• Persistent Surveillance’s CEO Ross McNutt calls the system a “live version of Google Earth” complete with a rewind button.
• The company successfully tracked crimes during testing in Dayton and during missions in other cities, including Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where the system registered dozens of homicides.
• Crime would drop 20-30 percent a year in Dayton if the city used wide-area surveillance, according to McNutt.
• Unregulated mass aerial surveillance could lead to constitutional challenge, privacy advocates say.
• Wide-area surveillance first developed to catch those setting improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, Iraq wars.
• Imagery is not at a resolution high enough to allow for direct identification of people, McNutt said. Analysts look only at people associated with 911 calls, ongoing investigations.
• Purchase price for system begins at $1.5 million; it costs about $2,000 an hour to operate.
• Tentative agreement to try aerial surveillance in Dayton stalled in 2013 amid protests by public, ACLU.
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“I’m going to show you a couple of murders. They’re not graphic,” Ross McNutt tells an audience of retirees who attend the same Beavercreek church.
The visitors watch small dots on a screen move about the streets of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. In successive images taken a second apart from a small aircraft, McNutt points out a getaway car and a number of other individuals before one dot appears to go lifeless. The other dots scatter, spreading out in multiple directions.
McNutt, president and CEO of Persistent Surveillance Systems, describes what they’re seeing.
“This is the second murder in the first hour of the first full day of operation in Juarez, Mexico. We witnessed 34 murders in a few months,” he said. The sparse police report his analysts first received stated: “Man in alley shot in head. No witnesses.”
The report ignored the one witness that had been flying a continuous octagon pattern in the sky overhead for hours.
“We can tell you where they came from and where they went to, 45 minutes prior to the murder and three and a half hours after the murder,” McNutt says.
Advancements in aerial surveillance technology make it not only possible — but increasingly affordable — to deploy an eye in the sky to track the movements of suspected criminals and assemble evidence that law enforcement can use to put perpetrators away. It’s called wide-area surveillance and its roots are in the military. But privacy advocates say there are unintended consequences from using the technology in our communities — concerns they say are being ignored in the rush to embrace the latest advances. The two views collided in Dayton in 2013 when the city backed out of a deal with McNutt — “chickened out” in his words — after some citizens and the ACLU launched objections.
Surveillance technologies that track people and store data on their movements give law enforcement significant new but often unregulated powers,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Certainly if we’re going to have mass aerial surveillance, we definitely want very strong policies,” Stanley said. “We have to confront this kind of technology and whether we want to let it loose on our cities, potentially changing the nature of what it’s like to be out in public in America.”
Since 9/11 and passage of the Patriot Act that followed, the country has evolved into a surveillance state with little scrutiny over how that information is being collected and used, said James Nunez of Dayton, who was a vocal opponent of the 2013 plan for surveillance flights over his hometown.
“If you continue to put all these pieces together, you can form a picture of anybody’s life,” he said. “Who is going to be using it? Is it going to be sold? Will it be mined? We just don’t know. There just isn’t any system in place to protect our rights as citizens.”
Back in Persistent Surveillance’s Tech Town office, the church group continues following one of the suspects through the streets of Ciudad Juarez and into a house. McNutt pulls up a Google Maps view of the street and points to the screen. “An officer can knock on this door and say, ‘Sir, can I have a moment of your time?’”
Most Persistent Surveillance flights have been south of the border in Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican cities for unspecified clients. The company also has demonstrated the technology for officials in Baltimore, Md., Compton, Calif.; Philadelphia, Pa., and Dayton.
McNutt said he’s not peering into backyards, and even if he could he wouldn’t be able to tell a thing about a person. As cameras and optics incrementally evolve, he said, he’d use those technical improvements to cover a broader area, not collect greater detail.
“We believe we’ve taken tremendous steps on ensuring people’s privacy,” McNutt said. “We believe that anybody who takes a look at it in a rational way will see that we’re not invading people’s privacy, but instead providing some of the support and protection that the citizens demand.”
Americans have already given up a large degree of privacy, said McNutt, noting the vast numbers of ground-based cameras operational for decades. But wide-area surveillance would provide more benefits, he said, including a drop in crime of 20-30 percent in one year.
That, in turn, would attract development, increase property values, and raise the tax base, he said.
“I need an American city that’s willing to stand up,” McNutt said. “We’re looking for a city to take the lead to show what this technology can do and the impact it can have on crime in the community. We hope that’s Dayton.”
Watching ‘the bad guys’
Wide-area surveillance was a war-born effort to “watch the bad guys” setting improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq, said David Trexler, director of operations for Persistent Surveillance.
Trexler was a student of then-Professor McNutt at the Air Force Institute of Technology in 2004. At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base the two, along with other researchers, worked to develop a system that could spot anomalies on the ground along supply lines and quickly relay that information to troops.
The project later shifted to the Air Force Research Laboratory after the Marine Corps heard about its initial success, supplied money for further development, and told the Air Force to “get it over there as fast as you can,” Trexler said.
