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by rand334 3889 days ago
The FBI planes circle cities for hours and hours, equipped with Stingrays and FLIR cameras. This has no place in a free society, period. The "orwelianness" is pretty dead-on-balls fucking accurate.
1 comments

How much different is this from metro, traffic, and transportation CCTV systems that we've had for decades?
They use thermal cameras and stingrays. This is not technology that the public has access to. If traffic and CCTV cameras had thermal and cell-interception capabilities, people might be a bit more concerned. If I'm in my house, no one should be able to look inside it or intercept the signals from my phone. Do I need to thermally-insulate my house to get some fucking privacy?
Neither Thermographic nor SWIR cmeras can actually see through house walls, any internal heat source will be diffused, and bodies won't be picked up at all this isn't Hollywood.

Most modern CCTV cameras have SWIR mode for night operations.

Cell-interception is more easily achieved on a metro scale through carrier or base station based interception. In any case Stingray is a brand name for an IMSI catcher made by Harris, they sell many other IMSI catchers to local law enforcement agencies.

Miami PD for example bought their hand-held version back in 2006.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1282625-06-11-29-200...

They are quite often used in raids to pin point a specific house or an apartment.

Local police units have had this tech since the late 90's, in many places this was used in counter-drug and counter-organized crime operations, you had patrol cars with IMSI catchers that would drive through a neighborhood catching all cell-id's and matching them to known numbers of drug dealers and gang members.

So no this isn't really new.

Intent.