BALTIMORE — Baltimore police released data Friday showing that a surveillance plane secretly flew over the city roughly 100 times, taking more than 1 million snapshots of the streets below.
Police held a news conference where they released logs tracking flights of the Persistent Surveillance Systems plane; PSS is promoting the aerial technology as cutting-edge crime-fighting.
The logs show the plane operated about 314 hours over eight months.
The program began in January and was initially secret from Baltimore’s elected officials. Now that it’s public, police say the plane will fly again as a terrorism prevention tool when Fleet Week gets underway Monday, as well as during the Baltimore Marathon on Oct. 15.
The logs show that the plane made flights ranging between one and five hours long in January, February, June, July and August. The flights stopped Aug. 7, shortly before the program’s existence was reported by Bloomberg Businessweek.
The program drew harsh criticism from Baltimore residents, activists and civil liberties groups, who said it violates the privacy rights of an entire city’s people. The city council is planning a hearing on the matter; the ACLU and some state lawmakers are considering legislation to limit the kinds of surveillance police can use, and mandate public discussion beforehand.
This is not the first time Baltimore has served as a testing ground for surveillance technology. Cell site simulators, also known as Stingray devices, were deployed in the city for years without search warrants to track the movements of suspects. The technology was kept secret between the FBI and the police department. The Supreme Court recently ruled that warrantless Stingray use is unconstitutional.
At the news conference, Commissioner Kevin Davis defended the PSS trial as promising a positive change in policing. Supporters say it could enable precision law enforcement surveillance.
“We have a real opportunity to police smarter,” Davis said. “The old days of looking at a spike in violence, and marching orders to stop everyone that moves in hoping of identifying a suspect or a witness — we have to move away from that type of policing. I just believe that taking advantage of this technology opportunity was a prudent thing to do.”
