
A Surveillance Master Dissects a Murder from the Sky [video] - awl130
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/watch-this-surveillance-master-dissect-a-murder-from-the-sky?utm_content=business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-business
======
themenace
Today we can confidently guess that THIS is the secret groundbreaking military
technology that "60 Minutes" was alluding to in 2008.

Reporter Bob Woodward (known for breaking much of the Watergate story that led
to President Richard Nixon's resignation) claims that the US military has a
new secret technique that's revolutionary. The following is what he said in
his interview[1] with Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes in September 2008:

Woodward: _This is very sensitive and very top secret, but there are secret
operational capabilities that have been developed by the military to locate,
target, and kill leaders [in Iraq]._

Pelley: _What is this? Some kind of surveillance, some kind of targeted way of
taking out just the ... leadership?_

Woodward: _It is the stuff of which military novels are written._

Pelley: _Do you mean to say that this special capability is such an advance in
military technique and technology that it reminds you of the advent of the
tank and the airplane?_

Woodward: _Yeah._

The bits of info from Woodward, the timeline of the development of military
aerial camera systems (such as Angel Fire), the claimed capability to locate
people -- it all fits. This is the revolutionary advance in military
capability they are talking about.

[1]
[http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415...](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/04/60minutes/main4415771.shtml)

~~~
anf
Couldn't satellites do this during the cold war? What's different?

~~~
madaxe_again
Persistence. A satellite in GEO is nigh on useless for high resolution
persistent imaging. A satellite in polar is even more useless for persistence.

~~~
Zuider
Added to that, there seems to be real-time tagging of people and objects.

~~~
sovietmudkipz
Yea there is tagging of people, objects but that's software applied to high
resolution images. Collecting those high resolution images is the real
challenge here; seeing how pixels change from frame to frame once you have the
imagery isn't (well, it used to be certainly but we've got better). You claim
this is real-time... Are you sure this processing isn't applied after the
fact?

------
Mendenhall
You could do serious damage with this. You could follow CEO's,government
officials etc and detail everything they do and who they meet with. Nothing
stopping that company from using the images they have stored to compile
information on whoever they want in the area. Great technology thats super
easy to abuse to devastating effect in a myriad of ways. No one really cares
about that though .

~~~
hackuser
You could do a lot of that by many other means: Simple cell phone tracking
will tell you everywhere people go and everyone they meet. Plenty of apps
track geolocation; data on hosted servers and the wire have plenty more data,
etc.

~~~
zouhair
I could choose not to have a phone I couldn't choose to not be on the street.

~~~
tP5n
I once met someone who spent a few weeks in custody for choosing not to have
his phone with him. It's not always a choice ;)

~~~
e12e
What? Was he charged directly because he wasn't reachable on his cell phone?

------
dade_
As we reach a point where the science fiction genre can be merged with
fiction, I would just like to point out my appreciation for the many authors
that spent the time to open the cans of worms and tell stories of their
implications. This article makes me thinkof Daniel Suarez's Influx. And only a
decade ago, I thought it was weird that Neal Stephenson's snow crash had an
entire subclass of people delivering pizzas, but now with Uber eats and
foodera, except that they deliver anything and everything.

------
eggy
The video was eye-opening for me to how sophisticated imagery and image
tracking has become from my little explorations into neural nets, openCV and
others.

One book I was recently browsing "Crime Analysis Systems: Using Computer
Simulations and Geographic Information Systems" published in 2008, and this
video, make me think the combination of predictive analytics and their
toolset, along with surveillance will lead to large neural nets sifting
through traffic, pedestrian and vehicular live and historical footage, trying
to forecast a crime or public disturbance, and dispatch prophylactic police
personnel.

Minority Report without the time-traveling mentats!

I am sure every police department would like this, if they don't already have
it. PSS, Ross McNutt's company sells the tech to domestic and international
buyers.

I will not even address the privacy concerns, since they are so ubiquitous and
immediate in today's consciousness.

