Feds Reportedly Sent a Predator Drone to Spy on LA Protesters
gizmodo.com
The government is busting out the big guns to surveil protesters, according to trackers.

The government is busting out the big guns to surveil protesters, according to trackers.

As Trump’s shock troops invade Los Angeles, his administration is using every tool at its disposal to attack and surveil the political protests taking place in the city’s streets. That apparently includes the use of a Predator drone, which 404 Media reports was spotted by an aviation tracker as it zoomed over the city.

The outlet notes that, over the weekend, an MQ-9 Reaper flew over the political protests happening in the city. Onlookers suspected the drone’s presence based on public flight data that picked up movements of a mysterious aircraft:

One aircraft with no callsign, making it initially difficult to determine its model or which agency it belongs to, flew above the areas of the protests in Paramount and downtown Los Angeles on Sunday. The data showed this aircraft flying in distinctive hexagonal patterns, and 404 Media observed it fly afterwards to the U.S.-Mexico border.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
    391·
    7 days ago

    I mean.

    On 1 July 2014, Sierra Nevada Corporation revealed that the Gorgon Stare Increment 2 pod had achieved initial operating capability (IOC) earlier in the year.[15] While the Increment 1 system, first fielded in March 2011, could cover an area of 16 km2 (6.2 sq mi), the incorporation of the ARGUS-IS expands that coverage area to 100 km2 (39 sq mi). The system has 368 cameras capable of capturing 5 million pixels each to create an image of about 1.8 billion pixels. Video is collected at a variable frame-rate per second, with the resulting data output averaging several terabytes of video output per minute.[16]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare

    • jupiter2643@lemmy.mlEnglish
      32·
      7 days ago

      Christ. So many options… With security cameras and license plate readers and liveview trailers and ring doorbells without warrant and palantir and now drones that can just “watch an entire city” from the air and “see everything”. But who needs to decide, they’ve got it all!

      • solsangraal@lemmy.zipEnglish
        6·
        7 days ago

        don’t forget to go ahead and assume that every place you’ve gone with your phone, every text message, email, link clicked, thing you’ve bought online, or anything else involving the internet or cell towers, is stored in a DB somewhere owned by fascists. there are enough data points to cross reference that they pretty much know more about you than anyone in your life does. maybe more than you know about yourself

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
        142·
        7 days ago

        Yes and that is the only real saving grace, the capacity to record at what appears to be infinite fidelity is only really a destabilizing force until the ambitions of the surveillance apparatus exceeds the secretarial capacity to make sense of it at a geometric rate.

        Kind of like an LLM decaying into slop…