[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab, and I have the host of Note to Self with me, that's another WNYC podcast that comes out of here—a brilliant one. And the brilliant-ess person who does it all, Manoush Zomorodi, is with me.

MANOUSA ZOMORODI: Hello, Robert.

ROBERT: And I asked you to come in just because I wanted you to sort of set this up if you could.

MANOUSA ZOMORODI: Oh, happy to. So we did—Radiolab and Note to Self, did a joint episode last year called "Eye In The Sky." It was a disturbing story, but ...

ROBERT: It's kind of like a spy thriller, actually.

MANOUSA ZOMORODI: Definitely a spy thriller. And it turns out a lot has happened since that episode was first put out.

ROBERT: Right. There have been developments which truly surprised me, and I don't want to give you any details, so just listen to what's about to happen, and then don't go away at the end. Stay. Okay, we'll begin.

JAD ABUMRAD: So how did you guys find out about this? How'd you get into it?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I think it was somebody was reading about it. Was it ...

JAD: This is Manoush Zomorodi.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It was you reading about it.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Right.

ROBERT: And that's her producer Alex Goldmark.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And I just said, "His name is McNutt." And I just wanted to do a show where I get to say that name at least 10 times please. But then, like, we actually read it and it was weird and interesting and brought up lots of issues.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: Technology is remaking what is possible for individuals and for institutions and for the international order.]

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. So here we are in this moment in time where we're faced with these decisions.

ROBERT: About what we want our future to look like, be like.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Barack Obama: There are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do. That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.]

JAD: Today, we're gonna look at the "can" and the "should" with our friends down the hall, Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark. They run a great podcast called Note to Self. They will be our guides into the world of ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: McNutt.

ROSS MCNUTT: Yes. My name's Ross McNutt.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the McNutt, as I refer to him, he's an ex-military guy.

ROSS MCNUTT: Did 20 years in the Air Force. I enjoyed it. I did a lot of good.

JAD: Like combat military?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He was an engineer in the military.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Yeah, I mean I think he's actually special military.

ROSS MCNUTT: My background, I've got a PhD in rapid product development out of MIT, and what I do is I teach young people how to build new systems.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And the new system—that's the system that we want to talk about—that kind of began in 2004. Ross was teaching a course at a military college.

ROSS MCNUTT: Was at the Air Force Institute of Technology here at Wright-Patterson in Dayton.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He says one day in 2004, the whole school gathered together for a rally.

ROSS MCNUTT: And our commander got up in front of the whole school and said, "We need to do something to help the war effort."

[NEWS CLIP: Terrible violence today in the Iraqi city of Basra.]

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So at that time in the Iraq war ...

ROSS MCNUTT: Before the surge.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... things were not going well.

[NEWS CLIP: Suicide bombs ripped through police buildings and city streets.]

ROSS MCNUTT: IEDs going off all over the place.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Constant news about IEDs going off everywhere, soldiers being blown up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, soldier: In one week, I got blown up three times.]

ROSS MCNUTT: And to be honest with you, in 2004 it looked like we were gonna lose.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So Ross, he gets together some of the students, some of his colleagues, and they decide, you know, let's sit down and see if we can find a solution quickly, find a solution to figuring out who is planting all these roadside bombs.

ROSS MCNUTT: Yeah, bombs going off were pretty easy to detect in images. The problem is how do you go from a bomb going off backwards in time to be able to figure out who planted it? So somehow, you know, it just came out and it ...

ALEX GOLDMARK: Was it like, you guys sitting around?

ROSS MCNUTT: It was at a bar. We were working on the back of a napkin, and we're drawing out different ideas and throwing them around and seeing what happened.

ALEX GOLDMARK: They were just like, "Hey, let's use planes. Let's try this, let's try that."

ROSS MCNUTT: And then …

ALEX GOLDMARK: They hit on it.

ROSS MCNUTT: ... this one stuck and we sort of drew this out on the back of an envelope.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Making it took a little while.

ROSS MCNUTT: I had 38 students working for me for two years.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But eventually they developed what became known as Project Angel Fire. And here's how it worked: they'd take a small plane, and on the belly of the plane they hook up this array of cameras that sort of swivel around.

ROSS MCNUTT: It's a camera system we designed and built.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Super high end. And then the pilot takes off, flies the plane high over Fallujah.

ROSS MCNUTT: In the military, we were up at about 15 to 16,000 feet to stay out of the missile range.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Let's say I'm an Iraqi on the ground in Fallujah and I look up, what would I see?

