The raw storage density of a high-end sensing drone was approaching a petabyte even back then, so it is a plausible number if you have a large drone fleet. This roughly matches available COTS flash storage in ultra-dense form factors at the time. Live streams are likely going to be an extract of the captured data but you can always pull the storage array when it lands.
I haven’t done any math on 1.8 billion pixel video feed but I agree. There’s not enough radio bandwidth even for one drone to beam down over a million TB/day.
ARGUS-IS, which is the successor to GORGON STARE, adds DVR capabilities. So your feed catches a VBIED detonation and analysts can zoom in and rewind the footage and find the safe house from which the VBIED departed.
This can be done at effectively metropolitan scale.
IIRC, both these systems are being tested domestically.
I remember a RadioLab episode[0] that talked about using small planes to do similar things. Planes that were flying at high up so you won't hear or really notice them. They go through how they solved a crime in Mexico by tracing where the crime happened and stepping pictures back to find where the shooter originated from. The CIA and FBI have been doing this for a long time too. Its use is just getting more wide spread.
Then I want people to consider Planet [1](formally Planet Labs). Their goal is to get a picture of Earth every day. They currently have 14 satellites that get 0.72m resolution (sample)[2]. That's easily enough to see a car. The 3m[3] seems good enough to do what they describe in the RadioLab episode. Honestly it is only a matter of time before Planet or another company gets sub 100cm resolution AND has a constant view of the globe. While this product is transformative in many different ways and can do a lot of good for humanity (seriously, it can do a LOT of good) I have ZERO doubt that it will be used to track people. It really isn't a matter of inventing technology, it is a matter of how much to spend (inventing more will make it cheaper).
So I think we should think very carefully about this technology. I'm extremely concerned with privacy but at the same time I do not think we should prevent the march of innovation (even if you really could). But we've seen how it has been used. We see how it IS being used. But I want people to also think how it WILL be used as technology gets better. This isn't a conversation for tomorrow. We do have to think about it now and decide how we want to handle these things. I'm not entirely sure how it should be handled. But the idea that the US, Russia, China, or even NK could have access to constant monitoring of the entire planet is a scary idea and well past Orwellian. I think we're far from a constant monitoring being feasible, but we're at least close enough where the idea is realistic (where it isn't sci-fi anymore).
Side note: I wonder how much more difficult it would be to be a spy if this technology existed.
> 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.
Are satellite surveillance not already a threat in this sense? I have heard such images have a resolution down to 1 cm.
Diffraction limit for visible light would imply a rather huge aperture to be able to resolve 1cm on the ground from a low orbit. One that would stretch credulity. I would guess 5cm is achievable. Commercial applications are limited to 40ish cm. When I worked in aerial surveys we were working with an 8cm ground resolution, this was a good trade off point for wide field of view, motion blur, exposure, resolution and camera cost. So you can do a lot better for much cheaper with a plane (drones included). Plus you can fly under clouds and it is easy to change where you want images.
We know the payload size and weight limits of the largest launchers, so it's fairly easy to work backwards from there and calculate the maximum achievable resolving power of spy satellites. They can play some clever tricks with adaptive optics to boost clarity a little bit but obviously the stories about 1cm resolution or reading newspaper headlines from space are ludicrous.
Bostrom makes a compelling argument that we may find ourselves needing to rethink this assumption of privacy in the name of preventing bad actors from wiping out civilization.
I disagree. His paper comes off more as whataboutism, or a call toward paying more attention to underlying issues of poor ethical/moral fabric underlying society today; particularly and most obviously illustrated in the tech industry today.
Yes. Our ability to effect the world is amplified greatly from what it has ever been before; but before abandoning essential liberty, perhaps we should take a moment to collect ourselves, sit down, and realize that if we're willing to give up everything, then civilization is already lost; therefore, the proper direction is not further breakdown or restriction of liberties, but a revival of the collective cilized spirit that hitherto has graced our ancestors in bringing us to this point.
Technology and our bewitchment by it, and the power conferred through it's use are things tempered by prudence and an active sense of obligation to those around us, and those we'll be leaving behind to carry on after us.
I'm incredibly alarmed at the willingness to embrace the sacrifice of essential liberty nowadays... It's mind boggling.
Bostrom's argument is not at all that bad people do bad things so therefore we need total surveillance.
It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end.
Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument. If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
I've been called a modern day Spinoza, hadn't been called out as Mill yet though. At least I'm in good company.
>It's that some technology (which may be in our near future, but isn't quite here yet at least) may be so dangerous and so ubiquitous that unless you can reduce the number of crazy or misguided people (terrorists, violent nihilists, bored teenagers, or whoever) to zero, civilization will end.
Yes. I know. That is consistent with my interpretation. What I said spoke not to the message of the paper, but what it means in the backdrop of current events. I also strongly disagree with the conclusion that civilization ends because some crazy gets his hand on a thing. I say civilization ends once people start panicking about some crazy getting a thing, and seriously considering we have to either full stop technological development, or cleanse the world of "problematic sub-populations" for the sake of something that might not even happen.
>Lamenting the death of classical liberal values is not an argument.
Correct. It isn't. Nor was I attempting to do so. My argument was that seeing as civilization is already lost if we're considering hitting the full stop button, drugging the masses, or going off into flights of fancy creating a world with zero space for essential liberty; the only way to go is up. We have to reaffirm our commitment to personal liberty, rebuild the civic framework of trust, and embark on rational, prudent ways of hardening society against whatever new "threats " there are to be dealt with due to mischief caused by members of the very civilization we so deem to protect.
Civilization predicated on essentially null liberty, and iron-fisted systemic control isn't civilization. It's barbarism. Civilization is what you have when everyone has the means to put one over on everyone else, but we all decide to build/do something productive instead of trying to cause others harm.
Do some people make the harmful choice? Yes. Those people generally set the level the rest of us respond on. Creating a self-correcting dynamic.
>If such technology is feasible, there are only two options: accept the end of civilization and perhaps humans, or try to prevent use of the technology through mass surveillance and elimination of privacy. Or drugging everyone, or some combination. e.g. 1984 or BNW. The counterargument is that those schemes fundamentally don't work, but that really depends on the nature and reliability of the surveillance or the drug, doesn't it? Even if they don't work, the choice is between trying something that probably won't work, and the certainty of the end of human civilization if nothing is tried.
And this is the type of thing that indicates to me, that for at least right now, civilization is dead or dying. See, humanity doesn't go away when civilization does. Our works and infrastructure, and everything else don't just disappear. We just start acting in the most base, animalistic ways conceivable.
Dystopian literature is not a thrice damned instruction manual. It is a cautionary tale. A warning, a description of a societal failure state.
To take any option as laid out in these tales and to consider it a valid, agreeable, or desirable way to advance is to reject the central tenet of civilization. That people, given the means and freedom to employ them will generally do positive things, and for the one's that don't, we have ways of dealing with that; but in the interest of not succumbing to our baser natures as human beings, we bind the employment of those means through systematized, impartial codes, so at the very least, we protect ourselves from unraveling the civic trust that makes our current state of being possible.
It is through the respect of personal liberty, and prudence in the application of violence or coersion that the state of civility bears fruit.
I'll happily accept the possible risk of sudden existential collapse. If it's going to be, then it'll be. Everything historically recorded, everything being actively researched, and everything existing as even a kernel of a nightmare in a creative's eye is bound by time, space, and the laws of physics. Time we will have, and make no mistake; nothing creates unity in a civilization like sudden existential crisis. Some might even argue, that is how our civilizations mature. By being tested repeatedly, and managing to survive intact.
In case you thought the following were just platitudes, I recommend you think about what they really mean before being swayed by this alarmist/surrendering rhetoric.
Land of the Free, home the Brave.
Those that would sacrifice essential Liberty for Safety, deserve and will find neither Liberty, nor Safety.
The cost of Liberty is eternal vigilance.
I'll gladly wear Mill's mantle, because someone clearly needs to.
The tech is in the hand of bad actors, they are wiping out civilization. If you have no privacy, you have no freedom of thought, you cannot learn to think, and cannot become a person. Water bags, yes ("the last man lives the longest"), humans no, civilization no.
It's like the people who invaded Iraq and made ISIS possible, then go on and tell people what to do about ISIS, and so on. How about bringing to justice the and seeing judged in our history books the "bad actors" in past and present we know exist for sure, rather than rationalizing continued obedience to them by squinting hard, to try and see "silver linings" in clouds they are seeking to force upon us? That's the mechanism here, it's not like we live in a normal world as free adults, and someone says "hey, tech is getting very powerful, let's talk about privacy". No, we rationalize what we see powerful conglomerates pushing over decades, in an arms race against civilian populations that begun before we were even born.
