Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Occupiers adopt asymmetric tactics — deploy drones


The police may soon be watching you in your garden picking your vegetables or your bottom. As police plans for increasing unmanned aerial surveillance take shape, there is a new twist. Private citizens can now buy their own surveillance drones to watch the police.
This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department. In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police. But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and "frozen zones". This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.
Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the "occucopter". It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds.
Read the rest at The Guardian (UK)
Occupy Wall Street's 'occucopter' – who's watching whom?
by Noel Sharkey and Sarah Knuckey

Are we headed for drone wars over our cities?


3 comments:

Clonal said...

They could also use the Hyperblimp -- the inventor is a left wing progressive liberal, and most likely very supportive of OWS

googleheim said...

I would suggest checking out MIT canadian Steve Mann's photo-borg gear, theory and philosophy for borging against the police borgs :

http://www.wearcomp.org/

he has been organizing wearable computers for years and turned them against those who use cameras on us firstly

borg against the machine

Clonal said...

Also, one link away from me - If You Want To Be a Rebel, Be Kind

Quote:
The police had declared Monday, November 14th of 2011 as the day of the raid on the Occupy Oakland encampment. It was the first Occupy site to call for a general strike that shut down the fifth largest port in the country; it was also the first Occupy gathering to report a shooting and a murder, as police violence also reached new heights. With tensions mounting amidst political chaos, police escalated their violent crackdowns and the narrative of fear. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in preparation for the raid, police from around the state were called in, and uncertainty filled the air.

The night before, Pancho Ramos Stierle heard about growing tensions in the community and thought, "If police are stepping up their violence, we need to go and step up our nonviolence." So on that Monday morning at 3:30AM, Pancho and his housemate Adelaja went to the site of the Occupy Oakland raid. With an upright back and half-lotus posture, they started meditating.
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