Nearly 2 Terabytes of Police Helicopter Video Stolen, Leaked

A huge amount of police helicopter footage allegedly leaked from police departments in Texas and Georgia on a website on November 5, reportedly exposing about 1.8 terabytes worth of video footage, leading to questions about police surveillance, online security in law enforcement, and civilian privacy.

How Did It Happen?

The police helicopter footage was posted to a website owned by data transparency activist collective, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) on Friday. However, the identity of the source remains unknown as DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the group doesn’t know who shared the data.

What is DDoSecrets?

DDoSecrets was founded in 2018 as a non-profit whistleblower site for news leaks, bringing information powerful organizations want to keep hidden into the light. It was founded by journalists and transparency advocates and became popularly known after its June 2020 publication of a large collection of internal police documents and law enforcement data stolen by a hacker associated with Anonymous.

Data from the June 2020 incident, also known as BlueLeaks, included emails, video, audio files, and intelligence documents from more than 200 states, local, and federal agencies around the US.

Leaks from the DDoSecrets site, which currently hosts dozens of terabytes of data, have contributed to multiple government investigations.

How is the Police Handling This?

The vast majority of the leaked footage appears to have come from the Dallas Police Department while a smaller subset of the data leak appears to come from the greater Atlanta area.

In response to the evidence of the leak, Dallas Police Department public information officer Brian Martinez confirmed that the screenshots from the video footage were actually from the department helicopter. He however did not provide any more information on the department’s data storage, safety, and retention practices. On the other hand, the Atlanta Police Department declined that the footage was from its jurisdiction.

What is Aerial Surveillance Privacy Laws?

Aerial surveillance by aircraft and satellite has raised a number of privacy issues and highlights the need to balance the conflicting interests of the individual's legitimate desire for privacy against the government's legitimate law enforcement needs.

Privacy advocates have raised points relating to the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance and concerns about the methods used to safeguard this data, especially since police helicopters have gotten more effective with better equipment and technology at capturing everything including individuals standing in their residences. A leak of this magnitude reveals the risk of collecting and retaining sensitive footage that could be breached.

Individual privacy interests are protected against government intrusion by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees,

“the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable search and seizure.”

This amendment requires the government to obtain a search warrant from a court, and provide probable cause to believe that sought-after evidence is located at the place to be searched before conducting a search.

However, it is important to note that not all searches are subject to the Fourth Amendment protections, and their protections are not absolute. There have been incidences where courts have upheld surveillance of private property conducted without warrants from public areas which have a view of private properties.