ROSS MCNUTT: You wouldn't see us. You wouldn't hear us or you wouldn't see us.

ALEX GOLDMARK: So you've got this plane flying just below the clouds, doing an orbit over Fallujah. Circle, circle, circle.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: For six hours at a time.

ALEX GOLDMARK: And every second ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Click, click, click, click.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Every second it takes a still image of the entire city of Fallujah—25 square miles—and then beams it down to an operator.

ROSS MCNUTT: We take a picture, process it, downlink it, process it, downlink it every single second.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the plane is snapping picture after picture after picture. But here's what makes the system so powerful: the operator on the ground has, let's say, an entire day's worth of these high-res pictures of the entire city of Fallujah. And then let's say there's an explosion.

[NEWS CLIP: Officials say at least 20 people were killed in explosions at a market.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... people, and wound 11 others.]

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: First, the operator would pull up the most current image of the city, zoom into the place within Fallujah where it happened, and then click, click, click in one second increments, go back in time and see who was there, what happened.

ALEX GOLDMARK: When was the last time somebody fiddled around in that spot, yeah. And you're like, "Okay, I've gone back two hours and, ah! It's that car."

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Fast forward, click, click, click. They can now follow that car forward in time to see where it goes.

ALEX GOLDMARK: And you see that it went to a house in another neighborhood two miles away. Well, that's where you dispatch your troops to right then.

ROSS MCNUTT: Basically, we'd be able to send either the Special Forces in or the Marines in and sort of take appropriate action.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Now look, the military doesn't release statistics on how well some of its military technology works, but there are officers who will be quoted saying that, "Yes, Project Angel Fire saved lives." But the reason why we decided to do this story is because it's not just a military thing, right? Like, with a lot of these technologies, they maybe start in the military, but then they trickle down, all the way down to all of us. And actually, in this case it trickled down to Dayton, Ohio.

ANDY MILLS: Ross Group Incorporated. Do you think that's it?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: By first name?

ANDY: Yeah, it'd be weird.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: [laughs] Oh, you've gotta go with the pun.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Producer Andy Mills and I actually went to Dayton, Ohio, to visit Ross at his business.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Persistent Surveillance Systems.

ANDY: There it is!

JAD: Persistent Surveillance Systems. Right, that feels Orwellian.

ANDY: Yep.

ROSS MCNUTT: These are the lenses. And the motors here basically control it.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So first we went over to his workshop where he actually works and makes the cameras.

ROSS MCNUTT: These are more powerful than some of the best military systems.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Like, we could see him actually making them and how they get attached to the bottoms of the airplanes.

ANDY: Oh, so many airplanes.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Then we went over to the hangar where he has all the airplanes.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: They're beautiful!

ROSS MCNUTT: So overall, we've got 27 airplanes we operate.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He owns his own airport.

ROSS MCNUTT: You ready?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah!

ROSS MCNUTT: All right. After you guys.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Oh my God, it's big!

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And then he showed us their command center. And this is where you have a bunch of people sitting in front of these enormous screens.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This is like your viewing room?

ROSS MCNUTT: Yeah.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And this is where all the plane pictures end up, because Ross's basic idea in taking this technology from Fallujah to a city like Dayton, Ohio, is basically this ...

ROSS MCNUTT: The US cities have just as large a problem as we do in Afghanistan and Iraq, only it's not IEDs, it's crime.

RICHARD BIEHL: We've had a lot of major events this year. We've had four officer-involved shootings so far this year. Our homicides are up this year.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So this is Dayton police chief, Richard Biehl.

RICHARD BIEHL: B-I-E-H-L.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I talked to him last summer. A couple of years ago, Ross called him up and was like, "Look ..."

ROSS MCNUTT: A city like Dayton, Ohio, we've got 28,000 crimes a year. About 10,000 part one crimes.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Murder, rape, assault.

ROSS MCNUTT: 10,000 part one crimes comes out to be $480 million a year.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But McNutt is like, "For about the price of a police helicopter ..."

ROSS MCNUTT: We believe that we would be able to decrease crime by 30 to 40 percent. A 30 percent decrease in that is $155 million a year.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The Dayton police were like ...

RICHARD BIEHL: Alrighty.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: "Let's give it a shot."

RICHARD BIEHL: So we basically set up a test in June of 2012 for a five-day flight to see for ourselves what it was capable of doing.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: They sent the plane up in the air. It started doing its thing just like in Fallujah, and within just a few hours ...

