US Gov Launches Mass Surveillance Balloons in Fear of Rebellion

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Aug 5 17:26:17 PDT 2019


https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night-the-way-the-gorgon-stare-did/
https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Eyes-in-the-Sky/9780544972001

https://www.pss-1.com/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/15/baltimore-surveillance-john-laura-arnold-billionaires


The Gorgon Stare, a military drone-surveillance technology that can
track multiple moving targets at once, is coming to a city near you.

Sam Jaffe Goldstein | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,946 words)
Drones have come to define the United States’ forever war, the
so-called war on terror. The expansion of drone systems developed by
the military into new territories — including the continental United
States — embodies this era’s hyper-paranoid ethos: new threats are
ever imminent, conflict is always without resolution. At the same
time, non-militarized drones have entered civilian life in a number of
ways, from breathtaking cinematography to flight control at Heathrow
airport. There are many avid documenters of this new technology, but
no one seems to understand its many facets quite like Arthur Holland
Michel, founder and co-director of the Bard Center for the Study of
the Drone, which catalogs the growing use of drones around the world.
Now, Holland Michel has written Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of
Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, a book of startling
revelations about drone surveillance in the United States.
Holland Michel has lived and breathed drone technology for the last
six years, but nothing quite shocked him like the technology of Wide
Angle Motion Imagery (WAMI). WAMI greatly expands the power that a
camera attached to a drone can have; it is able to watch and record a
much greater area while also tracking multiple specific targets within
that area. In his book Holland Michel lays out how scientists and
engineers created this surveillance technology through a
Manhattan-project like mission. The name — a little too on the nose —
that the scientists decided to give their new invention was “Gorgon
Stare,” after the terrifying mythological creature whose mere glance
could turn you to stone. Even from the very beginning, Gorgon Stare’s
creators knew that its power would extend beyond its original stated
purpose — to help prevent IED attack and track insurgents across
conflict zones. Now, proponents of WAMI are finding uses for it in
civilian life, and Holland Michel argues that the public must be
involved in any decision before it is deployed above us. I met up with
Arthur on a beautiful Spring day (perfect for flying drones) to
discuss this profoundly troubling technology, how to prevent its worst
potential from being realized, and maybe — just maybe — how drones can
be used for good.
*
Sam Jaffe Goldstein: You co-founded the Bard Center for the Study of
the Drone. Why was the center created? What is its mission?
Arthur Holland Michel: I came up with the idea between my junior and
senior year of college. I was fascinated by the idea of drones; they
were flying robots that were going to deliver burritos, they were
being used for military operations overseas, and they were going to
start crowding the airspace. I felt it would be interesting to study
this new and mysterious technology.
As it turned out my first-year roommate, Dan Gettinger, was writing
his senior thesis about drones, and so he joined me and became a
crucial part of the project. I came back to campus after the summer
and we set up speaker’s seminar. By the time we graduated there was
enough interest in what we were doing that we decided to take it
further. That was in May of 2013, and here we are now.
How did you learn Gorgon Stare and Wide Angle Motion Imagery (or WAMI)?
I believe the first time I found out about Gorgon Stare was in reading
about it in 2013. At that point the first iteration of Gorgon Stare
had been deployed and there was a little bit of press around this
totally unprecedented technology. From that point onward, I couldn’t
stop thinking about it. When you study drones, you spend a lot of time
looking at really impressive, futuristic, and at times troubling
technologies. But nothing kept me up at night the way Gorgon Stare
did. There was just something so formidable about it.
I spent about two years thinking about the technology and all the
things it would mean for society. Then it struck me: This is an urgent
topic and I should probably write about it. That was in November of
2015 and I started on the book a few months after that.
So what is Gorgon Stare and WAMI technology, how does it work?
Think of a traditional camera on a drone as a high powered telescope.
What it’s really good for is zooming in on things on the ground very
closely. The downside is that you can really only watch one person or
vehicle at a time. Maybe something important is happening a few blocks
away or on the other side of the city. If you focus on just one target
you are going to miss all the other important things that happened
around it, you are going to lose all the context. I’m talking about
cameras aboard military drones that fly at 25,000 thousand feet, by
the way.
What Wide Area Motion Imagery does is expand the aperture. You can
watch an entire city at once and zoom in on any one part of the
imagery with a decent amount of detail, while still recording
everything else. To do that is a tremendous technological leap,
because you need an incredibly powerful camera. And that’s the other
thing that sets them apart. They are tremendously powerful.

    “In 2008 there were already live operational tests over football
games, NASCAR races, and rallies.”

