The Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) is scrapping plans to test persistent aerial surveillance technology following criticism from privacy advocates. This kind of technology has prompted privacy concerns in others cities, with Baltimore being perhaps the most notable. One of the best-known aerial surveillance companies allows users to keep a roughly 25 square mile area under surveillance and comes with “Google Earth with TiVo” capability, The news from Miami-Dade county. while reassuring, underlines a number of issues concerning federalism, privacy, and transparency that lawmakers must tackle as aerial surveillance tools improve and proliferate.
MDPD Director Juan Perez was set to ask county commissioners to retroactively approve a grant application to the Department of Justice for the aerial surveillance testing. The fact that MDPD was seeking federal money for the surveillance equipment reminds us that federal involvement in state and local policing should be strictly limited.
The aptly-named Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), the Ohio-based company that made the sensor system deployed in Baltimore, uses technology originally designed for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military equipment has an unfortunate tendency to make its way from foreign battlefields into the hands of domestic law enforcement, as my colleagues have been outlining for years. This is a trend that ought to be strongly resisted.
It’s not clear if the Department of Justice’s Office of Justice Programs would have approved MDPD’s grant application, but given the current attorney general’s record on civil liberties, as well as the president’s own enthusiasm for aerial surveillance, we shouldn’t be surprised if similar grants are approved during the Trump administration.
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