RICHARD BIEHL: There was a call of this breaking and entering in progress with a description of a van.

ANGIE HORN: It was an older white box truck. Just a regular random moving truck.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This is Angie Horn. She's the one who called 911. She was just home on her lunch break, and she sees a moving van pull up in front of her neighbor's house. The guy gets out, breaks in, starts moving furniture out.

ANGIE HORN: So we immediately called the police. They got there relatively quickly from what I remember, but he had already taken off.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Now normally in a case like this, the police would be like, "Well, how do we follow him? We don't know where he went." But in this case, the police contact Persistent Surveillance Systems, and ultimately they get connected to this guy.

ALEX BLASINGAME: My name's Alex Blasingame. I'm the senior analyst for the company.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Alex pulls up the image of Dayton, zooms in, clicks backwards about five minutes until he sees this little grainy white dot appear in front of her neighbor's house.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is the vehicle here that we're wanting to track.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I'm sorry. What vehicle? I don't—I barely see anything.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Right. So the image looks real blurry, but the human brain and the human eyes are very, very evolved to pick out movement.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: You've gotta understand that from two miles up, a car looks just like a random shape. And people, they look like pixels. Alex has trained himself to pick out movement.

ALEX BLASINGAME: I'm gonna put a tag down on where he's at.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He places an orange circle over that random little shape and then click, click, click, he moves forward, forward, forward.

ALEX BLASINGAME: To follow him to his real time location.

ALEX GOLDMARK: Alex follows it up some roads, finds out that it is parked in a parking lot.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Six blocks away.

ALEX GOLDMARK: He calls up the people in the field, goes, "Go over there." They get there, they see the guy, they see a truck full of stuff, they send a different cop over to pick up the witness. The witness goes, "Yep, that's the guy."

JAD: Oh, the lady who called?

ALEX GOLDMARK: Yeah. This is minutes later.

JAD: No kidding!

ALEX GOLDMARK: That could have been a murderer, right? That could've been an armed robber. It could've been a lot of things.

ROBERT: This is so weird. It's like having a superpower.

JAD: It is kind of.

ROBERT: This is actually better than Batman. You can't go back and forth in time if you're a superhero.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I just feel sad. It's like we're all just these little dots. It just seems like the antithesis of what a lot of police departments seem to be trying to do in the aftermath of Ferguson and Staten Island and other horrific things that have happened, which is getting the police on the streets, making personal connections, creating relationships.

RICHARD BIEHL: There's nothing in this system that prevents you from having effective community policing at the same time. And oh, by the way, this may dramatically help that community relations. The reason they're putting body cams on police officers is to try to get the police officers to be more respectful because they can be seen. Well, this lets us watch all the officers in a 25-square-mile area all at once.

ROBERT: But then you can watch so many other people all at once. Here's other things that people in Dayton do: like Romeo and Juliet, they sometimes meet without their parents' permission in the playground and smooch. There are gonna be divorce lawyers who are gonna be tracking errant spouses. There are gonna be traffic police who are watching who goes through the red light. There are gonna be realtors who are wondering who are—how many tenants do you really have in that building?

ROSS MCNUTT: Right.

ROBERT: And I guess the thought might be that if the information exists that will show what my pixel was actually doing, then—then I'm a little less free.

ROSS MCNUTT: There is a clear trade off between security and privacy. And, you know, in our major cities where we have tens of thousands of major crimes, you are a lot less free when you can't leave your house at night.

ROBERT: There's obviously a huge advantage to knowing what you know, but then there's a huge thing to knowing what you know. Like, knowledge all by itself is sort of a—is pregnant with funny ...

JAD: You know, here's my problem with this, with all of these privacy stories. It's like when you're talking about these technologies, the advantages are always so concrete and the trade offs always feel so abstract. I feel like there is something being lost here, but I can never quite put my finger on it. It's weird.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Oh, Jad. That weirdness that you're feeling?

JAD: Yes?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It's gonna get a lot weirder.

JAD: [laughs] We'll be right back.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Jenny Linehan from Round Lake, New York. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And we'll continue our collaboration with Manoush Zomorodi and Alex Goldmark from Note to Self.

ROBERT: And our subject is, and remains, eyes in the sky.

