Leaked Police Drone Footage Exposes the Reality of Urban Surveillance

You were not supposed to see this.

The only reason you are is

because cops in San Francisco live-streamed

highly sensitive surveillance drone footage on the open web.

Security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert found

that a link on the drone platform Skydio,

publicly revealed real-time San Francisco police

drone footage from both color and thermal cameras recorded

by five Skydio quadcopters

as they flew around the city.

The researchers reported the leak to Skydio,

but by the time the link was taken down,

Curry and Robert had already recorded

and shared with Wired around three hours

of video from two days of exposed drone flights.

The footage shows, for instance, police surrounding

and tackling a man hiding in a parking lot viewed

from multiple quadcopters,

police jumping off scooters

to detain another man, and a view of police

inside an apartment in a high-rise building.

None of this should have ever been exposed,

but it now provides a revealing glimpse

of modern drone-based police surveillance.

In one questionable incident described in police records

as a prowler investigation,

a drone zooms in on an oblivious young person

wearing headphones on the roof of a building.

In another investigation described

as an alleged theft from a vehicle,

a drone follows a car

for 10 minutes until two men get out

and start innocently playing basketball.

When Wired reached out

to the San Francisco Police Department,

it responded in a statement calling the exposed

drone video stream an internal restricted link

that is for SFPD law enforcement purposes only

and wrote that it had been improperly obtained

and accessed by individuals without authorization.

But Curry and Robert say they didn't bypass any security

or gain unauthorized access to anything.

Instead, someone with access

to the SFPD Skydio instance appears

to have created a link last December to five

of its drones feeds with no authentication

and an expiration date of on full year.

The SFPD's drone policy requires pilots

to minimize inadvertent recording

of uninvolved people in places,

but according to Wired's analysis of the videos,

the drone cameras filmed hundreds of people in vehicles

across just the 20 flight recordings we obtained,

with dozens of faces captured

in some single frames of the videos.

The security researchers were struck

by how in all the videos they watched,

no one ever looks up

or attempts to hide from the drone,

suggesting that their small size

and high altitude make them virtually invisible.

In other words, you would never even know

that you were being watched unless of course you find a link

to a video stream of that police surveillance

available on the public internet.

For more on the SFPD's drone video leak,

read our full story at wired.com.