Ask the residents of any major American city to vote on a program of total aerial surveillance––where the cops would record footage of everything that happened within municipal borders, then store the high-resolution video on hard drives, so that they could effectively go back in time, tracing the outdoor movements of any individual––and the proposal would, at the very least, trigger furious debate.

But what if the police didn’t ask permission? What if they began recording their city’s residents from above without even bothering to inform their elected overseers?

That is what the police in Baltimore have just done.

It is illegal, in Maryland, to record a phone call without informing the person on the other end. Yet Baltimore police have been using an eye in the sky to surveil the whole city for months on end, recording hi-resolution footage and storing it on hard drives so that the movements of residents can be accessed at any time in the future.

…If proceeding in secret has no consequences for police agencies or the burgeoning private surveillance industry, we’re all likely to suffer increasingly intrusive privacy violations as technology advances. Who is to say that this isn’t already happening, in your city, given the law enforcement community’s track record? In reality, unlike in 1984, Big Brother may watch for awhile without revealing that there is a Big Brother.

The Baltimore Police Department’s Secret Program of Mass Surveillance – The Atlantic

Fucking Baltimore….