> It's pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advantaged' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.
-- Noam Chomsky
> What mattered in our early, nontheoretical education in morality was never the conduct of the true culprit of whom even then no one in his right mind could expect other than the worst. Thus we were outraged, but not morally disturbed, by the bestial behavior of the stormtroopers in the concentration camps and the torture cellars of the secret police, and it would have been strange indeed to grow morally indignant over the speeches of the Nazi big wigs inpower, whose opinions had been common knowledge for years. [..] The moral issue arose only with the phenomenon of "coordination," that is, not with fear-inspired hypocrisy, but with this very early eagerness not to miss the train of History, with this, as it were, honest overnight change of opinion that befell a great majority of public figures in all walks of life and all ramifications of culture, accompanied, as it was, by an incredible ease with which life long friendships were broken and discarded. In brief, what disturbed us was the behavior not of our enemies but of our friends, who had done nothing to bring this situation about. They were not responsible for the Nazis, they were only impressed by the Nazi success and unable to pit their own judgment against the verdict of History, as they read it. Without taking into account the almost universal breakdown, not of personal responsibility, but of personal judgment in the early stages of the Nazi regime, it is impossible to understand what actually happened.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship"
I keep wondering if the person who came up with the name was a Charlie Stross fan.
Stross's Laundry Files novels feature a hybrid magical/technological device codenamed Scorpion Stare. It's a weapon rather than a surveillance technology, but it's also built into government surveillance systems as a hidden feature. And the technology behind it was discovered by dissecting actual gorgons (which are a real thing in the Laundryverse).
This is great, I hope Gorgon Stare enters the modern lexicon.
It's a adequately intimidating sounding name for an overreaching gov surveillance program that was intended for warfare zones and being applied to domestic citizens. Exactly like "Stingrays" from a couple years ago.
All a terrorist would have to do is a few minor operations on domestic soil, then stand back and watch as the country folds in on itself. Like airport security x 1000.
For better or worse, this isn't a new idea. See e.g. The Twilight Zone S1E22, "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" (which isn't literally about McCarthyism, but the metaphor is so blatant that it might as well be).
Was this not the stated mission of Osama Bin Laden, to bait America into a taxing war that would drain the economy and see Western civilization spend itself into bankruptcy?
I think that was the goal he stated retroactively. Before the attacks, he seemed to legitimately believe he could conventionally destroy the US and unite the Umma with a long series of 9/11 style operations.
They're already doing it culturally in response to political wrongthink on the internet and elsewhere, which legions of trolls on 4chan et al regularly exploit for their own amusement.
The same thing in the "homeland" security world would obviously result in a similar overreaction in a country where so many people are paid to be paranoid and overly sensitive to risk. But the deterrents and personal risks of messing with actual security services are so much higher which lowers the likelihood.
Plus how many crazies have tried the "mass shootings to start a {cultural/race} war" thing and completely failed. Or all the groups from the 1970-90s preaching nonsense about the triggering of some symbolic event resulting in mass societal change or utopia (see: Branch Davidians). It always fails spectacularly. Same with ISIS. I wish people would stop trying those strategies, which always harms innocent people caught in between, while the overreaction just feeds into the group's now (self-fulfilled) victim complex which just further adds fuel to their sales pitch to the fringe, creating more conflict and overreaction.
I was with you until the last bit. Responsibility for the overreaction rests solely on the powerful parties overreacting - USG, mainstream media, out of touch suburbanites, industry working groups, etc. The existence of crazies does not serve as justification for totalitarianism. There's always going to be some perturbation, and a robust system needs to be tolerant of it.
Not perhaps solely. If we know something about a threat in advance and we do nothing to stop it from affecting ourselves, then perhaps we are not free from blame.
Sure, but that's an awfully weird nitpick. My comment was attributing blame ostensibly for the purpose of pushing back against the panicking powermongers...
A while back this was talked about on a podcast - can't remember which one, and they said it took 1 photo per second. I'm not sure if they were being truthful or just saying it for illustration.
Half-meter resolution from a drone - big deal. Digital Globe can do better from orbit.[1]
Integration of all the imagery from ground-based surveillance cameras is a bigger threat to privacy. At half a meter, about all you can do is find fires and follow cars.
