From [HERE] Distributed Denial of Secrets released a massive 600-hour leak of Dallas Police and Atlanta Police Department helicopter footage, raising more questions about the so-called rights of its citizens.

Distributed Denial of Secrets posted over 1.8 terabytes of police helicopter footage on the group’s website last Friday. The site states, “The extensive footage reveals the capabilities of the "military-grade" technology behind police surveillance. It also highlights the voyeurism inherent in surveillance and how it often focuses on protected first amendment activities and people who have no idea they're being watched and who've done nothing to justify the intrusion of surveillance.”

The majority of the footage appears to be from DPD and the rest from the Georgia State Patrol. Large sections of the video shows surveillance of Dallas neighborhoods, with highly detailed and zoomed-in images of people in their front yards, standing by their cars and sunbathing. The subjects appear to have no indication they are under surveillance.

Another section of video shows what appears to be large crowds at the State Fair of Texas, with the helicopter camera switching in and out of infrared imaging as it pans the crowd.

Video footage from Atlanta show highly detailed thermal imaging of the exterior of Mercedes Benz Stadium during a football game before the camera zooms in on individuals walking outside the stadium.

Footage from the Dallas leak shows cameras following individuals at extremely close range as they go about their daily lives. In one sequence, the camera zeroes in on two men fixing a flat tire on Interstate 30. The text of their bumper stickers is legible. In another, police focus on a man and a woman talking outside an AutoZone. The brand of sandal the man is wearing (Adidas slip-ons) is clearly visible in the footage.

Other sequences show police aiming military-grade thermal imaging at apartment complexes, private residences and groups of people in their backyards.The software mapping out addresses, streets and building names in the footage is the same package used by the U.S. Army Special Forces. The company that built it, called Aero Computers, also has law enforcement clients in 31 other states. The Texas Department of Public Safety uses the package as well.

The capabilities of the Dallas and Atlanta programs are unknown because journalists seem scared to ask. However, beyond mere 1st Amendment rights if the military grade systems are retained over time it would provide authorities with an encyclopedic record of everyone’s movements over an extended period of time; rendering the 4th Amendment rights of all City occupants non-existent.

In July 2021 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Baltimore’s use of aerial surveillance that could track the movements of the entire city violated the Fourth Amendment right’s of the city’s mostly Black residents. The aerial surveillance program continuously captured an estimated 12 hours of day time coverage of 90 percent of the city each day for a six-month pilot period. The police also could enhance the process by integrating BPD systems—like its CitiWatch camera network, license plate readers, and gunshot detectors—into its “iView software,” “mak[ing] all the systems work together.”

The AIR program’s detailed data collection and 45-day retention period gave BPD the ability to chronicle all the people’s public movements in a “detailed, encyclopedic” record, akin to “attaching an ankle monitor to every person in the city.”

That ability to deduce an individual’s movements over time violated Baltimore residents’ reasonable expectation of privacy. In making that determination, the court underscored the importance of considering not only the raw data that was gathered but also “what that data could reveal.” Contrary to the BPD’s claims that the aerial surveillance data was anonymous, the court pointed to studies that demonstrated the ease with which people could be identified by just a few points of their location history because of the unique and habitual way we all move. Moreover, the court stated that when this data was combined with Baltimore’s wide array of existing surveillance tools, deducing an individual’s identity became even simpler.

The court explained that a detailed log of everyones movements constituted essentially a “general search” violative of basic 4th Amendment principles. The court explained that “allowing the police to wield this power unchecked is anathema to the values enshrined in our Fourth Amendment.” The court stated,

The AIR program is like a 21st century general search, enabling the police to collect all movements, both innocent and suspected, without any burden to “articulate an adequate reason to search for specific items related to specific crimes.” Because that collection enables Defendants to deduce information from the whole of individuals’ movements, this case is not “far from Carpenter”; indeed, it is controlled by it.

The dependent media has mindlessly focused on how the hackers obtained the material.

Emma Best, a journalist and co-founder of DDoSecrets, said the group is unaware of the identity of the leak source and that the video was stored by the two agencies on unsecured cloud infrastructure.

“In some of the videos, they use infrared tech to look at people inside buildings with thinner walls,” she tweeted. “The video provides no justifying context.”

DPD declined to comment on the leak Sunday afternoon, punting on questions regarding the department’s data security and helicopter video retention policies until business hours on Monday.

The leak comes three months after Dallas County prosecutors admitted that DPD lost 22 terabytes of case data during a data migration in the spring, with only 14 terabytes being recoverable. City officials have faced intense criticism of the protocols in place that allowed a data loss of this size, as well as the delay in disclosure of the deletion to the public.