Military-Grade Surveillance, Coming Soon to a Police Department Near You
When super-powerful aerial surveillance fuses with on-the-ground sensors, the all-seeing eye will track you everywhere
On a searing afternoon in June 2017, Steve Suddarth, a former U.S. Air Force colonel, is radioing air traffic control for clearance to take off from Albuquerque’s airport. The flight, he tells the tower, is a civilian “photo mission.” Riding shotgun in Suddarth’s white single-prop Cessna, I am not sure I would have used such a mild term to describe our plan.
The plane is equipped with a military-grade surveillance camera, and we intend to watch wide tracts of the city in a way many of its residents probably never imagined was even possible. This camera technology is called WAMI (pronounced whammy), which stands for wide-area motion imagery. By name and by design, WAMI watches a very broad area, in some cases even a whole city. It is so powerful that when you want to look at something closely, you simply zoom in on the image itself; the camera continues to record the entire view.
Flying 12,000 feet over Albuquerque, Suddarth’s WAMI feeds a tablet in front of me on the cockpit windscreen. The footage looks like a satellite picture, but when Suddarth zooms in on the screen, it…