What does it look like?
Generally they are larger than the standard cameras on drones. Some of
the original iterations were essentially a number of cameras bolted
together, and with a bit of software you could stitch those images
together to create one single view. As the technology matured and
became more refined you could have one very large digital camera with
multiple lenses that absorbs a very wide angle view of the ground with
a lot of resolution.
To put this in context, an iPhone camera maybe has twelve million
pixels. A Gorgon Stare has 1.8 billion pixels — that is, 1.8
gigapixels, 150 times more powerful than an iPhone. And as it happens,
the fundamental technology that enabled this was the camera chips in
cell phones. Your cell phone has a little chip that sits behind the
camera lens, and if you stitch a bunch of those together, then you’ve
made a camera that can generate very high resolution images. The
technology in your pocket right now that enabled this all-seeing view
of the ground.
In Eyes in the Sky, you tell the story of how the 1998 blockbuster
Enemy of The State was the initial inspiration for this technology.
In Enemy of the State there’s an imagined technology, a satellite that
can watch people on the ground across vast areas. This was of course
pure fantasy at the time. An engineer who works for the government saw
the film in a theater and thought it would be quite incredible if the
government could actually do that. That seed of inspiration
precipitated a whole series of events and development projects that
culminated with Gorgon Stare about ten years later. It took a while,
but during that period the rate at which camera technology got more
powerful outpaced Moore’s law, which predicts the rate at which
computer chips become more powerful. It was this phenomenal jump in
capability in a very short period of time, all driven from an initial
seed of inspiration, a 1998 Will Smith blockbuster.
Why was it built other than this pure fantasy? What is its practical purpose?
It was envisioned as a counter terrorism tool. It’s a way to find
people, a way to find insurgents. It was seen as a way to potentially
turn the tide at a point in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars where it
became clear the counter insurgency fight was going to be a lot more
challenging than originally thought.
Do proponents feel like it did turn the tide?
The events on the ground speak for themselves. The wars haven’t ended.
The counter insurgency fight and the counter terrorism fight continue
to this day. No single tool is going to win a war for you. However,
everybody I spoke to described it as being transformative. The fact
that it is still being used is a strong sign that it has some utility.

So it is currently deployed?
Yes it is flying right now as we speak.
Do we know where it’s flying right now?
No. That information is classified. All operational information about
Gorgon Stare is considered classified. Same goes for other WAMI
systems.
How did we learn that it has been flown in previous theatres of war?
Because there have been selective disclosures over the years, in
congressional reports, for example, and in Air Force budget documents.
You can piece together these little bits of information that have been
released. But if you were to ask the Air Force how Gorgon Stare is
being used on this very day, you would not get a specific answer.
Do we at least know who is using it?
The Air force owns Gorgon Stare.
But not NSA or the CIA?
We don’t know. All these groups work together very closely on
intelligence matters. There is a lot of intelligence sharing.There’s a
lot of intelligence that comes from a whole range of different
sources. All we know is that it is being used for counter terrorism
missions.
People throughout the book — people in the military — when they talk
about using a drone to find a suspect in a terror attack, they use a
euphemism, they say “they’d go knock on his door.” It’s a remarkably
revealing allusion to a far simpler way of doing things. It seems
like, as with so much about the war on terror, Gorgon Stare does not
fit into a larger goal.
There’s a difference between tactics and strategy. A tool can be very
effective in finding who you are looking for — that’s tactics. But
whether finding a particular person, apprehending them, killing them,
or turning them is good strategy in the long run is a separate
question for a separate group of people.
Yet this truly powerful tool doesn’t seem to have changed anything in
terms of turning the tide. We are about to sign a peace treaty with
the Taliban in Afghanistan.
There are a whole range of incredible tools at the DOD’s disposal and
that just speaks to the complexity of the situation on the ground.
What difficulties does that bring up for you since you are writing
about the tool without writing about the larger picture?
I did not want to wade into the debate about strategy, because I was
interested in a story about a technology that will have ramifications
for all of us. This is a story that began squarely in the military
space but does not end in the military space. It is a story that ends
here, over our heads. That’s what mattered to me about this story.

    “I visited Baltimore during that operation and was astounded
seeing first-hand how the technology was being used on the people of
Baltimore without their knowledge.”

