Eyes in the Sky by Arthur Holland Michel

Author:Arthur Holland Michel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

The Creators’ View

The view from the other side of the field is, unsurprisingly, almost exactly the opposite. Everyone I’ve met who has been involved, even peripherally, with the all-seeing eye believes that they have created a force for good. Many seem to see their work—from their early efforts combating terrorist networks in Iraq and Afghanistan to their more recent campaigns to bring the technology back home—as a sort of righteous quest.

These figures approach their work with considerable zeal. While running the Community Support Program in Baltimore, McNutt and his wide-area-surveillance team investigated sexual assaults, burglaries, and traffic accidents even when nobody in the police department had instructed him to do so. Nathan Crawford, the founder of CRI, says that he will hang up his hat in what he calls “his journey” the day he is able to stop a child abduction in progress. One Persistent Surveillance Systems document claims that the company had already, as of 2012, been involved in kidnapping investigations for various private clients.

Yet the creators of WAMI also know that the line between good and evil is a blurry one. Initially, when the groups focused on IEDs, there were few ethical questions. “But it wasn’t a big leap for people to think, Well, wait a minute,” Bill Ross, the former MIT Lincoln Laboratory engineer, said, “what happens when these systems are turned on inside the US?” The question wasn’t just, “How do we plan to use this?” Ross explained, but also, “How will others use it when we’re done?” After all, the technology was inspired by a movie about the dangers of an overly powerful surveillance state. How could they be sure that the nightmare scenario of Enemy of the State wouldn’t become a reality?

Crawford said that during the brief collaboration between the two earliest WAMI programs, the engineers on the beach all agreed that if they were going to put this technology out in the world, they would have to do it, he recalled, “the right way.” In a later conversation, he added, “if it’s not truly a capability that serves the interests of society, then it shouldn’t exist.”

He paused. “If it gets turned into that, I’ll be one of the first people to speak out against it.”

Until now, most of the engineers and officials responsible for the creation and development of wide-area surveillance technology have not spoken publicly about the moral consequences of their work. One gets the sense that, after so many years of silence, they are itching to get something off their chests. With few exceptions, they raised the issue of ethics in our interviews before I did.

In one conversation, with Michael Meermans, the former congressional staffer and current Sierra Nevada executive, I asked about the civil applications of a camera like Gorgon Stare. After listing a few examples, he stopped. “Now, there will always—there will always—be the issue of privacy rights.” When I asked the ARGUS engineer Yiannis Antoniades, who was born in Greece and emigrated to America as a college student,

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