Source: All Activities Monitored | The New Atlantis, by Jon Askonas
RE: Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All,
by Arthur Holland Michel
How military drone technology is quietly creeping into policing, business, and everyday life
The main theme is straightforward: Wide-area persistent surveillance, combined with machine learning and massive storage, is a novel technology that threatens civil liberties, even while it offers a number of new capabilities for serving the common good. But another theme runs obliquely through the book: What capacity do we, as individuals or as a society, have to shape — or prevent — a dangerous technological development?
Gorgon Stare was first developed to disrupt attacks in Iraq by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which had become the main cause of death among U.S.-led coalition forces. … Like so many other technologies created for war, this type of surveillance has come home, and early adopters have found many inventive uses. Security companies have used it to protect events like NASCAR races — in one case, the surveillance system allowed a security team to quickly track back a hostile fan to his trailer to eject him from the event. The Forest Service deploys wide-area surveillance to monitor potential forest fire zones. And of course, a number of law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to local police departments, have experimented successfully, if controversially, with using the technology to fight crime.
Michel’s story thus displays the ethical problem of technological development in high relief. A small group of engineers came together to build a powerful weapon to meet the needs of war. In so doing, they have shifted, for everyone, the balance of power between citizen and state, between individual and corporation, and have eroded to the point of extinction what little remained of the natural rights of privacy, all around the world.