On 05/22/2016 10:08 AM, grarpamp wrote:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/07/1120214/spies-in-the-skies-fbi-plan... Each weekday, dozens of U.S. government aircraft take to the skies and slowly circle over American cities. Piloted by agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the planes are fitted with high-resolution video cameras, often working with "augmented reality" software that can superimpose onto the video images everything from street and business names to the owners of individual homes. At least a few planes have carried devices that can track the cell phones of people below. Most of the aircraft are small, flying a mile or so above ground, and many use exhaust mufflers to mute their engines -- making them hard to detect by the people they're spying on. [...] The government's aerial surveillance programs deserve scrutiny by the Supreme Court, said Adam Bates, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C. "It's very difficult to know, because these are very secretive programs, exactly what information they're collecting and what they're doing with it," Bates told BuzzFeed News.
This is all child's-play. A couple of years ago a company called Persistent Systems was discovered to have been doing full-time 24/7/365 Wide Area Surveillance of ALL OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY for the LASD. They changed their name to Dojo Technlogy to avoid the publicity. Locally they were noted by yours truly as the company that does the surveillance system for the local transit station (bus). They're probably also responsible for sat-tracking the buses which has been ongoing for literally decades. Again, full-time 24/7/365 Wide Area Surveillance of ALL OF LOS ANGELES COUNTY at a price the LASD could afford. Why waste money on aviation fuel? Rr