Eye in the Sky

SPEAKER_07: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Remember FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_02: Crack cocaine plagued the United States for more than a decade. This week on Notes from America, author Donovan Ramsey explains how the myths of crack prolonged a disastrous era and shaped millions of lives. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_03: Hey, Latif here. I am currently spelunking in the Radiolab archives. There are tons of gems in here. And I'm excited to tell you about the one we have resurfaced this week for your listening pleasure. But before I do, a quick announcement. Our very own senior producer, Simon Adler, is continuing his epic mixtape series with a live event in New York City in the green space. It is called Mixtape to the Moon, How the Cassette Changed the World. He's doing two performances the evening of June 22nd. I've already seen the show. It's great. It's so great, in fact, that I'm going to see it again. And if you're not in New York City, you can still see it. You can livestream it. Check it out at wnyc.org slash the green space. Green has an E at the end. So it's G R E E N E WNYC dot org slash the green space. OK, let's talk about the episode, shall we? I feel like sometimes when I am introducing these reruns, it's like, oh, here is a lovely little piece of candy for you. Have fun. This is not that. This is not a fun sized candy bar. This is it feels more like I'm like unsheathing a double edged sword for you to kind of marvel at and ponder over. And even though this double edged sword was produced in 2015, it is still now as sharp as ever. The story was reported by Manouche Zalmarodi, Andy Mills and Alex Goldmark. Here it is. Eye in the sky. Wait, you're listening to radio lab radio from WNYC. SPEAKER_05: I'm Robert Kralowitz. This is radio lab and I have the host of Note to Self with me. That's another WNYC podcast that comes out of here. A brilliant one and the brilliant person who does it all. Manouche Zalmarodi is with me. Hello, Robert. And I asked you to come in just because I wanted you to sort of set this up if you could. SPEAKER_10: Oh, happy to. So we did radio lab and Note to Self did a joint episode last year called Eye in the Sky. It was a disturbing story, but it's kind of like a spy thriller, actually. SPEAKER_10: Definitely a spy thriller. And it turns out a lot has happened since that episode was first put out. SPEAKER_05: Right. And there were developments which truly surprised me. And I don't want to give you any details. So just listen to what's about to happen and then don't go away at the end. Stay. OK, we'll begin. SPEAKER_13: So how did you guys find out about this? How did you get into it? SPEAKER_10: I think it was somebody was reading about it. SPEAKER_13: This is Manouche Zalmarodi. Well, it was you reading about it. SPEAKER_05: Right. And that's her producer, Alex Goldmark. SPEAKER_10: And I just said, his name is McNutt. I just want to do a show where I get to say that name at least 10 times, please. But then, like, we actually read it and it was weird and interesting and brought up lots of issues. SPEAKER_19: Technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order. SPEAKER_13: I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radiolab. So here we are at this moment in time where we are faced with these decisions. SPEAKER_05: About what we want our future to look like, be like. SPEAKER_19: There are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do. SPEAKER_13: Today we're going to look at the can and the should with our friends down the hall, Manouche Zalmarodi and Alex Goldmark. They're on a great podcast called Note to Self. They will be our guides into the world of McNutt. SPEAKER_06: Yes. My name's Ross McNutt. SPEAKER_10: So the McNutt, as I refer to him, he's an ex-military guy. SPEAKER_06: Did 20 years in the Air Force. I enjoyed it. I did a lot of good. Like combat military? He was an engineer in the military. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I mean, I think he's actually special military. SPEAKER_06: My background, I've got a PhD in rapid product development out of MIT. And what I do is I teach young people how to build new systems. SPEAKER_10: And the new system, that's the system that we want to talk about, that kind of began in 2004. Ross was teaching a course at a military college. SPEAKER_06: He was at the Air Force Institute of Technology here at Wright-Patterson and Dayton. SPEAKER_10: Says one day in 2004, the whole school gathered together for a rally. SPEAKER_06: And our commander got up in front of the whole school and said, we need to do something to help the war effort. SPEAKER_15: Terrible violence today in the Iraqi city of Basra. SPEAKER_10: So at that time in the Iraq war, before the surge, things were not going well. SPEAKER_15: Suicide bombs ripped through police buildings and city streets. SPEAKER_06: IEDs going all over the place. Constant news about IEDs going off everywhere. SPEAKER_10: Soldiers being blown up. SPEAKER_09: In one week, I got blown up three times. SPEAKER_06: And to be honest with you, in 2004, it looked like we were going to lose. SPEAKER_10: So Ross, he gets together some of his students, some of his colleagues, and they decide, you know, let's sit down and see if we can find a solution, quickly find a solution to figuring out who is planting all these roadside bombs. SPEAKER_06: Yeah. Bombs going off are pretty easy to detect in images. The problem is how do you go from a bomb going off backwards in time to be able to figure out who planted it? So somehow, you know, it just came out. And it was like you guys sitting around? SPEAKER_06: It was at a bar. We were working on the back of a napkin and drawing out different ideas and throwing them around and seeing what happens. SPEAKER_11: They were just like, hey, let's use planes. Let's try this. Let's try that. And then they hit on it. SPEAKER_06: This one stuck and we sort of drew this out on the back of an envelope. SPEAKER_10: Thinking it took a little while. I had 38 students working for me for two years. SPEAKER_06: But eventually they developed what became known as Project Angel Fire. SPEAKER_10: And here's how it worked. They take a small plane and on the belly of the plane, they hook up this array of cameras. Sort of swivel around. SPEAKER_06: It's a camera system we design and build. SPEAKER_10: Super high end. And then, the pilot... Ready. He takes off. Flies the plane high over Fallujah. SPEAKER_06: In the military, we were up at about 15 to 16,000 feet to stay out of the missile range. SPEAKER_10: Let's say I'm an Iraqi on the ground in Fallujah and I look up, what would I see? SPEAKER_06: You wouldn't see us. You wouldn't hear us or you wouldn't see us. SPEAKER_11: So you've got this plane flying just below the clouds doing an orbit over Fallujah. Circle. Circle. And then, you're flying down. SPEAKER_10: For six hours at a time. And every second... SPEAKER_11: Click. Click. Click. Click. Every second, it takes a still image of the entire city of Fallujah, 25 square miles, and then beams it down to an operator. We take a picture, process it, downlink it, process it, downlink it, every single second. SPEAKER_06: So the plane is snapping picture after picture after picture. SPEAKER_10: But here's what makes the system so powerful. The operator on the ground has, let's say, an entire day's worth of these high-res pictures of the entire city of Fallujah. And then let's say there's an explosion. SPEAKER_19: Officials say at least 20 people were killed in explosions at a market... And wounds 11 others. SPEAKER_10: First the operator would pull up the most current image of the city, zoom into the place within Fallujah where it happened, and then click, click, click in one second increments, go back in time. And see who was there, what happened. SPEAKER_11: When was the last time somebody fiddled around in that road side? In that spot. Yeah. And you're like, okay, I've gone back two hours and... Ah, it's that car. SPEAKER_10: Fast forward, click, click, click, they can now follow that car forward in time to see where it goes. SPEAKER_11: And you see that it went to a house in another neighborhood two miles away. Well, that's where you dispatch your troops to right then. SPEAKER_06: Basically, we'd be able to send either the special forces in or the Marines in and sort of take appropriate action. SPEAKER_10: Now, look, the military doesn't release statistics on how well some of its military technology works. But there are officers who will be quoted saying that yes, Project Angel Fire saved lives. But the reason why we decided to do this story is because it's not just a military thing, right? Like with a lot of these technologies, they maybe start in the military, but then they trickle down all the way down to all of us. And actually, in this case, trickle down to Dayton, Ohio. Ross Group Incorporated, you think that's it? SPEAKER_08: By his first name? Yeah, it'd be weird. Oh, you gotta go with the nut. SPEAKER_10: Producer Andy Mills and I actually went to Dayton, Ohio to visit Ross at his business. Persistent