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Discussion (129 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverdrone+dark+angel
https://archive.is/dychh
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
https://www.404media.co/footage-shows-cop-stalking-woman-he-...
> The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Or this: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgia-deputy-charged-with...
Or this: https://fox11online.com/news/crime/tehrangi-chapman-milwauke...
Or this: https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2026/07/10/pasadena...
I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move, and if your response to that is "I don't understand the problem" then we cannot live in the same society. It has been proven for thousands of years now that more laws do not fix society, and especially the problems we have now. Usually the laws increase in size and absurdity proportionally to how close said society is to its fall. Yet people never learn, and we just add one more line to the list.
> Curry and Robert were struck by the fact that, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up at the drone or makes an attempt to hide from it—perhaps evidence that, given their size and altitude, the flying cameras are virtually invisible to the targets of their surveillance. “You’re just watching from above, and no one is aware that the drone is there,” Curry says. “It felt kind of creepy.”
What should they have done, creeped on them as they played?
How expensive are drones? Way less expensive than a police officer. They can be deployed at scale. You can imagine a world where every move everyone makes is tracked. If you don't think public spaces hold any 4th amendment protections, they can also see much better into private property that police officers can't see from the street. Back yard, second story windows, all angles into windows, and that is only considering if they use regular cameras, imagine when they have thermal cameras or other sensors.
Unironically, also GP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46559004
> > The bad food is a plus. The most orderly civilizations generally have the blandest food. Almost all societies with good food are chaotic and disorderly.
So yes, the state should probably take over cooking to maintain order!
I am no fan of police and am a big proponent of requiring police to carry malpractice insurance. I still think having cameras and footage while a call is going on is good for everyone.
Police should be made to get out of their cars and make some relationships with the community to get information. They should be so trusted by the community that private citizens willingly give them tips and security footage to aid investigations.
This surveillance tech is a band-aid on the effects of crime rather than a solution to the root cause.
So you catch the criminals and put them in jail. Then what? What prevents more people from resorting to crime? What prevents recidivism?
Our government as a whole should reduce crime by performing the most effective crime reduction strategies: eliminating the tuition cost of education, ending poverty [1] and disastrously high income inequality, implementing strong universal healthcare [2], reforming the prison system so that it provides opportunities to rehabilitate rather than raw punishment, enshrining employee protections like paid family leave into law so that kids can be raised by their family rather than being under-supervised while their parents work two shifts a day.
[1] With the excess wealth the US generates, ending poverty is trivial. Suggested Google search: “daily cost of Iran war.”
[2] Doesn’t even cost money, it saves money.
Also: You're welcome to disable push notifications if you don't want a big mac ad. (I agree that advertising is a cancer.)
Also, 2: What right should the government have to capture public data and then keep it from the public?
In principle I think this is good. These are useful tools as shown in the first video, helping them safely arrest a suspected thief. And having a policy like this is a good step to ensure they aren't used for ubiquitous surveillance that enables the sort of post-hoc warrantless (and unjustifiable) invasions of privacy we've seen with Flock cameras.
That said, I hope the official policy is more air-tight than this one-sentence version. "with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits" is tautological, only constraining the target to be a vehicle [edit: or does it require they follow a vehicle pursuit policy specified elsewhere? unclear to me]. And can anything be a "training exercise"? What would the consequences be anyway if an officer violates the policy? [edit: I'm also wondering now how tight their policy on an "active criminal investigation" is. When there's significant officer time involved, there's some inherent limit on how silly/vindictive/... they can get, but with enough drones, that could go away.]
1: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/explore-departm...
I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
Yes, this is preferable to me when compared to a society where police can surveil everyone, everywhere for no crime at all. I don't want to sit on my roof listening to music and wonder how many police drones are watching me, trying to figure out if I'm a "prowler." I don't want to be followed by a police drone while I'm on my way to the basketball court to shoot hoops with my friend, simply because the police thought one of us looked like a "suspicious individual."
> I know this is lagging, and American culture will take decades to accept it, but the better our police are the lighter the sentences can be. Part of why a big hard sentence was seen as a deterrent was sort of the EROI ... If the chances of catching are small, you need a big deterrent. If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent (and apply it close to the behavior to maximize the brain training of "Do bad, bad things happen")
I think you're really underestimating the public's desire to punish criminals.
>If the chances of catching are near 100% you only need a smaller deterrent
I would rather live in a world with marginally higher petty crime rates with zero surveillance, than a world that has no petty crime but where there are Flock cameras on every corner and drones patrolling overhead at all times.
Peter Thiel and his ilk are creating Big Brother.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
Move fast enough with sufficent scale and you can eliminate peoples ability to protect their own rights before they even realise they are under threat.
Sometimes friction in government is necessary for individual liberty.
