Baltimore Police Took 1 Million Surveillance Photos of City

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Baltimore Police on Friday released data showing that a surveillance plane secretly flew over the city roughly 100 times, taking more than 1 million snapshots of the streets below. Police held a news conference where they released logs tracking flights of the plane owned and operated by Persistent Surveillance Systems, which is promoting the aerial technology as a cutting-edge crime-fighting tool. The logs show the plane spent about 314 hours over eight months creating the chronological visual record. The program began in January and was not initially disclosed to Baltimore's mayor, city council or other elected officials. Now that it's public, police say the plane will fly over the city again as a terrorism prevention tool when Fleet Week gets underway on Monday, as well as during the Baltimore Marathon on Oct. 15. The logs show that the plane made flights ranging between one and five hours long in January and February, June, July and August. The flights stopped on Aug. 7, shortly before the program's existence was revealed in an article by Bloomberg Businessweek. "We have a real opportunity to police smarter," Commissioner Kevin Davis said. "The old days of looking at a spike in violence, and marching orders to stop everyone that moves in hoping of identifying a suspect or a witness -- we have to move away from that type of policing. I just believe that taking advantage of this technology opportunity was a prudent thing to do." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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