Aerial Surveillance Is Astonishingly Legal

mood · Aug 3, 2019

Aerial Surveillance Is Astonishingly Legal
August 3, 2019
https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...ry-style-surveillance-air-often-legal/595063/

Say you’re on a commercial flight and you pass over a city. You pull out your phone and take a picture. Much of the area that you have photographed is private property, but have you violated anybody’s privacy? You’d probably say no, and you’d be right.
But what if, instead of your phone, you use a professional camera equipped with a telescopic lens that’s strong enough to make out individual people in their backyards? [...] no different from the first example.

Even the most secretive organizations in the U.S. government are not necessarily safe from aerial observation. [...] As it turned out, the helicopter was being operated by a film crew working on—believe it or not—Enemy of the State. It was taking a series of establishing shots of the agency’s sleek glass complex.

[...] The officials protested the idea, but there was nothing they could do, legally speaking, to stand in the way.
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When it comes to law enforcement, police are likewise free to use aerial surveillance without a warrant or special permission.
The only caveat to police aerial-surveillance activities is that they must employ publicly accessible technology, a term that has been defined, somewhat vaguely, in a small number of court cases
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mirimir · Aug 3, 2019

So is the US military. Because there's a surveillance exception for the Posse Comitatus Act.

See "Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US" at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveillance-midwest

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Aerial Surveillance Is Astonishingly Legal

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Aerial Surveillance Is Astonishingly Legal

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mirimir Registered Member

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