surveillance systems. There it is. SPEAKER_13: Persistent surveillance systems. Right. It feels Orwellian. SPEAKER_06: Yep. These are the lenses and the motors here basically control it. SPEAKER_10: So first we went over to his workshop where he actually works and makes the cameras. SPEAKER_06: These are more powerful than some of the best military systems. SPEAKER_10: Like we could see him actually making them and how they get attached to the bottoms of the airplane. SPEAKER_08: Oh, so many airplanes. SPEAKER_10: Then we went over to the hangar where he has all the airplanes. They're beautiful. SPEAKER_06: So overall, we've got 27 airplanes we operate. SPEAKER_10: He owns his own airport. Ready? Yeah. After you guys. Oh my god, it's big. And then he showed us their command center. And this is where you have a bunch of people sitting in front of these enormous screens. This is like your viewing room? Yeah. And this is where all the plane pictures end up. SPEAKER_10: Because Ross's basic idea in taking this technology from Fallujah to a city like Dayton, Ohio, is basically this. SPEAKER_06: The US cities have just as large a problem as we do in Afghanistan and Iraq, only it's not IEDs, it's crime. SPEAKER_21: We've had a lot of major events this year. We've had four officer involved shootings so far this year. Our homicides are up this year. So this is Dayton Police Chief Richard Beal. SPEAKER_11: B-I-E-H-L. I talked to him last summer. A couple years ago, Ross called him up and was like, look. SPEAKER_06: A city like Dayton, Ohio, we've got 28,000 crimes a year. About 10,000 part one crimes. Murder, rape, assault. 10,000 part one crimes comes out to be $480 million a year. SPEAKER_10: But McNutt is like, for about the price of a police helicopter. SPEAKER_06: We believe that we would be able to decrease crime by 30 to 40 percent. 30 percent decrease in that is $155 million a year. SPEAKER_10: The Dayton police were like, alrighty, just give it a shot. SPEAKER_21: We basically set up a test in June of 2012 for a five day flight. Fair prop. SPEAKER_21: Just see for ourselves what it was capable of doing. SPEAKER_10: They sent the plane up in the air. Started doing its thing, just like in Fallujah. And within just a few hours. SPEAKER_21: There is a call of this breaking and entering in progress with a description of a van. SPEAKER_09: It was an older white box truck, just a regular random moving truck. This is Angie Horne. SPEAKER_10: She's the one who called 911. She was just home on her lunch break. And she sees a moving van pull up in front of her neighbor's house. A guy gets out, breaks in, starts moving furniture out. So we, you know, we immediately called the police. SPEAKER_09: They got there relatively quickly from what I remember. That he had already taken off. SPEAKER_11: Now normally in a case like this, the police would be like, well, how do we follow him? We don't know where he went. But in this case, the police contact persistent surveillance systems. And ultimately they get connected to this guy. My name is Alex Blassingame. SPEAKER_14: I'm the senior analyst for the company. SPEAKER_11: Alex pulls up the image of Dayton, zooms in, clicks backwards about five minutes until he sees this little grainy white dot appear in front of her neighbor's house. SPEAKER_14: This is the vehicle here that we're wanting to track. I'm sorry, what vehicle? SPEAKER_10: I barely see anything. Right. SPEAKER_14: So the image looks real blurry, but the human brain and the human eyes are very, very evolved to pick out movement. You got to understand that from two miles up, a car looks just like a random shape. SPEAKER_10: People, they look like pixels. Alex has trained himself to pick out movement. I'm going to put a tag down on where he's at. SPEAKER_14: He places an orange circle over that random little shape and then click, click, click. SPEAKER_10: He moves forward, forward, forward. SPEAKER_14: To follow him to his real time location. SPEAKER_11: Alex follows it up some roads, finds out that it is parked in a parking lot. Six blocks away. He calls up the people in the field, goes, go over there. They get there. They see the guy, they see a truck full of stuff. They send a different cop over to pick up the witness. Witness goes, yep, that's the guy. Oh, the lady who called. So at this point, yeah, this is minutes later. SPEAKER_13: No kidding. SPEAKER_11: That could have been a murderer, right? That could have been an armed robber. It could have been a lot of things. This is so weird. SPEAKER_05: This is like having a superpower. It is. This is