Brainstorm: 32
Monday, 06 July 2015
By. David El Achkar
“Eye in the sky.”
Yesterday I listened to the latest Radiolab podcast episode, Eye In The Sky. Highly recommend! And it got me thinking…
“In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with an idea. With a small plane and a 44 mega-pixel camera, they figured out how to watch an entire city all at once, all day long. Whenever a bomb detonated, they could zoom onto that spot and then, because this eye in the sky had been there all along, they could scroll back in time and see — literally see — who planted it.”
They could then move “forward in time” and see where that person went after placing the bomb, and arrest him.
After the war, Ross brought this technology home for civilian use (like many other technologies, from war to mass consumption, e.g., GPS) and launched his company, Persistent Surveillance Systems (with extremely poor branding).
Today they’re able to launch their planes in cities and continuously monitor crime. The most impressive story comes from Juárez, Mexico. After a police officer was shot dead on the streets while driving her car to work, PPS was able to track the murderer back in time to see who his accomplices were, and then forward in time to see where they regrouped. This turned out to be a much bigger story. What were initially two cars at the crime scene, turned into 4 at a first meeting point, 8 after that, 16, and so on, all finally regrouping in a specific location: the house of the head of a cartel reportedly responsible for the murder of 15,000 people.
Clearly this technology can have tremendous benefits. But what about privacy and freedom of choice?
What is to stop this technology from tracking you in a relationship with the boy you’re trying to hide from your parents, or at the bar when you promised your wife you’d stop drinking?
+ What are you thoughts about this type of persistent surveillance?
+ Can its deployment even be stopped — even if decide it is a “bad thing”?
+ Are there other benefits beyond the obvious, like crime prevention?
+ Is privacy an overblown concern? (“I don’t care, I’ve got nothing to hide”)
+ Do we loose freedom of choice when we’re constantly monitored?
