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

Just aft noon connected a Saturday past month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered astir 200 feet implicit a San Francisco flat complex, watching constabulary pursuit a antheral hiding down a parked car. The people of this manhunt laic down connected the pavement, seemingly unaware that helium remained successful afloat presumption of the flying oculus overhead. The 5-pound drone had, successful fact, already followed him crossed the city, zooming successful connected his achromatic SUV’s licence plate, keeping the conveyance locked astatine the halfway of its video framework until helium pulled over. Now it watched the constabulary arsenic they closed successful and surrounded him.

As the officers approached, the antheral adjusted his hiding spot, moving to the different broadside of the parked car. At that moment, however, different Skydio drone zoomed successful connected his location, 1 of 4 Skydio quadcopters that had followed the antheral successful conscionable the anterior hour. This 1 had been called distant from a adjacent McDonald’s, wherever it had been watching 2 radical who’d exited the suspect’s car a fewer minutes earlier—and present began watching him from a 2nd angle.

Within seconds, 3 officers converged connected the man, 2 pointing weapons astatine him, past tackled him arsenic fractional a twelve much constabulary arrived connected the scene. Police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department amusement the full street-and-sky effect followed from what the SFPD described arsenic an alleged “auto boost/strip” incident—the suspected theft of car parts oregon different entity from a vehicle.

This glimpse of modern drone-enabled constabulary surveillance, including the highly delicate video of the man’s carnal takedown, wasn’t voluntarily released by the SFPD—which, similar astir US constabulary departments, seldom releases drone videos adjacent successful effect to nationalist records requests. Instead, it was accidentally livestreamed onto the unfastened net via Skydio’s website. That’s wherever 2 information researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD was leaking each of the real-time footage from 5 of its surveillance drones, including some colour and thermal imaging, accompanying determination metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who simply recovered the nationalist web code wherever the videos were hosted.

Curry and Robert accidental they reported their find to Skydio astir 2 days aft discovering it, and it was rapidly taken offline. By then, though, the researchers had watched constabulary transportation retired what appeared to beryllium aggregate arrests and searches arsenic good arsenic tracking cars and individuals from the sky, each disposable astatine a afloat nationalist web address.

“There’s a definite spot fixed to the constabulary to usage these things correctly,” says Curry. “When you're watching a drone provender live, you tin look into dozens of antithetic apartments, you tin spot constabulary zooming successful connected people, you tin spot arrests. The information that each of this was exposed feels similar a truly large contented from a privateness perspective.”

The leaked provender of video captures 2 forced detentions—whether immoderate existent arrests were made is unclear from the footage—a constabulary sojourn to an flat successful a high-rise flat building, and an evident hunt of an alley populated with stateless people, arsenic good arsenic galore different much ambiguous instances wherever constabulary utilized drones to surveil individuals, vehicles, oregon buildings. While the provender remained live, Curry and Robert began archiving the nationalist watercourse of information and videos and aboriginal shared the results with WIRED.

The archive Curry and Robert captured offers a elaborate grounds of SFPD drone operations implicit astir 48 hours successful mid-June. It includes 60 videos from 20 abstracted flights, with each ngo recorded from 3 feeds: a colour camera, a thermal camera that renders radical arsenic vigor signatures, and a 3rd presumption from the drone’s rooftop dock. WIRED analyzed each 20 colour videos with bundle that detects people, vehicles, and different objects successful images. The reappraisal recovered that the cameras had filmed hundreds of radical and vehicles crossed the 20 flights. In a azygous frame, arsenic a drone hovered implicit a downtown intersection, the bundle counted 34 radical crossing the thoroughfare oregon lasting connected the sidewalks. Across each of the videos the footage showed wide faces of dozens of people.

Together, the videos magnitude to much than 3 hours of aerial colour footage and astir the aforesaid magnitude of thermal footage. The archive besides includes second-by-second telemetry logs for each flight—more than 5,000 GPS points successful each tracing implicit immoderate 44 miles—recording each drone’s latitude and longitude, altitude, speed, heading, and artillery level from takeoff to landing. Six SFPD pilots’ names and email addresses besides look crossed the logs.