actually better than Batman. You can't go back for time if you're a superhero. SPEAKER_10: I just feel sad. It's like we're all just these little dots. It just seems like the antithesis of what a lot of police departments seem to be trying to do in the aftermath of Ferguson and Staten Island and other horrific things that have happened, which is getting the police on the streets, making personal connections, creating relationships. SPEAKER_06: There's nothing in this system that prevents you from having effective community policing at the same time. And oh, by the way, this may dramatically help that community relations. The reason they're putting body cams on police officers is to try to get the police officers to be more respectful because they can be seen. Well, this lets us watch all the officers in a 25 square mile area all at once. But then you can watch so many other people all at once. SPEAKER_05: Here's other things that people in Dayton do. Like Romeo and Juliet, they sometimes meet without their parents' permission in the playground and smooch. There are going to be divorce lawyers who are going to be tracking Aaron's spouses. There are going to be traffic police who are watching who goes through the red light. There are going to be realtors who are wondering how many tenants do you really have in that building. And I guess the thought might be that if the information exists that will show what my pixel was actually doing, then I'm a little less free. SPEAKER_06: There is a clear trade off between security and privacy. And in our major cities where we have tens of thousands of major crimes, you are a lot less free when you can't leave your house at night. SPEAKER_05: There's obviously a huge advantage to knowing what you know, but then there's a huge thing to knowing what you know. Advantage all by itself is sort of pregnant with funny... SPEAKER_13: You know, here's my problem with all of these privacy stories. It's like when you're talking about these technologies, the advantages are always so concrete and the trade offs always feel so abstract. I feel like there is something being lost here, but I can never quite put my finger on it. It's weird. SPEAKER_10: Oh, yeah. That weirdness that you're feeling? Yes. It's gonna get a lot weirder. We'll be right back. SPEAKER_07: Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, sometimes behave so strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, The Lab. This month, all new members will get a T-shirt that says sometimes behave so strangely. To check out the T-shirt and support the show, go to radiolab.org slash join. Radiolab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. 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SPEAKER_04: After but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? SPEAKER_17: You can almost see an equation again, I would say, led by the Times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. SPEAKER_04: Listen to On the Media from WNYC. Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_13: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And we'll continue our collaboration with Manoush Samorodi and Alex Goldmark from Note to Self. And our subject is and remains Eyes in the Sky. SPEAKER_13: And the situation when we left it is that Manoush and one of our producers, Andy Mills, had gone down to Dayton, Ohio to talk with Ross McNutt, check out his technology. And after the Dayton demo, what were you how are you feeling about things? SPEAKER_10: Well, I was feeling like, ah, you have not convinced me I do. I am not going for this. And then I saw Juarez, Mexico. And that, well, I mean, that's what made me start to think otherwise. SPEAKER_14: Juarez, especially at the time we did this, they averaged 300 murders a month and 52 kidnappings a week. SPEAKER_08: And that's about 300 murders a month. Yeah. SPEAKER_10: McNutt and the gang, they got a contract. We've been asked not to say for whom. And they went down south, set themselves up in a hotel room, got the plane up in the sky, and then whoever the client was started bringing them crime reports. SPEAKER_14: So this is kind of what you never want to see happen. But this is kind of why the system was up. SPEAKER_10: Alex pulls up on the screen this very grainy aerial shot of Juarez. This is Juarez, Mexico. It looks like any city, right? You've got like grids of streets and cars and houses. And then like over on the left of the screen, he points to this dark little square. It's a vehicle that's going down the street. SPEAKER_14: This is a female police officer. She was actually