A Leak of San Francisco Police Drone Footage Exposes the New Reality of Urban Surveillance - Wired

[justaprogressive]

Just after noon on a Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered about 200 feet over a San Francisco apartment complex, watching police chase a man hiding behind a parked car. The target of this manhunt lay down on the pavement, apparently unaware that he remained in full view of the flying eye overhead. The 5-pound drone had, in fact, already followed him across the city, zooming in on his black SUV’s license plate, keeping the vehicle locked at the center of its video frame until he pulled over. Now it watched the police as they closed in and surrounded him.

As the officers approached, the man adjusted his hiding spot, moving to the other side of the parked car. At that moment, however, another Skydio drone zoomed in on his location, one of four Skydio quadcopters that had followed the man in just the prior hour. This one had been called away from a nearby McDonald’s, where it had been watching two people who’d exited the suspect’s car a few minutes earlier—and now began watching him from a second angle.

Within seconds, three officers converged on the man, two pointing weapons at him, then tackled him as half a dozen more police arrived on the scene. Police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department show the entire street-and-sky response followed from what the SFPD described as an alleged “auto boost/strip” incident—the suspected theft of car parts or another object from a vehicle.

This glimpse of modern drone-enabled police surveillance, including the highly sensitive video of the man’s physical takedown, wasn’t voluntarily released by the SFPD—which, like most US police departments, rarely releases drone videos even in response to public records requests. Instead, it was accidentally livestreamed onto the open internet via Skydio’s website. That’s where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking all of the real-time footage from five of its surveillance drones, including both color and thermal imaging, accompanying location metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who merely found the public web address where the videos were hosted.

Curry and Robert say they reported their discovery to Skydio around two days after discovering it, and it was quickly taken offline. By then, though, the researchers had watched police carry out what appeared to be multiple arrests and searches as well as tracking cars and individuals from the sky, all visible at a fully public web address.

“There’s a certain trust given to the police to use these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone feed live, you can look into dozens of different apartments, you can see police zooming in on people, you can see arrests. The fact that all of this was exposed feels like a really big issue from a privacy perspective.”

https://www.wired.com/story/sfpd-drone-video-leak-surveillance/

[Dave Bowman]

1. Not so long ago this was only happening in distopian science fiction movies and books.