The fascinating history and unnerving future of high-tech
aerial surveillance, from its secret military origins to its growing
use on American citizens
Eyes in the Sky is the authoritative account of how the
Pentagon secretly developed a godlike surveillance system for
monitoring America's enemies overseas, and how it is now being used
to watch us in our own backyards. Whereas a regular aerial camera can
only capture a small patch of ground at any given time, this
system—and its most powerful iteration, Gorgon Stare—allow
operators to track thousands of moving targets at once, both forwards
and backwards in time, across whole city-sized areas. When fused with
big-data analysis techniques, this network can be used to watch
everything simultaneously, and perhaps even predict attacks before
they happen.
In battle, Gorgon
Stare and other systems like it have saved countless lives, but when
this technology is deployed over American cities—as it already has
been, extensively and largely in secret—it has the potential to
become the most nightmarishly powerful visual surveillance system
ever built. While it may well solve serious crimes and even help ease
the traffic along your morning commute, it could also enable far more
sinister and dangerous intrusions into our lives. This is
closed-circuit television on steroids. Facebook in the heavens.
Drawing on extensive
access within the Pentagon and in the companies and government labs
that developed these devices, Eyes in the Sky reveals how a
top-secret team of mad scientists brought Gorgon Stare into
existence, how it has come to pose an unprecedented threat to our
privacy and freedom, and how we might still capitalize on its great
promise while avoiding its many perils.