headed to work on this morning. So we'll kind of go through it here. He starts at the beginning and you see there's her house and her car is parked outside. SPEAKER_10: You see that like teeny little Pixel gets in her car. SPEAKER_14: She pulls out of her driveway. That was her home. Starts to drive to work. And then right when she leaves, if you look up here, he points to the upper left of the screen. SPEAKER_14: Several cars were parked up on the corner. As soon as she left her driveway, those cars become active. So this is a stakeout. Yeah, they were waiting for her to leave. SPEAKER_10: He's so zoomed in that you can see it's like a Tic Tac moving down the street. And then two more Tic Tacs come alongside. SPEAKER_14: Until they get right about here. He's clicking forward on the photo and you see. SPEAKER_10: Right there is a speed bump. These cars just inch closer. SPEAKER_14: So she'll kind of hesitate there, which is unfortunate. SPEAKER_10: So she's driving down the street and there's these cars following behind her. And then there's this car up ahead of her. SPEAKER_14: A vehicle that had been parked here for 15, 20, 30 minutes, all of a sudden backs out into traffic and seemingly slows them down. Almost gets in an accident right here, which gives these guys enough time to catch up. This is where they're going to pull up a cider. And then suddenly, Alex says, this is the point where here the first car pulls up and SPEAKER_10: SPEAKER_14: shoots her multiple times. She was shot in the head. Multiple times in the head right here. She's actually going to roll through the intersection. SPEAKER_10: Her car continues to go, even though she's been shot in the head. SPEAKER_14: There is a parked car behind this tree and you'll actually see this parked car move when she runs into it. And then these guys take off. SPEAKER_10: It was not fun to watch. It was upsetting. But what happens next made me really start to understand what this technology is capable of. SPEAKER_06: Ross walks in, he takes that moment, horrible moment, and then he starts to shoot back and SPEAKER_10: forth in time. SPEAKER_06: He actually takes the two cars from that murder and you see, he draws on the map, you see SPEAKER_10: that they meet up with two other cars that were involved in a different murder. Now one murder becomes two, two cars become four. And if you follow all four of these cars drawing lines as they move through the city, you find out who they meet up with. Four becomes eight, eight becomes sixteen, so on and so on. And you have all these lines crisscrossing the city. And then you see that a whole bunch of those cars are headed to one place. SPEAKER_06: This house, this house appears to be their cartel headquarters. SPEAKER_10: And that's when you start to think, well, that's how you have to take something like this down. It's not a one-shot thing like solving the crime. It's about cracking an entire system. SPEAKER_08: In fact, this is Andy here. When I was doing some research into this, I made a bunch of calls and I spoke with this one governmental source who told me that this information that Ross had just showed us, like it was one of the primary tools used to dismantle an entire cartel in Juarez. And that apparently the leader of that cartel was responsible for something like 1,500 murders. Whoa. So I got asked again, so how are you feeling at this point? SPEAKER_13: Are you happy or scared or I don't know? I felt ashamed of myself because I thought, oh, the reason why I'm so excited about SPEAKER_10: it is it's because it's in a country where I don't live and I'm an outsider and I think of it as being messed up. So it's okay for them, but it's still not okay for us. What did you think Andy? I mean, like this is where I stopped being a good journalist because I picked a side. SPEAKER_08: It feels wrong to not solve these crimes that we can solve. SPEAKER_13: What if this plane is on top of New York? Good. SPEAKER_10: God, really? For me it became- But do you remember like after 9-11 when you'd walk down the street and you'd hear the F-16 circling over the city? And I just remember the feeling in my stomach was like nausea. Like I felt sick. It felt gross. It felt like we had no autonomy over ourselves. And at that point I was scared enough that I could live with it. But right now I don't feel that way. And look, it's a very privileged position to be able to say that we shouldn't have it. I get that. SPEAKER_08: I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like I became a convert because somebody got kidnapped today. And if we had an