Miles-high eyes look at state in surveillance test
Parts of Wisconsin are under mass surveillance by balloons miles high in the sky, according to a new report.
The experimental balloons and hightech radar were launched by Sierra Nevada Corp., a military contractor, The Guardian reported, as part of testing commissioned by the U.S. Southern Command.
Southcom, a joint effort of U.S. military services, coordinates disaster response, intelligence and security cooperation in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
As many as 25 of the solar-powered balloons drift in the stratosphere, some 65,000 feet above the Earth. They were launched from South Dakota and will traverse parts of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin before landing in Illinois.
The Guardian’s story cited the application Sierra Nevada Corp. had to file for an FCC license to test the balloons from July to September.
The application said the technology would help deter drug trafficking and threats to homeland security.
Despite the ACLU concerns cited in the Guardian story, neither the balloon technology nor the idea of a constant government eye-in-the-sky is exactly new.
Solar-powered balloons are the key to Google’s Project Loon, exploring ways to provide internet service to vast rural areas. Instead of radar or cameras, the balloons carry special antennas that get signals from the ground and then share them with other balloons to create a giant mesh network over areas without ground-based service.
While it’s unclear just what the military radar balloons can sense, from a civil liberties concern, it’s likely it wouldn’t be more than Ross McNutt’s airplanes have been collecting over some cities for years.
McNutt runs Persistent Surveillance Systems, which offers police departments the chance to buy constant video of entire cities. His planes fly around taking very wide-angle video 24 hours a day. Then, based on police calls, PSS staff go back over the video later looking for movement at the times and places of crimes, often finding where a car — or even a pedestrian — came from or went to after the incident.
“We make the ground cameras a thousand times more effective,” he said, referring to the exploding network of private and government surveillance cameras on homes, businesses and poles.
Milwaukee police are offering residents discounted Ring doorbell cameras if they agree to let police access video.
McNutt has provided his service on a test basis in almost 60 cities, he said, most famously, or infamously, in Baltimore, where police did not initially tell the mayor or other city officials about the program.
McNutt expects the high-altitude radar now being tested would be most effective in rural areas, where detecting movement would be helpful but would be less effective than his video imagery at solving crimes in dense cities.
The Guardian report indicates that the current balloons may also carry video cameras, based on the FCC application, that might also capture 25-mile swaths of the Earth below.