JAD: And the situation when we left it is that Manoush and one of our producers Andy Mills had gone down to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with Ross McNutt, check out his technology. And after the Dayton demo, what were you—how were you feeling about things?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well, I was feeling like you have not convinced me. I am not going for this. And then I saw Juarez, Mexico. And that? I mean, that's what made me start to think otherwise.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Juarez, especially at the time we did this, they averaged 300 murders a month and 52 kidnappings a week.

ANDY: 300 murders a month?

ALEX BLASINGAME: Yeah.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: McNutt and the gang, they got a contract—we've been asked not to say for whom—and they went down south, set themselves up in a hotel room, got the plane up in the sky, and then whoever the client was started bringing them crime reports.

ALEX BLASINGAME: So this is kind of what you never want to see happen, but this is kind of why the system was up.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Alex pulls up on the screen this very grainy aerial shot of Juarez.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is Juarez, Mexico.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: It looks like any city, right? You've got, like, grids of streets and cars and houses. And then, like, over on the left of the screen, he points to this dark little square. It's a vehicle that's going down the street.

ALEX BLASINGAME: This is a female police officer. She was actually headed to work on this morning, so we'll kind of go through it here.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He starts at the beginning, and you see there's her house. And her car is parked outside. You see that, like, teeny little pixel gets in her car.

ALEX BLASINGAME: She pulls out of her driveway. That was her home.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Starts to drive to work. And then ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: Right when she leaves, if you look up here ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He points to the upper left of the screen.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Several cars were parked up on the corner. As soon as she left her driveway, those cars become active.

ANDY: So this is a stakeout?

ALEX BLASINGAME: Yeah, they were waiting for her to leave.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He's so zoomed in that you can see it's like a Tic Tac moving down the street. And then two more Tic Tacs come alongside.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Until they get right about here.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He's clicking forward on the photo and you see ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: That right there is a speed bump.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: These cars just inch closer.

ALEX BLASINGAME: So she'll kind of hesitate there, which is unfortunate.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So she's driving down the street, and there's these cars following behind her. And then there's this car up ahead of her.

ALEX BLASINGAME: A vehicle that had been parked here for 15, 20, 30 minutes, all of the sudden backs out into traffic and seemingly slows them down. Almost gets in an accident right here, which gives these guys enough time to catch up. This is where they're gonna pull up beside her.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And then suddenly, Alex says this is the point where ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: Here the first car pulls up and shoots her multiple times.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... she was shot in the head.

ALEX BLASINGAME: Multiple times in the head right here. She's actually gonna roll through the intersection.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Her car continues to go, even though she's been shot in the head.

ALEX BLASINGAME: There is a parked car behind this tree, and you'll actually see this parked car move when she runs into it. And then these guys take off.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah, it was not fun to watch. It was upsetting. But what happens next made me really start to understand what this technology is capable of.

ROSS MCNUTT: I just wanted to real quickly just show you some of the other ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Ross walks in. He takes that moment—horrible moment—and then he starts to, like, shoot back and forth in time.

ROSS MCNUTT: So suspect car one, here's his path before the murder, here's his path after the murder.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: He actually takes the two cars from that murder and you see—he draws on the map, you see that they meet up with two other cars ...

ROSS MCNUTT: See that guy there?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: ... that were involved in a different murder. Now one murder becomes two, two cars become four.

ROSS MCNUTT: Car stops ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And if you follow all four of these cars, drawing lines as they move through the city, you find out who they meet up with. And four becomes eight, eight becomes 16, so on and so on. And you have all these lines criss-crossing the city, and then you see that a whole bunch of those cars are headed to one place.

ROSS MCNUTT: This house—this house appears to be their cartel headquarters.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And that's when you start to think well, that's how you have to take something like this down. It's not a one-shot thing like solving the crime. It's about cracking an entire system.

ANDY: In fact—this is Andy here—when I was doing some research into this, I made a bunch of calls. And I spoke with this one governmental source who told me that this information that Ross had just showed us, like, it was one of the primary tools used to dismantle an entire cartel in Juarez.

JAD: Wow.

ANDY: And that apparently, the leader of that cartel was responsible for something like 1,500 murders.

JAD: Whoa! So I gotta ask again. So how are you feeling at this point? Are you happy or scared or—I don't know.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: I felt ashamed of myself because I thought oh, the reason why I'm so excited about it is it's because it's in a country where I don't live and I'm an outsider and I think of it as being messed up. So it's okay for them, but it's still not okay for us. What did you think, Andy?

ANDY: I mean, like, this is where I stopped being a good journalist because I—I picked a side. It feels wrong to not solve these crimes that we can solve.

