[Simulacra]

I remember reading this excellent article on Bloomberg about a guy who started a company that uses Cessna's with high-quality cameras, and they fly over an area for hours, and then use that footage to rollback crimes.

They filmed everything. There's a video if you can find it where the man shows footage they took of a city in Mexico, where a murder occurred, and how they were able to roll back time and see the murder go down in real time.

It was really fascinating… In 2016.

At the time I imagined one day we would have blimps, or long range aircraft circling all major cities 24/7 doing the same thing.

Instead of planes, they are using drones…

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur...

[adolph]

Here is a RadioLab podcast [0] about the system from company Persistent Surveillance Systems [1].

An interesting dimension to systems similar to the US military's Gorgon Stare [2] program is that they are generalized rather than specific, unlike a quad following a specific person(s).

0. https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky

1. https://www.pss-1.com/

2. https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...

[bell-cot]

Drones are cheap & reliable. Vs. blimps, balloons, and such have repeatedly proven themselves quite fragile.

[inigyou]

Quadcopters, you mean? They are cheap, and reliable enough given that they are cheap, but that's all.

[tencentshill]

Cheap while China allows them to be cheap.

[inigyou]

True, but that's true of everything. Western countries willingly forgot how to manufacture stuff.

[iamtheworstdev]

domestically we use the RQ-4 and MQ-4 and lie about it

[rationalist]

Source?

[iamtheworstdev]

look up federal agencies borrowing MQ-9s (sorry, I had the wrong drones) from the CBP for domestic operations.

[pineapplepizza6]

An unmanned plane is also called a drone.