------
liquidise
This video confirms so many of my concerns about surveillance. The problem, of
course, is that nothing i just watched received any sort of rigor. Despite
knowing no identities, and confirming nothing about the vehicles in question,
an entire narrative is presented without any shred of evidence. For all we
know, this "drug deal" may well have been a carpet cleaner with inconvenient
timing who can expect to have his house raided next week.

In fact, let me take that a step further. What evidence do i have that this
was even a murder? I'll assume in this case it is, but can i independently
confirm that? Of course not. Worse still is the logical skip: "well now that i
have shown you this, here are some colorful lines demonstrating a ton of other
related behavior that you should totally extrapolate nefarious connections
from." The scope of narratives that can be taken out of context, or outright
invented using these videos is terrifying.

Power indeed.

~~~
Retra
They found a body with a bullet in it's head. That's step one.

Step two, they went to these recordings, looked where they found that body,
and they tracked all the people who were there when the murder happened.

>an entire narrative is presented without any shred of evidence

Why should it? It's not trying to convince you a murder took place. That's
already an established fact. It's trying to show you the technology.

Nothing here would have been able to predict a crime. Someone driving around
the block twice before driving across town might just be a driver whose car is
making a funny sound when he turns left, so he's investigating it. That means
nothing. Unless you've got a bloody corpse laying in the alley he's driving
past. Then it means a whole lot.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
> They found a body with a bullet in it's head. That's step one.

i am not much of an expert, but for a start they would need the exact time of
the murder - without this fact all these little dots that move around the
screen don't make a lot of sense.

~~~
ctdonath
Forensics is good enough to narrow the time down enough to get a good start.

------
brendanr
Does anybody remember the old Manhunter games from Sierra? They used a very
similar idea of replaying a timeline multiple times to track a bunch of
suspects as they interacted throughout an event. What was a clever but
abstract sci-fi game mechanic has suddenly become reality.

------
sndean
Same story, as told by Radiolab last year:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-
sky/)

~~~
sumoboy
Couldn't a satellite do basically the same thing hovering over a city?

~~~
Retra
Satellites can't hover over cities unless they are near the equator.

~~~
beisner
But you could probably put a couple of satellites in Molniya-esque orbits and
have near-24/7 imaging coverage of a location

~~~
obmelvin
Yes, it's far cheaper to fly planes in the atmosphere than launch satellites
into space. And you only need one plane vs multiple satellites for persistence
over a location.

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zipwitch
Billionaire's personal media outlet promotes virtues of panoptic surveillance!

------
chillingeffect
Context is important here. Before jumping to the obvious logical conclusion
"Cameras in all the skies would prevent all the murders," remember how messed
up a place like Juarez is: A murder happened in plain daylight. Home common
would you suppose that is in other locales? And once it's known that cameras
are in the sky, how many of the remaining murders would continue to take place
outdoors?

~~~
Retra
This isn't preventing murders. They didn't even know a murder happened until
after they found the body. Nobody was able to pick that up on the footage
until after the fact.

With that said, if you're doing a drug deal and don't want to be murdered, why
would you do it indoors? Also, to murder someone indoors, you need access to a
building, which really tends to limit the number of viable suspects (if it's a
private place) or produce a lot of witnesses (if it's a public place.) The
murder happened in an alley because nobody is watching the alley. There aren't
a lot of indoor spaces that aren't being watched by someone.

~~~
vidarh
> With that said, if you're doing a drug deal and don't want to be murdered,
> why would you do it indoors?

Because you also don't want to get arrested, and the presence of tech like
this means you have every reason to assume it won't be long before the moment
_any_ of the people present gets tied to drug activity, they will start to go
through recordings and tag anyone he's been in contact with in circumstances
that look like they might be a drug deal.

It's creating a situation where doing it outdoors does not just place you in
jeopardy because of a specific deal, but potentially also because of any
incidents tied to any deal any other people present have made or will make.

> or produce a lot of witnesses (if it's a public place.)

I find it bizarre that you assume an indoors location will inherently produce
more witnesses than doing it outdoors.

Consider a parking garage. I've been to plenty in major cities where finding a
location that is free of people for a little while would be easy even in the
middle of the day.

