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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHomeland 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 |
Its 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 doesnt have a particular system in mind. Right now, its just soliciting industry feedback on what a formal call for such a Wide Area Surveillance System might look like. But its 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 its interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square kilometers thats between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New Yorks 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 its 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 Amendments 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 theyre not living in a government panopticon.
....(more at link)
Lint Head
(15,064 posts)drone or satellite image.
They_Live
(3,236 posts)but we have to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, The Post Office, and anything else that actually benefits society. Great.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)I'll bet they buy the hardware from PRC.
Good luck, America!
sarcasmo
(23,968 posts)and far into a crazy Orwellian nightmare.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)What kinds of values does the Obama administration have?
What is important here? Filling the sky with this junk or doing what is right for the American people?
And who is snooping on whom?
Isn't the government supposed to belong to us, not the other way around?
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)because there is a new betrayal of the people every day. And it will continue to happen until we acknowledge that this is a pervasive, bipartisan problem, and get the money out of politics.
The parties are colluding and acting against the interests of the people, and they are colluding to keep wedge issues front and center, to distract us from what they are accomplishing together. Obama's signing of ACTA was purposely kept quiet, and nobody here was aware of when he signed the bill to proliferate drones in US skies, and to make it more difficult for airport workers to unionize.
This surveillance plan, too, has been in none of the major papers.
It has become important to watch our elected "representatives" very closely, it seems.