Should we even be using this technology on people even if they are
insurgents, let alone bringing it stateside?
Well as a proponent of the technology might say, if you have the
capability to prevent a terrorist attack it is incumbent upon you to
use that capability to do so. Gorgon Stare falls under that logic.
When you are so focused on the mission at hand, it can be difficult to
see the larger picture.
That being said, everybody I interviewed who had been involved in the
development of the technology was very realistic about the fact they
had created a very dangerous tool. That it could be misused and that
there were privacy concerns. I was very surprised that many of them
brought up the privacy concerns before I had a chance to ask them.
It’s front and center in their minds.
[But when it was being developed] they have a very specific and
singular focus: save lives on the ground. Prevent U.S. Soldiers from
getting blown up by IEDs. For them, that trumps everything. Their
perspective is that many of the other concerns can be dealt with —
that you will weigh the benefits of the technology against its real
and perceived costs, and that you can make that balance work. Some of
that thinking is potentially very misguided, and that’s why some of
the dangers of the technology are truly frightening and urgent.
What are the dangers?
It’s a way of seeing everybody all the time. Fundamental to liberal
democracy is the ability to have sacrosanct private spaces. That is
where the life of civil society exists. It is where our own personal
lives exist, where we are able to pursue our dreams and passions. And
it is often where we hold power to account. When you uncover those
spaces, you fundamentally put all of those things at risk.
Gorgon Stare also creates a real and tangible fear. The thought that
you are being observed from the sky will have a direct impact on your
behavior. It will directly impinge upon your desires and your
decisions when you enter into those spaces. One has to ask whether we
want to live in a society where people are scared to organize around
causes, or where they are scared to associate with their peers in a
religious or political context. There is a real threat that needs to
be taken seriously.
When was it first used stateside in a secret government experiments,
and when was it used stateside with public knowledge?
The first experimental use of the technology began at the very start
of this story. As soon as the first iterations of the technology were
created, they were tested in the U.S., in California specifically. In
one of the earliest tests they flew over a gas station in the San
Fernando Valley. Then there were tests in San Diego, and a whole range
of other cities. A lot of the companies that develop the technology
are based in the United States, so it was very natural that they would
conduct their testing here.
The story of its domestic use for active operations is almost just as
old. In 2008 there were already live operational tests over football
games, NASCAR races, and rallies. Shortly after that there were pilot
programs in a number of U.S. cities. A few companies emerged offering
surveillance services. One of the most extensive programs that we have
seen to date was in Baltimore in 2016. I visited Baltimore during that
operation and was astounded seeing first-hand how the technology was
being used on the people of Baltimore without their knowledge.
How was it being used on the people of Baltimore?
It was being used for investigative law enforcement. Trying to solve
“unsolvable crimes,” is how its mandate put it.
When you watched it, did you feel uncomfortable?
Yes, I felt deeply uncomfortable.
Ross Mcnutt and his company Persistent Surveillance Systems was in
charge of the program. How did he defend it?
He said that it’s not illegal. He said all of the perceived dangers
are accounted for with the company’s privacy policies. For example,
the policy prevents a rogue agent from tracking their spouse across
the city. It was thorough policy and, to his mind, that was enough.

This program was funded by philanthropist John D. Arnold. Can you talk
about his motives?
He funds a whole range of different issues. One of his key areas of
interest is in technologies that can be used for law enforcement and
for keeping cities safe. He focuses on high risk technologies, things
that are untested and on the frontier.
If you were to lay it out, how would you want it look like versus what
John D. Arnold or Ross Mcnutt wants it look like.
I would be hesitant to pit myself against their views. My philosophy
is that we often have much more in common than we don’t. We all want
to have safe cities. No one wants people’s personal privacy to be
intruded upon in egregious ways. But there are significant differences
of opinion as to the best ways to achieve those goals. One of the core
principles that I believe is important is transparency. If a city is
surveilling its people, it needs to be honest about it. WAMI watches
everybody, so it’s everybody’s business.
The rules for the technology need to be a result of a discussion
involving multiple stakeholders: the people who will be watched, the
people whose job it is to protect those residents, the people who make
the technology, government oversight groups, and civil-society
organizations. Everyone should come together and have a discussion and
the details should come out of that process. If the process is managed
properly, then we should have every reason to believe that the
technology’s many perils can be held in check while its promise can
benefit all of us. It shouldn’t be one person who just comes up with
the smartest solution.

    “The question of who counts as a legitimate target of surveillance
is purely subjective.”