Even so, even _with_ witnesses, if the alternative is a few eye witnesses vs.
an "all seeing" surveillance system in the sky that can track you for extended
periods of time, it's not at all given that it wouldn't be preferably to be
prepared to risk a few witnesses. Case in point:

> The murder happened in an alley because nobody is watching the alley.

The murder happened because they _thought_ nobody is watching the alley. That
doesn't mean there aren't plenty of other places suitable as well. So when
that changes (the alley is being watched), the calculation as to which space
is least risky changes too.

------
fiveSpeedManual
Fascinating. Although the idea of public surveillance is a very hot topic,
stories like this make a strong argument for adoption.

~~~
zouhair
And a strong argument to not adopt it.

------
ChristianGeek
Does anyone have links to information on the technology involved?

~~~
dharma1
Looks like their own design -
[http://media.wix.com/ugd/9845f4_93752cf91e1d41cb8388458f0e69...](http://media.wix.com/ugd/9845f4_93752cf91e1d41cb8388458f0e69f56e.pdf)

It's an array of 10 or so cameras shooting at 1fps at high res. Quite a lot of
data generated over a day :) For smaller areas tethered drones would be
interesting. I guess the main limitation is that most crime is committed at
night when visibility is low.

It wouldn't be super hard to DIY this btw - there are good open source
stitching and tracking algos, and many cameras that can shoot at high res at
1fps

~~~
mdda
Talk about attention to detail : every page is marked "PSS Proprietary
Infomration"

------
jokoon
It seems all those paths are still drawn by humans, I think. It still takes a
lot of watching those images and putting points on them before they could
really start an investigation.

Of course if this agency has access to the cellphone towers, it could allow
them to draw those points, but I don't know if towers are always triangulating
the positions of all cellphones in an area at any given time.

------
jonbaer
There is a scene in Homeland where Saul is captured, in that video objects are
"tagged" as combatants (triangles),
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MWxgfUWyA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3MWxgfUWyA)
... I find remote sensing technology like that to be entirely operational
(domestic and foreign) at this point.

------
ddt_Osprey
Here it comes. The next wave of propaganda, in favour of precogs. The concept
of precrime will save us from ourselves.

~~~
userbinator
It's scary that it's only a small step away from thoughtcrime. George Orwell
was eerily prescient.

~~~
Dylan16807
Tracking people's movements near a murder has what to do with thoughtcrime,
exactly?

~~~
e12e
It's a small leap to combine panoptic surveillance with predictive policing
(the latter has been used in large cities already) - along with automated
classification labeling "suspect" behaviour.

Note for example that it is rather likely, if you go from an historic "know
good" dataset containing more convictions of poor people of colour, that you
would automate racial profiling... Quite possibly mixing cause and effect in
the training period. Consider further the implications of a company running
prisons (paid per inmate) going into the business of selling city/country-wide
surveillance systems to "assist police".

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zouhair
This stuff is really scary. I don't know if this technology should be used at
all.

------
jmartinpetersen
This makes me want to watch Enemy of the State again.

~~~
beachstartup
for a kick, watch the bourne movies again. they seemed somewhat far-fetched
when they first came out but now look rather conservative in what they portray
the CIA as being able to do (presumably with help from NSA)

it's almost as if they modeled the real tools after the fictional ones...

------
Houshalter
I know how anti-surveillance HN is, but I would like to make a case this could
be an amazingly good thing.

The cost of crime to society has been estimated to be on the order of $300
billion/year
([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2835847/)).
But that doesn't include numerous indirect costs. E.g. decreased property
values, white flight and the various issues it causes, people staying indoors
or making sacrifices due to fear of crime, etc.

One of the biggest things is that bothers me about our society, is children
are not allowed to go outside anymore. People blame electronics, but it's
almost entirely due to parents that fear their kids being outside of their
eyesight. Look at the incredible map on this article, on how much range
children have lost over time:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-
children-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-
lost-right-roam-generations.html) And it's almost entirely due to fear of
child abductors and crime, although other issues like increased automobile
traffic play a part. I find this incredibly sad.

A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious
crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic and
social impact.

I too, find the idea of being watched constantly creepy. So I propose some
restrictions. They should require a warrant to get the data from the
surveillance machines, and only be allowed to use it for a particular case. It
should be entirely air gapped. It should be deleted after a week. And it
should ideally be stuff like this surveillance drone, which can't make out
individual faces, just movements to see where people have gone.

We are looking at a society that is surrounded by sensors anyway. Surveillance
cameras on businesses are becoming nearly universal now they are so cheap, and
everyone walks around with a microphone in their pocket. Soon all cars will
have insurance mandated dashcams, not to mention self driving cars loaded with
sensors. All that stuff seems much creepier than a drone, as it can't make out
the faces of individuals and what they are doing or saying.

