ACLU Sues Baltimore Police Department Over Aerial Surveillance Program
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for SoyCow8192:
ACLU Sues Baltimore Police Department Over Aerial Surveillance Program:
On the first day of April, Baltimore officials approved a deal between the Baltimore Police Department [(BPD)] and Ohio-based company Persistent Surveillance Systems to use drones equipped with high-resolution cameras in order to spy on the city's residents through around-the-clock surveillance despite formal objections filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Defense Fund.
[...] On Thursday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the BPD seeking to block the program, saying that it will put everyone in the city "under constant aerial surveillance," WBALTV 11 reports.
"It is equivalent to having a police officer follow us, each of us, outside all the time in case we might commit a crime," said David Rocah, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland. "If that happened in real life, everyone would clearly understand the privacy and First Amendment implications, and it would never be tolerated."
[...] The spy planes can cover at least 90% of Baltimore's land area at any given moment. The ACLU fears that the technology can be combined with the BPD's ground cameras and license plate readers and that all of that data can be tied together and used to provide detailed information as to the identities and activities of the city's citizens.
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