Surveillance planes spotted in the sky for days after West Baltimore rioting

As Benjamin Shayne settled into his back yard to listen to the Orioles game on the radio the night of May 2nd, he noticed a small plane looping low and tight over West Baltimore (MD) -- almost exactly above where rioting had erupted several days earlier, in the aftermath of the death of a black man, Freddie Gray, in police custody. What Shayne’s online rumination helped unveil was a previously secret, multi-day campaign of overhead surveillance by city and federal authorities during a period of historic political protest and unrest. Discovery of the flights -- which involved at least two airplanes and the assistance of the FBI -- has prompted the American Civil Liberties Union to demand answers about the legal authority for the operations and the reach of the technology used. Planes armed with the latest surveillance systems can monitor larger areas than police helicopters and stay overhead longer, raising novel civil liberties issues that have so far gotten little scrutiny from courts.

Civil libertarians have particular concern about surveillance technology that can quietly gather images across dozens of city blocks -- in some cases even square miles at a time -- inevitably capturing the movements of people under no suspicion of criminal activity into a government dragnet. The ACLU plans to file information requests with federal agencies on May 6th, officials said. "We have the right to demand to know what’s happening,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group based in San Francisco (CA). “Whether the government will respond to that, that’s the question.”