eye in the sky, we might be able to get the kid back in a few minutes, hours compared to like, you see the stats on Amber Alerts? They're not good. Yeah, but what we're talking about is like, and I'm not saying that I'm like anti-McNutt SPEAKER_10: at all, but what I'm saying is like, it's very easy to paint it as we're going to get bad guys. And I just don't think it's that simple. The McNutt and Co, they seem like decent people. They have set limitations for themselves. They have said they will not use photography that could get any closer. They've made a moral choice with that. How do we know other people will make the same moral choice? You're saying that even though this thing might solve a ton of crimes, might save lives, SPEAKER_08: it's still not worth the risk because it just asks a level of trust in government that we shouldn't give. Is that what you're saying? SPEAKER_10: For now, yes. SPEAKER_05: So back to Dayton, what happened in Dayton? Well, I was pretty impressed. SPEAKER_21: I was pretty impressed. SPEAKER_10: After that five day demo, the police chief, Richard Beale, I recommended that we enter SPEAKER_21: into a contract with Persistent Availability Systems. SPEAKER_10: And so they took it to the city commission. Hi, this is Kerry Gray. Oh, hey Kerry, it's Mnuchin, New York. And according to Kerry Gray, Director of the City Commission Office for the City of Dayton, SPEAKER_20: Ohio, the committee saw the presentation and they liked it. SPEAKER_20: The city commission was interested in the presentation. SPEAKER_10: But they decided that before they go forward, they should have a public forum so they could just sort of hear from the people. SPEAKER_20: There was about 75 or so people there. SPEAKER_10: And he says that the people of Dayton, like much like the people of Radiolab and Note to Self, were very divided. SPEAKER_20: A quarter of the people were supportive of this technology and they were frustrated with the amount of crime. Their belief was, I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't care what people see me doing. We want this implemented and we want it implemented very broadly. So a quarter of them were like, you know, bring it on. SPEAKER_10: They were basically in the Andy camp. But then there was another group, slightly smaller, but not by much. SPEAKER_20: Maybe 15 percent. SPEAKER_10: That was the Robert Manouche camp who believed that this was a grotesque invasion of privacy. SPEAKER_20: And some of the people spoke in very impassioned terms. So yeah, I think calling it grotesque invasion of privacy would pretty much reflect the way this group was feeling. SPEAKER_06: This group too. SPEAKER_20: And that there was no way that you could trust government with this volume of information and this breadth of information. SPEAKER_10: So you had your pros and your cons, the rest of the people, like the majority, SPEAKER_20: Maybe had some feelings one way or another, but just didn't have enough information. And so they came and kind of asked questions. SPEAKER_10: Like how long will persistent surveillance systems keep the images? 90 days. How far can they zoom in? Can they see my face? No. So they had a lot of questions, which Kerry seems to think that they could have answered. They could have gotten everybody on board. But in the end, even though the room was basically divided into three parts, the naysayers were so loud and so impassioned that they sort of defined the conversation. SPEAKER_20: As we do. So we took that lesson to understand that there was going to be some significant education that was going to be needed and some significant hurdles that were going to have to be crossed before that we were able to do a broad-based implementation. And based on the amount of time that was going to have to be spent, we decided there were other more immediate techniques that could be used that could be invested in. And we took the money that could have been spent on this and spend it on some other activities. SPEAKER_13: It seems like what you're saying is that like, it was just going to be too hard to get people over the hurdle. So like, eh, it's not worth it. SPEAKER_20: Yeah. I think that's probably, probably accurate. SPEAKER_10: So the plane is off the table, so to speak. SPEAKER_20: It's off the table for right now. But that doesn't mean that it's never coming back on the table. SPEAKER_10: Which I think is fair to say is frustrating to him. SPEAKER_06: Right now we've got about $150 million with a proposal sitting out there for a large number of cities. Baltimore, Philadelphia, we've been to