Homeland Security Wants to Spy on 4 Square Miles at Once
And we thought traffic cameras were a big deal? Now Homeland Security wants a camera on miles and miles and miles of us, all the time. Welcome to the surveillance state, and be sure to wave to the camera when you go to buy milk.
Occupy now, because they are working on making it impossible to occupy later.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/homeland-security-surveillance/
Homeland Security Wants to Spy on 4 Square Miles at Once
By Spencer Ackerman
January 23, 2012 |
It’s not just for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars anymore. The Department of Homeland Security is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four square miles of (constitutionally protected) American territory for long, long stretches of time.
Homeland Security doesn’t have a particular system in mind. Right now, it’s just soliciting “industry feedback” on what a formal call for such a “Wide Area Surveillance System” might look like. But it’s the latest indication of how powerful military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.
The Department of Homeland Security says it’s interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square kilometers — that’s between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — in its “persistent mode.” By “persistent,” it means the cameras should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours to collect what the military likes to call “pattern of life” data — that is, what “normal” activity looks like for a given area. Persistence typically depends on how long the vehicle carrying the camera suite can stay aloft; DHS wants something that can fit into a manned P-3 Orion spy plane or a Predator drone — of which it has a couple. When not in “persistent mode,” the cameras ought to be able to see much, much further: “long linear areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers in extent, such as open, remote borders.”
If it’s starting to sound reminiscent of the spy tools the military has used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should....But. Those systems are used against insurgents, who are not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable searches. Even if the wide-area surveillance DHS is after is just used at borders or airports, those are still places where Americans go about their business, under the presumption that they’re not living in a government panopticon.
....(more at link)
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