Investigative report on police dronesfrom @wired

Transcript

You were not supposed to see this. The only reason you are is because cops in San Francisco live streamed highly sensitive surveillance drone footage on the open web. Security researchers Sam Curry and Mike Robert found that a link on the drone platform Skydio publicly revealed real time San Francisco Police drone footage from both color and thermal cameras recorded by five Skydio quadcopters as they flew around the city. The researchers reported the leak to Skydio, but by the time the link was taken down, Curry and Robert had already recorded and shared with Wired around three hours of video from two days of exposed drone flights. The footage shows, for instance, police surrounding and tackling a man hiding in a parking lot viewed from multiple quadcopters, police jumping off scooters to detain another man, and a view of police inside an apartment in a high rise building. None of this should have ever been exposed, but it now provides a revealing glimpse of modern drone based police surveillance. In one questionable incident described in police records as a prowler investigation, a drone zooms in on an oblivious young person wearing headphones on the roof of a building. In another investigation described as an alleged theft from a vehicle, a drone follows a car for ten minutes until two men get out and start innocently playing basketball. When Wired reached out to the San Francisco Police Department, it responded in a statement calling the exposed drone video stream an internal restricted link that is is for SFPD law enforcement purposes only and wrote that it had been improperly obtained and accessed by individuals without authorization. But Curry and Roberts say they didn't bypass any security or gain unauthorized access to anything. Instead, someone with access to the SFPD's Skydio instance appears to have created a link last December to five of its drones feeds with no authentication and an expiration date of one full year. The SFPD's drone policy requires pilots to minimize inadvertent recording of uninvolved people in places. But according to Wired's analysis of the videos, the drone cameras filmed hundreds of people and vehicles across just the 20 flight recordings we obtained, with dozens of faces captured in some single frames of the videos. The security researchers were struck by how, in all the videos they watched, no one ever looks up or attempts to hide from the drone, suggesting that their small size and high altitude make them virtually invisible. In other words, you would never even know that you were being watched, unless, of course, you find a link to a video stream of that police surveillance available on the public Internet. For more on the SFPD's drone video leak, read our full story at wired.com.