It was a revolutionary technology when it was deployed in Iraq. You had roadside bombs going off constantly.
The workflow was:
1. Bomb goes off
2. Plane lands, disk packs taken off, loaded into computer
3. DVR type interface, zoom to the time/place where the bomb went off.
4. Rewind. Observe some guys messing around with something on the side of the road.
5. Draw a box around their truck.
6. Run the tape forward. Computer automatically tracks the truck. Observe where truck goes back to.
7. Run the tape backward. Observe where truck came from.
8. Kick down two doors that night.
9. Integrate this with your mobile phone tracker. Observe all phones that came to either of the two addresses within a time window.
10. See what other places these phones went to. Find places that are common to multiple bombings. Repeat.
11. You now have the leadership chain.
Roadside bombs essentially stopped being a problem. This was attributed to the "Anbar Awakening", but my belief is that it was essentially due to these two technologies.
I used to live next to a guy who would shoot all drones on sight. The world needs more people like him.
Edit: so other people have pointed out firing ballistics into the air is actually really dangerous. Signal jamming the drone seems like a safer kind of direct action.
Could also indirectly resist the military industrial complex by lobbying state and federal governments. That would be the safest way to bring down a drone.
I found a bullet in my roof. It was only a .22, but it was facing straight down into the roof, stuck maybe 1/8" or 1/16" of an inch into it.
I was amused and showed it to my neighbor one day and he immediately (and seriously) told his wife "See, I told you we should move out of this neighborhood"
Just because you don't see people and you think the neighbor kids are at school doesn't mean there aren't people around that could be hit by a stray bullet. Maybe even people actively trying to not be seen, though they aren't thieves casing the house or whatever. They are just extremely poor.
I spent nearly six years homeless. I used to see drones above my tent at night when camped at the foot of some bluffs below expensive housing. I don't believe the people in the expensive housing had any idea I was there. I did my best to have tree cover, to come in under cover of darkness and remain quiet and so forth.
I was trying to avoid telling that personal anecdote because I'm routinely given shit for telling my personal anecdotes to explain what I mean.
To give a voice to the silent - thank you Doreen for telling your story! You have a unique insight into the problems of the homeless and I for one am grateful to you for sharing it.
If you try to shoot drones with a rifle or handgun. In most cases you would use a shotgun with birdshot, which isn’t really dangerous beyond a few hundred feet unless it hits you in the eye. Still, never shoot at anything unless you’re sure of not hitting fragile things behind it, but fearmongering over shooting down drones isn’t very productive.
> isn’t really dangerous beyond a few hundred feet
The overwhelming majority of the world lives less than a few dozen feet from their neighbors. Homes tend to cluster together even in the middle of nowhere.
Now please, pretty please, stop encouraging people to discharge their firearms into the air.
You don't fire at your neighbors. Birdshot fired upward (at a drone) is going to fall back down - after losing it's muzzle velocity to air resistance and gravity - at terminal velocity. The terminal velocity of birdshot isn't fast enough to do damage.
It's still not a good idea, but they've got a point about birdshot. An ordinary bullet, fired straight up, will come down with enough force to hurt or kill. But each pellet of birdshot is much much lighter, so its terminal velocity is lower. Falling from the sky, it shouldn't do more than sting a bit.
(I haven't done the math, but I know the notion that a penny dropped from the Empire State Building is false; a penny's terminal velocity is too low. And birdshot is a lot lighter than a penny.)
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Regional slurs aren't ok either. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking the spirit of this site more to heart? We'd appreciate it.
I meant no disrespect. I’m pretty country myself and I don’t think redneck is derogatory. In fact a lot of country folk are proud to call themselves rednecks. This is evident in popular culture, for example in songs like ‘Redneck Yacht Club’ and ‘Boys ‘Round Here’, two very popular country songs (they’re good; listen to them).
Understood, and I believe you. The problem is that intent doesn't come across by itself in internet comments. We don't have things like tone of voice or facial expression to make it clear. So if you're going to post something like this, the burden is on you to include enough information to disambiguate intent. "Haha" isn't enough information.
Gorgon Stare was featured in PBS Nova Rise of the Drones (2013)
Skip to 30m mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP_T45UG1-o?t=30m29s