A peril that comes to mind is the use of this technology against the
vulnerable. That even the best processes will not be able to protect
them.
Managing surveillance technology is going to be at the heart of the
struggle for the future of democracy. We cannot have a democracy where
everybody is watched all the time, in high resolution, through
multiple formats. [But] you also cannot stop technological progress.
You cannot fully block the logic that says if there’s a way to stop
something — a terrorist attack or a crime that we agree is bad for
society — that the effort should be made to stop it. The challenge is
in drawing those lines. Who should be protected? Who shouldn’t be
protected? When is use fair? When is it not fair?
Part of the question will be whether the structures in place to
protect the vulnerable will continue to hold up in the face of
technological change. There will be those who say that the protections
in the Bill of Rights and Constitution do enough to hold all of these
technologies in check. There will also be those who say no, these
tools raise completely unfamiliar questions and as a result new rules
will need to be written.
One of the dangers of the technology is that the question of who
counts as a legitimate target of surveillance is purely subjective. A
legitimate target to you might not be a legitimate target to the next
person. The structures and rules that protect people from unwarranted
surveillance are necessary and that’s why these rules are used every
single day. You cannot just go and tap anybody’s phone just because
you think they are a legitimate target of surveillance. There are
abuses, and those abuses are the reason why we need processes for
keeping surveillance in check. The process is not a static thing; it
is a living discussion, which has to change as the technology evolves.
Do you have any hope for that happening considering how agencies like
the NSA have been empowered, or America’s conservative judiciary where
a lot of these questions are going to be dealt with?
Democracy has existed for two thousand years and it has adapted itself
to all kinds of technologies that posed a fundamental threat. It
wasn’t all that long after the introduction of wire tapping that we
collectively decided there’s a line that must not be crossed. If it
has happened with previous tectonic technological shifts, then we have
some reason to believe it can happen again.
We are certainly living in a remarkable time, though. It’s not just
WAMI that’s watching us in new ways. It is also social media
monitoring systems, big data analytics, license plate readers, ground
cameras, facial recognition. It is an extensive list. Artificial
intelligence is a theme running through all of those technologies, and
it is at the base of many of the challenges that we will have to
confront.
Even with a conservative government like ours, it’s easy to foresee
mass use of WAMI in the U.S. coming not from a government spy agency,
but from a private corporation. For instance, Amazon sets up a blimp
with a WAMI camera over a major American city. Or, a customer buys a
toothbrush on their phone, and with the use of WAMI a drone is able to
deliver that toothbrush within the hour. While there might be
protests, people are probably going to be more willing to go along
with it. How do we warn them about the risks of data collection?
Get this: Amazon has a patent for a system to analyze the video
footage of private properties collected by its delivery drones and
then feed that analysis into its product recommendation algorithm. You
order an iPad case, a drone comes to your home and delivers it. While
delivering this package the drone’s computer vision system picks up
that the trees in your backyard look unhealthy, which is fed into the
system, and then you get a recommendation for tree fertilizer. There
is tremendous value in the data that can be collected from the sky and
people will seek to take advantage of that data.
However, nobody likes being watched from above. There is a profound
human resistance to it. A resistance as old as time: if you go back to
Greek mythology, there was already a very clear fear of the sky and
things that inhabit the sky. We may just say “No, we don’t want it.:
This is a very real possibility. Let’s just hope that it is a
reasonable discussion, and that the functions used to protect privacy
in the past kick in again. I think it’s needed now more than ever
before.
Did the creators of WAMI understand the vast power of what they were
building and how it could change everything?
The men who built this technology — and let’s not mince words: they
were predominantly men — have generally never been the victims of
unwarranted surveillance. They have not been subject to egregious
intrusion upon their privacy, so naturally they lack that perspective.
But they are very conscious that they have created something
dangerous. They are not unaware, and it troubles them. They will not
go so far as to apologize for it, but they are not going to tell you
there’s no need to do anything. They are realistic about it, but they
maybe don’t respond to those dangers in visceral way that is grounded
in personal experience.
Technology is usually described as neutral, but it is hard not to see
some of our worst tendencies as humans baked into WAMI. The
inspiration for it was a paranoid thriller about surveillance! Can you
really even describe this technology as ‘neutral’?
There is a very good reason that when anybody hears about WAMI for the
first time, they feel a universal emotion: fear. There’s a reason we
fear the technology now just as we have always feared observation from
above. That fact calls into question this notion that technology is
neutral.
Maybe there is something baked into it. Would you call the atomic bomb
neutral? Would you call the smallpox vaccine neutral? It’s only
neutral if it exists in a total vacuum, but it doesn’t.
What I want, my reason for writing the book, is that there needs to be
a discussion. This technology could be dangerous, but it could also be
beneficial. However, in all likelihood if we don’t talk about it, WAMI
will be more dangerous than beneficial. If we talk about it, given the
fact we generally share a common goal of balancing privacy against
safety, and of maintaining and protecting the core structures of
democracy, we’ll land on the right side.


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list