The program was revealed by an article in Bloomberg that described its proprietary technology. “The system was built around an assembly of four to six commercially available industrial imaging cameras, synchronized and positioned at different angles, then attached to the bottom of a plane,” the story notes. “As the plane flew, computers stabilized the images from the cameras, stitched them together and transmitted them to the ground at a rate of one per second. This produced a searchable, constantly updating photographic map that was stored on hard drives.”

The product pitch: “Imagine Google Earth with TiVo capability.”

Back in 2014, I wrote about Ross McNutt, the man who owns the technology, and his company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, after they performed a test over Compton, California, another municipality where residents weren’t told that a private corporation would record their every move at the behest of local law enforcement. Back then, Sgt. Douglas Iketani of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department acknowledged that his agency hid the initiative to avoid community opposition. “This system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” he said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush.”

Reflecting on that willful disregard for democratic legitimacy, and the similarly presumptuous behavior of police officials in Baltimore––who were already on notice that there would be objections to shenanigans of this sort––it seems to me that the outrage so far offered by critics doesn’t go far enough. The right response, I think, is the termination of police leadership in any city that undertakes an initiative of this sort without at least alerting all of the relevant elected city officials.

Baltimore cops were able to circumvent the city’s elected leadership in part by relying on private funding. The surveillance flights over the city were bankrolled by Texas billionaires Laura and John Arnold. “John is a former Enron trader whose hedge fund, Centaurus Advisors, made billions before he retired,” Bloomberg reported. “Since then, the Arnolds have funded a variety of hot-button causes, including advocating for public pension rollbacks and charter schools. The Arnolds told McNutt that if he could find a city that would allow the company to fly for several months, they would donate the money to keep the plane in the air.”

That is worth dwelling on.

Technology has reached a point where billionaires can simply bankroll aerial surveillance that significantly and secretly compromises the privacy of hundreds of thousands.

And Baltimore police officials are dissembling about what they’ve done even now that the program has been made public. “This technology is about public safety,” a police department spokesman declared. “This isn’t surveilling or tracking anyone. It’s about catching those who choose to do harm to citizens in our city.” In fact, those criminals are caught precisely because the city is engaged in surveillance. By violating everyone’s privacy they can track a few people who’ve committed crimes.