~~~
paganel
> A surveillance society could eliminate almost all crime, or at least serious
> crimes. Even just reducing them significantly would have enormous economic
> and social impact.

I wanted to be on your side, I really did, until I came to this paragraph.

From my point of view "crime" is an intrinsic part of our species, doing bad
things is one of the things that make us humans. I'm not condoning rapes nor
murders, it's just that, if you look at the history of our species, you'd
realize that we are where we are (we've sent people to the Moon and discovered
planets from galaxies far, far away) also because we did "bad" stuff.

Take the Bible, a book that has had a profound effect on the "Western"
civilization. The story of Cain and Abel is one of the most important from the
Old Testament. The New Testament is also a "Chronicle of a Crime Foretold", to
paraphrase Garcia Marquez.

Or Homer's The Iliad, the book that defined the Greek-Roman antiquity. It's
full of murders and rapes and bad things.

Long story short, we wouldn't have had the "enormous economic and social
impact" that we have today as a species if, let's say, an omnipotent
God/Spaghetti Flying Monster would have just watched us from the very
beginning and would have prevented us from doing any crimes.

~~~
ceejayoz
Seems a bit of a stretch from "crime happened in the past and people wrote
about it in fiction" to "crime is fundamentally necessary for our societal
development"...

~~~
paganel
Fiction represented what people saw around them and considered them as some
sort of values.

Someone above mentioned "Law&Order" as some sort of dismissal, but that's
exactly the point, in a "know it all surveillance society" the societal
aspects that made the producers think: "hey, let's make a show about the good
guys catching the bad guys, let's call it 'Law&Order'" would not be present.
Fiction is always backed up by facts from the real life.

I should know, i grew up in a wannabe "know it all surveillance society" (on
the Eastern side of the wall), where we did not have TV shows like 'Law&Order'
because, technically, the "socialist society" we were part of didn't have any
bad guys. There were of course criminals, and rapist, and bad people, but they
were just a glitch hidden under the rug. It was sort of supposed that in the
brighter future awaiting us all those "bad elements" would have been gone for
good.

The former socialist government of my country was against the bad guys because
in the end we were all supposed "to all be equal", some commenters on HN are
against the bad guys because it brings down real estate prices, maybe some
other people are against the bad guys because in a book of fiction 2000-years
old someone wrote it down that: "You should not steal", the fact remains that
no-one, ever, would be able to hide the "bad guys" under the rug, for ever.
It's against our very nature as a species.

------
msane
I think this is our future, whether it's dystopian or not.

Technology is eventually going to make it impossible to really prevent
"Persistent aerial surveillance". What requires an expensive small blimp today
might become the size of a ping pong ball (or wide area flock of them) and
come out of a 3D printer tomorrow.

So who will be using such tech? Governments and private entities alike - we
can try to legislate against either but technology will probably overpower the
legislation quickly.

So what is the impact of this sort of technology? Maybe it's not all George
Orwell. Your bike was stolen on Third St at 1pm? Roll the video back or
forwards to know exactly where the thief is. Someone shot up a nightclub and
rushed out in a crowd? automated video analysis caught them.

Yes it sounds scary if it were a monopolized power, but eventually I don't
think government will be able to hold monopoly on it.