Moscow, we've been to London. That we're waiting for them to make decisions on. We've done Compton, then to Rome. So Compton's like maybe. SPEAKER_08: Juarez is like maybe. Dayton is like maybe. There's a whole lot of maybes out there. SPEAKER_10: And what McNutt and his team are doing now, and this is actually what they were doing when we went to visit them, they're analyzing... SPEAKER_08: What we're doing here in Dayton is we are looking at a turnpike or something? SPEAKER_10: Yeah, traffic in New Jersey. They're studying traffic problems. SPEAKER_14: We look at congested areas, which are typically, especially in that part of the country, exits and on-ramps, any kind of junction in a highway. No, sometimes you just want to scream. SPEAKER_05: Since we did that story, things have happened, Manoush. SPEAKER_10: Indeed they have. SPEAKER_05: And so I've invited you back here to fill us in on further developments of which there have been gigantic ones very recently. SPEAKER_10: Yes. And McNutt says not just since we aired that episode, but because we aired that episode. What do you mean? Well, after this episode first went out, it turns out that there were a couple very wealthy philanthropists listening to Radiolab and they picked up the phone, they called him and they said, we would like to be the people that bankroll you giving us a try in an American city somewhere. SPEAKER_05: So they just said, we'll write you a check. If you can land the city, we'll give you the money? Pretty much. Wait a second, who are these people? SPEAKER_10: They are Laura and John Arnold. They're young, they're in their early forties, they're in Texas. And by the time that they contacted McNutt, he had already done as we said, he'd already done a very extensive look at cities across the nation, looking for the one that had the biggest crime issue. And as he puts it, the strongest political leadership, somebody who would be willing to put up with the firestorm that would inevitably ensue. Baltimore fit the bill. It had a mayor who said she was very tough on crime. Wings were actually up in Baltimore by 72% last year. So he went back to Baltimore and said, if I can get the money for this, are you game? And they were like, sure. SPEAKER_05: So the rich folks were willing to give money to the mayor of Baltimore to put a plane in the sky to take pictures of Baltimore for a discrete period? SPEAKER_10: No, not quite. So it didn't go to the government or any elected officials. Nobody needed to sign off on this in the city of Baltimore other than the police commissioner, which is why he was able to do it without telling any of the city council members or the mayor or the second. So Baltimore's police department without telling the mayor or the city council or anybody decides SPEAKER_05: to contract with this fellow supported by two people in Texas to put a plane in the sky to gaze down at Baltimore and everyone in Baltimore. And they just don't mention this to the mayor. Did McNutt move to Baltimore and do this? SPEAKER_10: Oh yeah. He moved to Baltimore and they set up across the street from the police station and had about a dozen analysts sitting there for two months looking at everything that was going on in Baltimore. SPEAKER_05: So they did see some stuff during this period? Like, give me an example of something bad that happened that they saw. So here's one that we know about, which is that there was an elderly brother and sister. SPEAKER_10: The woman is 90 years old. The brother is 82 and they were near this bus stop and they actually got in the line of fire. They got gunned down by a shooter. And so they end up tracking a couple cars. But then later they think, the police say, actually we think he got away on foot. I think it was a witness on the ground who said that they thought that he had left on foot. And so rewind and they see a dot scrambling to get away from the scene. It goes down the street. It passes a subway sandwich shop. It goes between these two houses, stops at a car that's parked, and then it ends up at – they later discover the home of a woman. And turns out her boyfriend is somebody who has a long criminal record. And so there are over 700 CCTV cameras on the streets in Baltimore. And so the idea is that it's sort of a support mechanism, right? Like they get the high level, then it goes to the street. Then you've got the officers on the ground. So if the shooter shoots and then gets into a car and goes down Elm Street, you have cameras SPEAKER_05: down on Elm Street and you can see maybe the car and then the driver's license and maybe even