Army Surveillance Blimps Launching over MD as 30,000 Cameras Watch D.C. Schools (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Tuesday, January 06, 2015, 10:59

(SNIP)

Let’s start with the Army blimps. Ostensibly, defense contractor Raytheon built the blimps for the Army as part of a defense system against cruise missiles.

Via The Intercept:
In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles.
And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns.
The project is called JLENS – or “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.” And you couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for wildly inflated defense contracts, a ponderous Pentagon bureaucracy, and the U.S. surveillance leviathan all in one.
Built by the Raytheon Company, the JLENS blimps operate as a pair. One provides omnipresent high-resolution 360-degree radar coverage up to 340 miles in any direction; the other can focus on specific threats and provide targeting information.
The blimps, which will be tethered to hover at 10,000 feet near Interstate 95, will be able to “watch” a space the size of Texas, so in this case, from Boston to North Carolina.

Which dystopic future movie was it that had blimps watching people? Blade Runner?

Who is really being protected here? Who is watching the watchers?

Meanwhile, a report out of D.C. found that eight local public school systems had not just ten or twenty or a hundred cameras at each school but some thirty thousands cameras in and around the area schools. Most are monitored from “central security hubs” within the school district, which are readily shared with law enforcement. Thirteen hundred of these cameras had just been added in the past few months, the necessity of which was blamed on school shootings.

Yet Montgomery County Public Schools Security Director Bob Hellmuth told NBC4 Washington, “Well this is something that we’d always planned, so when we started wiring our buildings, we wired them for the maximum number of cameras we could put in.”

To give you an idea for comparison, Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Massachusetts is a maximum security prison with a reputation for being one of the most secure and technologically advanced prison complexes in the world. It is literally being run by a robotic overlord overseeing a keyless computer system.

It only has 370 cameras.

Hellmuth demonstrated the school’s new technology to NBC4 by zooming in on one specific student in a high school lunch line from his security hub four miles away. A recent lockdown in the district just weeks ago involved a student thought to be carrying a weapon which turned out to be headphones.

NBC4 also reported that government agencies have been “dishing out” grant money to public schools to put in such systems.

But, as pointed out, there aren’t nearly enough people to actually watch all these cameras in real-time to stop anything … unless they plan to make them all automated and run by robot in the future.

Hey, the Army blimps will also be able to “see” the schools in D.C. from their position, so technically those kids will be watched by thousands of security cameras at school while they are being watched by military blimps in the sky.

But I guess if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide … Which I guess we’ll all just keep saying here in the “land of the free (surveilled), home of the brave (imprisoned)” even as they find a reason to put cameras in our homes in the interest of national security and our lives become one big reality TV show for the NSA (if we aren’t already there now).

FULL STORY