As Virus Spreads Authoritarianism Becomes More Visible. From [HERE] and [ACLU] The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to block the Baltimore Police Department from launching an aerial surveillance program.

The civil rights group argues in the case, filed on behalf of local activists in Maryland District Court, that the BPD’s mass surveillance system will persistently record the movements of virtually all of Baltimore’s 600,000 residents. According to the suit, “the BPD calls this system the “Aerial Investigation Research” program, or “AIR.”

The BPD has contracted with a company, aptly named Persistent Surveillance Systems, LLC (“PSS”), whose planes will fly over Baltimore at least 40 hours a week. Once per second, advanced wide-angle camera systems on those planes will collect images of over 90 percent of the city at a time, creating slow-frame-rate video recordings of pedestrians on sidewalks, parks, driveways, and back yards, and vehicles moving about on public streets and private lots. To Plaintiffs’ knowledge, the BPD has not yet commenced the program.

The AIR program would put into place the most wide-reaching surveillance dragnet ever employed in an American city, giving the BPD a virtual, visual time machine whose grasp no person can escape. And though the program’s objectives to reduce crime and violence are laudable, the Constitution dictates that this all-seeing and ever-present “eye in the sky” is not an available solution.”

The ACLU is seeking an injunction to the block the “Aerial Investigation Research” plan and a “declaration that the BPD’s policy and practice of persistent aerial surveillance violates their First and Fourth Amendment rights and an order requiring the BPD to destroy the information about them that it has collected in violation of their constitutional rights.“

Baltimore officials earlier this month voted to approve the rollout of the system, which was developed by the police department and a company called Persistent Surveillance Systems. Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison had expressed skepticism over the use of the planes, describing the idea as an “untested” crime-fighting strategy, before he announced the pilot program in December. Democratic Mayor Bernard C. "Jack" Young said that he has full support in the spy plane program: "I stand behind my commissioner." [MORE]

The planes, their pilots, analysts and hangar space will be funded by the nonprofit of Texas billionaires Laura and John Arnold. [MORE] Both are racist suspects. The deal also pays for grants to enable independent researchers to study whether the program has an impact on Baltimore’s violent crime rate. The city has recorded more than 300 homicides yearly for the last five years. Nevertheless, since 2018 the total number of crimes reported in the city has fallen by almost 6 percent compared to 2018, with violent crime falling by about 2.5 percent. Robbery, burglary, theft, and auto theft decreased modestly, while reported rape fell dramatically — with law enforcement documenting nearly 26 percent fewer offenses. [MORE]

The ACLU stated the new program “would be the most significant new surveillance system to be deployed in the U.S. in decades, and it would fundamentally change what it feels like to venture out in public in this country. It also violates our constitutional rights to freedom of association and privacy, and — on behalf of a group of Baltimore community activists — we are suing to stop it today.”

The technology is called wide-area aerial surveillance. It involves stationing an aircraft equipped with ultra-high-resolution cameras over a city to continuously track all visible pedestrians and vehicles within that city. Currently, the technology can cover a 32-square mile area, though better cameras are just an upgrade away. It was originally developed by the military for monitoring overseas battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan in a program called “Gorgon Stare.” Now, a company called “Persistent Surveillance Systems,” founded by a colonel who worked on that program, wants to turn this mega-powerful “eye in the sky” inward onto American cities.

Although this company has been pitching American cities for years, no police department until now has been willing to embrace this truly dystopian technology. The term “Big Brother” is bandied about a lot these days, but rarely has a technology lived up to the term so well.

It’s no coincidence, of course, that this program is being unveiled in Baltimore, a city that’s more than 60 percent African American. Black and Brown communities in the U.S. are always first in line to come under surveillance by new technologies. Baltimore in particular has a terrible history of racism and a lack of accountability for abuses by police that makes it an especially problematic place to deploy this technology. In fact, the city is currently under a federal consent decree for routinely violating people’s constitutional rights.

The ACLU represents the plaintiffs: Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a grassroots think-tank that advances the public policy interests of Black people in Baltimore, Erricka Bridgeford, co-founder of the Baltimore Ceasefire 365 project to end gun violence in the city, and Kevin James, a community organizer and hip-hop musician.

The ACLU stated

“Unfortunately, this country has a long history — continuing to the present day — of law enforcement using surveillance technology against people not because they are suspected of committing a crime, but because of their beliefs. In Baltimore, that has meant the targeting of Black Lives Matter protesters, who have been subjected to sweeping surveillance, including aerial surveillance."

If this program moves forward in Baltimore, we can expect it to quickly spread to other cities with large Black and Brown populations and histories of racial bias. But nobody in America should think that they’ll be able to evade this technology. If it moves forward in Baltimore, we can expect police departments around the country to start adopting it. Eventually, when drones are able to fly freely over our cities, making this kind of constant surveillance cheap and automatic, it wouldn’t be surprising if much of the country ends up covered.
 
Persistent Surveillance Systems is a tiny company, but if it succeeds in winning acceptance for its trial pilot program in Baltimore, there are much bigger companies waiting in the wings — companies that already advertise wide-area surveillance devices and would no doubt love for a domestic market to open up. These are companies that could put much more powerful technology overhead, including automated AI analysis, multi-spectral imaging, and night vision capabilities, not to mention much higher camera resolutions.

We are filing a lawsuit in the hopes of stopping this train. Based on ample precedent — including a landmark 2018 case that the ACLU won in the Supreme Court, Carpenter v. United States — we argue that tracking individuals in the way that this technology does is something the government cannot do without a warrant. There is no doubt, we argue, that people’s long-term physical movements, even in public places, enjoy constitutional protection.

The government certainly can’t track everyone in a city, because even with a warrant, that would violate the Constitution’s ban on “general warrants” — the kind of broad, non-individualized authorization to carry out searches that angered the Founders so much. If the Baltimore police want to track a citizen over wide areas and extended periods of time, they have to seek a warrant specific to that person. They don’t get to fill a data warehouse with records of everyone’s movements, which they can then pluck at will without asking a judge. In this respect, Baltimore’s plan echoes the National Security’s Agency’s secret seven-year collection of Americans’ telephone records — which was found to be unlawful in another ACLU lawsuit, ACLU v. Clapper.

Finally, we argue that this system violates not just the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against “unreasonable searches,” but also the First Amendment’s protection of the right of assembly. As the Supreme Court has found, overbroad searches will have an “inevitable chilling effect” on constitutionally protected activity like protests and marches.”