Leak of San Francisco police drone footage exposes new reality of urban surveillance

Wired: The archive Curry and Robert captured offers a detailed record of SFPD drone operations over about 48 hours in mid-June. It includes 60 videos from 20 separate flights, with each mission recorded from three feeds: a color camera, a thermal camera that renders people as heat signatures, and a third view from the drone’s rooftop dock. WIRED analyzed all 20 color videos with software that detects people, vehicles, and other objects in images. The review found that the cameras had filmed hundreds of people and vehicles across the 20 flights. In a single frame, as a drone hovered over a downtown intersection, the software counted 34 people crossing the street or standing on the sidewalks. Across all of the videos the footage showed clear faces of dozens of people…