“When a bomb would blow up, it’s a little too late at that time,” he said. But even then, analysts could hit rewind and look for who planted or triggered the device and follow them back to a nest of bomb makers, said Trexler, who tested the array and data links above Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq.
The Persistent Surveillance system is as good as the Defense Department’s at a tenth of the cost, said McNutt, who retired from the Air Force a lieutenant colonel. Off-the shelf cameras and hardware, along with the computer coding — its “secret sauce” — begins selling at $1.5 million and could run triple that amount depending on capabilities.
Running about $2,000 an hour to operate, McNutt calls his system a bargain. At 12,000 feet, the 192-megapixel camera array covers 25 square miles: equal to about 800 Predator drones or 800 police helicopters in the air.
Analysts track only vehicles or people – who appear as a single-pixel dot – associated with a 911 call, or identified with an ongoing investigation.
“I can’t tell if it’s a man, woman or child. I can’t tell if they’re dressed. I can’t tell what color they are. I can’t tell if they are straight or gay and I don’t care,” McNutt said. “All I care is that they were at the scene of a crime and I essentially follow everyone who flees the scene of a crime backwards and forward in time to try to figure out what happened.”
In one test flight for Dayton police in 2012, analysts locked onto an address on Leo Street where a burglary was in progress. The suspect was gone when police officers arrived, but the images compiled by the eye in the sky allowed analysts to hit rewind and spot a truck at the address that appeared to be loaded with stolen goods. They followed the truck to its destination and tipped officers for an eventual arrest.
“In less than 20 minutes we solved one of the 86 percent of the burglaries that otherwise might not be solved,” McNutt said. “The average burglar does 15-20 burglaries before they get caught.”
Dayton police also apprehended a suspect in a mini-crime spree after a man leapfrogged across town, first attempting to rob a bookstore and then a Subway before the sandwich shop’s owner chased him off with a gun. The suspect swung by another store before stopping at a gas station — all tracked and recorded by McNutt’s system. Police were directed to the gas station where an in-store camera captured the man’s face. He was later arrested at his home.
‘It’s not a military drone’
Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said the proposal with Persistent Surveillance was to “further test the technology to see if it was a tool that would make sense for the community.”
He said the opposition’s claims were inaccurate and overblown. “There were some concerns raised by members of the community, some of whom had no idea what they were taking about — calling it ‘drones, these are drones and drones kill people.’ It’s assessment, it’s not a military drone.”
Biehl said the letter of commitment the police department had with the company called for 120 hours of flight time that would be timed to when crime is known to occur.
“We wanted to drive the times when the flights occurred to correspond with clearly identified crime patterns that could really help us with big stuff: either concentrated property crimes, concentrated violent crime. And we never got the opportunity to test it.”
Dayton City Commissioner Matt Joseph said it was clear a “vehement” public was against aerial surveillance, though the system could have been better explained to constituents.
“It got sort of upended before we had a lot of discussion about it,” Joseph said. “I was hoping to at least have a discussion just because I want to be able to go to my neighbors, residents and people I represent and say that we’ve looked at every possible way of cutting down on crime in the city.”
Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley said in addition to the privacy concerns, the price tag of $120,000 for such a short time in the air was, “too big of a leap for us.” The proposal was scratched by then-City Manager Tim Riordan and no commission vote was ever taken.
McNutt said it was sad irony that the same day he got turned down by Dayton, two homemade pressure-cooker bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260.
While ground-based surveillance footage played a role in identifying the Tsarnaev brothers as suspects in the Boston bombing, a three-day delay contributed to a police officer’s death and resulted in a locked-down and panicked major American city, he said.
If his system had been in use over Boston that day, McNutt said, analysts might have immediately identified the bomb planters and followed the subjects, putting police in a safer position to make an apprehension.
‘We’re not invading people’s privacy’
McNutt had wanted to use the Dayton flights to demonstrate the technology for potential buyers, both domestic law enforcement departments and overseas countries. He ramped up by training 75 analysts and said he would have hired more pilots and technicians to grow the company and local economy.
The company has provided surveillance for NASCAR events and hopes to land a contract for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil. McNutt said he has multiple proposals out now totaling $30 million. He is in talks with a Detroit-area security firm and county and city police there.
McNutt said he’d like the company to stay in Dayton “where we developed the technology.”
But Joseph isn’t optimistic the city will revisit the issue.
“I can say it isn’t going to happen in the next few months for sure and probably not in the next few years,” he said. “It would take some change in the public’s perception and what they’re comfortable accepting.”
Nunez fears innocent people could get targeted or sucked unwittingly into the system. During the debate over the proposal in 2003, Nunez watched the screen as a Dayton burglary suspect moved from point to point during a demonstration of the Persistence Surveillance system.
It didn’t make Nunez, who works downtown as a financial adviser, feel safer.
“You can see how if you cast a net out … you may be able to find a lot of people who weren’t doing anything illegal,” he said. “Now you have all of these people where he stopped. You have no idea who they were. It could have been grandma, but now they’re in the system.”
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