And here it looks like they use it on criminals on the run - not something they use to practically monitor each person like some surveillance system, or court ordered wiretap
At least, that’s what I’ve gathered
But these drones are used to chase active criminals. Unless you committed a crime and ran back to your apartment, I think you’d be fine
Consumer drones can't summon a SWAT team.
> The innocuous appearance of many of the videos raises questions about whether the surveillance was necessary. In one “auto boost/strip”-related call, the drone follows two young men in their car, at least one of whom is described in police records as having been identified as a “suspicious person in a vehicle.” Then the two men emerge onto a basketball court and start playing, and the drone departs.
> SFPD’s drone policy says operators must keep cameras trained on areas necessary to a mission and minimize the inadvertent collection of data about uninvolved people or places. It also instructs operators to take reasonable precautions, including turning cameras away, to avoid inadvertently recording or transmitting images of places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But the exposed Skydio feeds reviewed by WIRED showed full missions from takeoff to landing, capturing not only detentions and searches, but also streets, apartment buildings, rooftops, cars, courtyards, and bystanders who did not appear to be the subject of any police operation.
If you are still unconvinced, ask yourself why you think the government breaking the law is not an issue?
https://apple.news/AYYcOLLOwSSmWqYuPlYALPA
They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.
It was really fascinating… In 2016.
At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.
Instead of planes, they are using drones…
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...
An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).
0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky
1. https://www.pss-1.com/
2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...
Sounds like they're saying we should be appalled by this usage of drones... IDK, until we have some proof of an truly innocent (found by a court) or no reason to be suspected person (eg profiled, misidentified) having a bad outcome (such as arrest and long detention) without recourse (sue the crap out of the city, dept, or state) ...
This article basically reads as "Drones help police apprehend a man involved with auto theft" ...
The only "news" here (no shocker) is that the PD is somewhat ignorant on how to handle these new technologies securely. They need to go out on the open market and hire some of the best and brightest security folks displaced by Mythos (that's a joke), and secure their stuff with the basics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
If we had a story of a Police officer using the drone to follow his dominos order, or his ex-girlfriend -- thatd be a story about abuse of power and quite newsworthy.
So do we need to wait for abuse with this specific piece of technology in order to be concerned?
Police Officer Accused of Tracking Partner Using License Plate Reader: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/us/milwaukee-police-offic...
What I don't care so much about the data collection as I do about how it's used.
Its not that the NSA surveils that bugs me. It's that they use kangaroo courts, "asdfasdfasdf" as the search reason field, that they cyber stalk girlfriends, or view camera devices to see people in state of undress (illegally and unethically).
In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
The police are doing these things too (stalking girlfriends, viewing cameras, following people).
> In this case we have an example of police using the devices, for a very legitimate usecase, more or less in an excellent manner (save for not properly securing the footage).
The article lists several cases where they weren't being used in an "excellent manner." They deployed drones to spy on some guy listening to music on his roof, and used drones to follow two "suspicious individuals" who were just driving to a basketball court. Another instance had drones hovering around outside an apartment building's windows while police were apparently inside. The department's drone use policy says that footage should only be recorded when the drone is at the scene to minimize the exposure of people unrelated to the investigation, but the investigators found that the drones are recording constantly, from takeoff to landing, and capturing everyone and their dog in between.
And these are just the instances the investigators were able to find, on the five drones that had a public link to their footage. Footage that only dates back six months. How many more drones does SFPD have that weren't included in the archive? How many more unexcellent uses did the investigators miss because the footage expired?
I could even get comfortable with tech like Flock if it was not so ripe for abuse.
Having a camera in the sky for police calls does not sound like a bad idea and actually good for all parties.
Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. SFPD only uses these for active calls. It’s no different imo than a human cop chasing down a suspect for a call.
We need protections/limits in place. But we also need a government that's reliable and "friendly" (to the extent a large government can be). We currently don't, so all these new techs are quite concerning.
Or to the requirement for RCS for which certificates are only issued to trusted parties?
This is done despite the department's drone policy stating that "drones can only be used to assist with active criminal investigations, to assist with or in lieu of vehicle pursuits, and for training exercises."
Either the laws need to be updated to have equal friction for the police to do surveillance, or we need to physically prevent police from having access to modern surveillance technology.
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: "I've got nothing to hide." According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/158/
See also "Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime"
The result of overcriminalization is that prosecutors no longer need to wait for obvious signs of a crime. Instead of finding Professor Plum dead in the conservatory and launching an investigation, authorities can instead start an investigation of Colonel Mustard as soon as someone has suggested he is a shady character.
https://columbialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Rey...
But here we are, with Skydio users openly using public sharing links to their drone feeds 24x7x365 apparently.
Sounds like another vendor needs to get added to the Covered List, methinks, but the lobbyists won't let that one fly.