Leaked San Francisco Police Drone Footage Reveals New Facts About City Surveillance

Just after noon Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter It circled about 200 meters above the San Francisco building, and looked the police chasing a man hiding behind a parked car. The man who wanted to kill him lay down on the road, apparently he didn’t know that he could see his eyes flying above him. The 5-pound drone had already followed him through the city, approaching his black license plate SUV, and keeping the vehicle locked in the middle of his video until he left. Now it watched as the police closed in and surrounded him.

When the police approached, the man changed the place he was hiding, and moved to the other side of the parked car. At that moment, however, another Skydio drone approached his residence, one of four Skydio quadcopters that had followed the man in the previous hour. This one had been called away from a nearby McDonald’s, where he watched two people who got out of the suspect’s car a few minutes earlier – and started looking at him again.

A few seconds later, three policemen arrived at the man, two pointed weapons at him, and then arrested him when the other half of the policemen arrived at the scene. Police records provided to WIRED by the San Francisco Police Department show the entire road and air response followed by what the SFPD described as an “accident/shooting incident” – a suspected theft of car parts or something in the car.

Drone footage released at the public address shows how the quadcopter swooped in on the SUV’s license plate, followed it through the street, then followed the driver out of the car and into a house. The suspect hid in the back of a car, then changed his hiding place, but he was still seen by the second drone that arrived at the scene – one of the four that followed where he was in an hour and then caught the police arresting him – all in response to what the SFPD describes as “an additional incident / stripping”, the theft of car accessories or something in the car.

Materials reviewed by WIRED

This view of modern police drones, including a critical video of the man’s takedown, was not voluntarily released by the SFPD – which, like most US police departments, does not release drone videos even in response to public requests. Instead, it was accidentally uploaded to the open web via the Skydio website. This is where two security researchers, Sam Curry and Maik Robert, discovered that the SFPD released real-time footage from its five drones, including all color and temperature data, accompanied by location metadata, and the drone pilots’ names and email addresses, to anyone who had access to the public address where the videos were.

Curry and Robert reportedly posted their findings to Skydio two days after they found them, and they were quickly taken down. By that time, the investigators had seen police conducting what appeared to be multiple arrests and searches as well as tracking vehicles and people from the sky, all visible from the public address.

“There’s a certain trust that the police are given to use these things properly,” Curry says. “If you watch the drones feeding all the time, you can look into many different buildings, you can see the police coming near people, you can see people being arrested.

The leaked video takes two people under arrest – if any arrest is not clear from the footage – to the police in a high-rise building, and investigates the whereabouts of homeless people, and many more obscure cases where the police have used drones to monitor people, cars, or buildings. While the food was still alive, Curry and Robert began collecting data and video footage and later shared the results with WIRED.

The archives captured by Curry and Robert provide a detailed account of the SFPD’s drone operation for about 48 hours in June. It includes 60 videos from 20 different trips, with each activity recorded from three feeds: a color camera, a thermal camera that makes people have heat signatures, and a third view from the roof of a drone. WIRED analyzed all 20 types of videos with software that recognizes people, cars, and other objects in images. The review found that cameras captured hundreds of people and vehicles during 20 flights. In one frame, when the drone was looking at an urban intersection, the software counted 34 people crossing the street or standing on the side of the road. In both videos he showed the beautiful faces of many people.

Together, the videos are more than three hours of atmospherics and the same amount of steamy footage. The archive also includes second-by-second logs of each flight—more than 5,000 GPS tracks over 44 miles—recording the drone’s height, altitude, speed, heading, and battery level from takeoff to landing. Six SFPD pilots’ names and email addresses also appear on the logs.