Nothing Kept Me Up At Night the Way Gorgon Stare Did

http://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night-the-way-the-gorgon-stare-did/
Date Written:  2019-06-01
Publisher:  Longreads
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23743

An interview with an expert on drones about a new camera technology that drastically improves wide-area sureillance capabilities.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Arthur Holland Michel, founder and co-director of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone, which catalogs the growing use of drones around the world has written Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, a book of startling revelations about drone surveillance in the United States....

So what is Gorgon Stare and WAMI technology, how does it work?

Think of a traditional camera on a drone as a high powered telescope. What it's really good for is zooming in on things on the ground very closely. The downside is that you can really only watch one person or vehicle at a time. Maybe something important is happening a few blocks away or on the other side of the city. If you focus on just one target you are going to miss all the other important things that happened around it, you are going to lose all the context... What Wide Area Motion Imagery does is expand the aperture. You can watch an entire city at once and zoom in on any one part of the imagery with a decent amount of detail, while still recording everything else.