capture the face. Exactly. And did they eventually arrest this person? So he crossed state lines and the feds picked him up. SPEAKER_05: Okay. So they've made the arrests. They go into court and they say to the judge, okay, we obtain information about this suspect in part through a spy airplane. Does the stuff that they gathered during this few months, is that now going before judges and becoming evidence in arrests and in prosecutions? SPEAKER_10: Well, not yet. We talked to the state's attorney's office. They got a briefing about a month ago from the police about what McNutt had been up to. And they also told us that there are five open and pending cases where this surveillance technology was used. Police are using it. And they say, this is the state's attorney's office, that they're looking forward to learning more about what McNutt actually does and that they are trying to determine whether in fact all those pictures could be used in some way at trial. But they're not ready to say, yes, this absolutely will pass legal muster in a trial. SPEAKER_05: God, this is, uh, the other objection that I guess I was thinking about was that the defense, the people, as a matter of justice, as a matter of the fourth amendment, well, you know this is going to come up at some point. Then the defense lawyers would say, wait a second. This evidence against my client was obtained without not only his or her permission, but without anybody's permission. And the entire town is now in effect searchable during on sunny days. And did the founding fathers want that to happen? To be honest, the Supreme Court hasn't seen a ton of these mass surveillance cases, but SPEAKER_10: actually Robert, I mean, I happen to have the fourth amendment here and I want to read it to you. SPEAKER_05: It says you can't, the searches and seizures are prohibited. SPEAKER_10: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. SPEAKER_05: So by that token, it'd say people to be searched, everyone in Baltimore, places to be looked at, every place in Baltimore, oaths to be obtained ahead of time, blanket. That's a pretty radical thing. SPEAKER_10: Yeah. And when you put it like that, no wonder there's very likely to be an inevitable, big legal public debate over whether this is the answer to Baltimore's crime problem. SPEAKER_03: An important update that I should tell you, just as Minouche and Robert predicted, that Baltimore experiment led to a big lawsuit that went to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. And in 2021, that court determined that this program indeed did violate the fourth amendment and was unconstitutional. So that means this program, everything you heard about, it is not happening anywhere currently in the US so far as we know. That said, it's hard to imagine technology like this will go back neatly, quietly, tidily back into the box. SPEAKER_05: I'm Robert Krolwich. SPEAKER_10: And I'm Minouche Samorodi from Note to Self. You can go to radiolab.org for more information about the McNutt. Special thanks to Alex Goldmark, also to Dan Tucker and George Sholes. By the way, the piece that we just listened to was produced by Andy Mills. SPEAKER_05: And thanks, of course, for listening. SPEAKER_12: My name is Miss O'Hare. I live on Van Avill in Dayton. I'm here to register my concern regarding the airborne surveillance that was discussed earlier. SPEAKER_05: A great eye, lidless, breathed in flames. Somebody's watching me and that's just the way it is. SPEAKER_17: Do military contractors watch over the globe? SPEAKER_01: I'd also like to register my concern with the so-called surveillance program. This was the stuff of science fiction when Orwell wrote 1984. What policies does Dayton have in place to prevent using the data in a racially biased SPEAKER_00: way? SPEAKER_18: Who closely Molly Webster, with help from Sachi-Kita Jimomoki. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Finn calling from Storrs, Connecticut. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming SPEAKER_15: is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_16: Radiolab is supported by IBM. AI has the power to generate solutions, but if it's using unverified data, it could generate problems. Your business doesn't just need AI. It needs the right AI for your business. Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by tailoring AI to your needs. When you Watson X your business, you can train, tune, and deploy AI all with your trusted data. Let's create the right AI for your business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash watsonx. IBM. Let's create.