaled into a precrime mass surveillance machine. Much the opposite, this would make the job of the police a lot easier, so if drone surveillance is fully entrenched in our societies, they will start incrementally pushing for it. Do you not see the issue?

But let's also come back to the individuals misusing drones argument - something that's a lot more immediate and perceptible. Whenever there's arguments about expanding police powers, proponents always hand-wave these concerns by suggesting that some systematic or technological changes be made. But neither the police nor the government above them have an incentive to do these things beyond the shallowed need for good PR. Police would like the least restrictions and oversight on their actions to 'increase efficiency', governments would like the same to squash 100% of crime. There's no mechanism that moves the ratchet back. You know these measures will not be implemented. The only method to prevent this that seems powerful enough seems to be denying them the power altogether.

Most importantly, it frustrates me that in these arguments, it's always presented as a two-choice space. Either you get the status quo, or the incredibly dangerous new mass surveillance tech. Crime waves have existed in the past. How did cops manage to deal with them without a thousand eyes quietly recording everyone doing everything? In many places, crime has been going down well before any mass surveillance doodads could even have existed. Don't you think there's other actions that can be taken to improve things outside of just allowing them whatever they want?

NoSalt• 9 days ago

James Cameron is prophetic:

https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel

charlie90• 9 days ago

On the other hand, https://youtu.be/iY4nx5zuvPA?si=rrPxlC92sUDJYvmO. SFPD posts a number of videos showing that drones are stopping crime, violent crime.

Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes Reality of Urban Surveillance

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