FBI Black Helicopters Spying And Databasing Everything, Including Your Barbecue
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.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 05/22/2016 01:08 PM, grarpamp wrote:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/04/07/1120214/spies-in-the-skies-fb i-planes-are-circling-us-cities
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etc. ] Good catch! With July 4 coming up the Take Back The Fourth people should have uses for this and similar paranoia vs. rage inducing information. In military aviation circles, black airplanes (which include helicopters) are ones without tail numbers, that don't file flight plans and keep their transponders off. So the FBI and DHS flights reported in the Buzzfeed article were anything but: Their identities and flight paths are highly visible in the public record. That's enough to make me conclude that these missions have are mostly about burning allocated budgets in time for renewal, and normalizing "routine" aerial surveillance in advance of any Court challenges regarding specific abuses. Whether the redundancy of building frequently updated high resolution Google Earth type views of "amusing" landscapes will be of any practical use is probably not a factor in whether or not they happen, and get paid for. I would be more interested in knowing what IT vendors are involved and how much they are making, than in what they are storing and how they are processing it. Re black airplanes, I have seen four: All in Orlando, FL which is a major epicenter of surveillance tech development. One late afternon in early December of 1999 three literal black helicopters flew over the downtown area at low altitude, passing directly over the City Hall building. They looked like customized passenger carriers, with Big shrouds over their engines. Their rotors were startlingly quiet: I expected to see a helicopter at normal altitude in the distance when I looked up, and three passed directly overhead just above treetop level. At the time I guessed Somebody was putting on a show, demonstrating their ability to evacuate any "important" people from downtown in the event of a Y2K Bug Apocalypse. A couple of years later, about a half mile from the same spot, an all white helicopter with no markings /or/ visible windows stood station for about 15 minutes at about 1500 feet, 1/4 mile south of a small anti-war demonstration at Colonial Drive and Magnolia. At the same time, a team was working the crowd - taking names and "why you came out today" under the guise of "I'm a journalism student." This was done under the watchful eye of a guy in shades at the back of the crowd who was taking notes between holding a non-stop conversation with his cuff links. The FBI had just opened a brand new "anti-terrorism" school in town. :o) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJXQ1tNAAoJEECU6c5XzmuqpXIH/3fSHIUEoN8A5zYWY2t2VGVk cysSwD7Y90tI5u4/VBJT+RNBj5LtvS/SkfhmaD+9dhanPM0bCI/iZPkP07K+3wc8 KxbrUAyqG16BRRnL40zwPOBcFOs95rZx8AJi76+IA+2BEhXchC9m5npaLCYjKnoZ VHUx19bUVbsl88npq+NouEL6NuwmvMxU8lJ/L5vrXBQpWd/ECv+rrI6CSM5mpgqE 1sNMg91zDfCmRlGdynuwxlbEZWNBi3uZsWfzSJ2GddzY5LqOUvAnGTCLuPZ+Ryxi zCRD6FXr9k1T6u6Q2FfdwAxqwL8d+QR72a2qQKHFOQG39X7MCFi75uJ4L5sOZBs= =DbGt -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On 05/22/2016 10:08 AM, grarpamp wrote:
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
OMG - what a bunch of tweakers! -----Original Message----- From: cypherpunks [mailto:cypherpunks-bounces@cpunks.org] On Behalf Of Rayzer Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 9:14 PM To: cypherpunks@cpunks.org Subject: Re: FBI Black Helicopters Spying And Databasing Everything, Including Your Barbecue On 05/22/2016 10:08 AM, grarpamp wrote:
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
On 05/24/2016 09:41 PM, Greg Moss wrote:
OMG - what a bunch of tweakers!
Funny you should say that... Considering the computer industry was kept in code by coke/alcohol addicts for decades. Perhaps Methamphetamine is more popular nowdays. The paranoia level IS arguably of the same intensity as someone coming down from a run. Rr "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following you" ~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, Proverbs for Paranoids
participants (4)
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grarpamp -
Greg Moss -
Rayzer -
Steve Kinney