JAD: And what if this plane is on top of New York?

ANDY: Good.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: God, really?

ANDY: For me, it became ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But do you remember, like, after 9/11 when you'd walk down the street and you'd hear the F-16s circling over the city? And I just remember the feeling in my stomach was like nausea. Like, I felt sick. It felt gross. It felt like we had no autonomy over ourselves. And at that point I was scared enough that I could live with it. But right now I don't feel that way, and look, it's a very privileged position to be able to say that we shouldn't have it. I get that.

ANDY: I mean, that's what I'm saying. Like, I became a convert because, like, somebody got kidnapped today, and if we had an eye in the sky we might be able to get the kid back in a few minutes, hours compared to, like, you see the stats on the amber alerts? They're not good.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. But what we're talking about is, like—and I'm not saying that I'm, like, anti-McNutt at all, but what I'm saying is, like, it's very easy to paint it as "We're going to get bad guys." And I just don't think it's that simple. The McNutt and co., they seem like decent people. They have set limitations for themselves. They have said they will not use photography that could get any closer. They've made a moral choice with that. How do we know other people will make the same moral choice? And ...

ANDY: You're saying that even though this thing might solve a ton of crimes, might save lives, it's still not worth the risk because it just asks a level of trust in government that we shouldn't—we shouldn't give. Is that what you're saying?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: For now, yes.

ROBERT: So back to Dayton. What happened in Dayton?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well ...

RICHARD BIEHL: I was pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: After that five-day demo, the police chief, Richard Biehl ...

RICHARD BIEHL: I recommended that we enter into a contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And so they took it to the City Commission.

KERY GRAY: Hi, this is Kery Gray.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Oh, hey, Kery. It's Manoush in New York.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And according to Kery Gray ...

KERY GRAY: Director of the City Commission Office for the city of Dayton, Ohio.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: The committee saw the presentation and they liked it.

KERY GRAY: The City Commission was interested in the presentation.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But they decided that before they go forward, they should have a public forum. So they could just, you know, sort of hear from the people.

KERY GRAY: There was about 75 or so people there.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And he says that the people of Dayton, like, much like the people of Radiolab and Note to Self, were very divided.

KERY GRAY: A quarter of the people were supportive of this technology, and they were frustrated with the amount of crime. Their belief was, "I'm not doing anything wrong so I don't care what people see me doing. We want this implemented and we want it implemented very broadly."

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So a quarter of them were like, "You know, bring it on!" They were basically in the Andy camp.

ANDY: Woo hoo!

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But then there was another group, slightly smaller, but not by much.

KERY GRAY: Maybe 15 percent.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: That was the Robert/Manoush camp.

KERY GRAY: Who believed that this was a grotesque invasion of privacy, and some of the people spoke in very impassioned terms. So ...

ROBERT: Yay!

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yay!

KERY GRAY: ... I think calling it grotesque invasion of privacy would pretty much reflect the way this group was feeling.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: This group, too.

KERY GRAY: And that there was no way that you could trust government with this volume of information and this breadth of information.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So you had your pros and your cons. The rest of the people, like the majority ...

KERY GRAY: Maybe had some feelings one way or another, but just didn't have enough information. And so they came and kind of asked questions.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Like, how long will Persistent Surveillance Systems keep the images? 90 days. How far can they zoom in? Can they see my face? No. So they had a lot of questions, which Kery seems to think that they could've answered, they could've gotten everybody on board, but in the end, even though the room was basically divided into three parts, the naysayers were so loud and so impassioned that they sort of defined the conversation.

ROBERT: As we do.

KERY GRAY: So we took that lesson to understand that there was going to be some significant education that was gonna be needed and some significant hurdles that were gonna have to be crossed before we were able to do a broad based implementation. And based on the amount of time that was gonna have to be spent, we decided there were other more immediate techniques that could be used, that could be invested in, and we took the money that could have been spent on this and spent it on some other activities.

JAD: It seems like what you're saying is that, like, it was just gonna be too hard to get people over the hurdle. So like, eh, it's not worth it.

KERY GRAY: Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So the plane is off the table, so to speak.

KERY GRAY: It's off the table for right now, but that doesn't mean that it's never coming back on the table.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Which I think is fair to say is frustrating to him.

ROSS MCNUTT: Right now, we've got about $150 million worth of proposals sitting out there for a large number of cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia. We've been to Moscow, we've been to London. We're waiting for them to make decisions. We've done Compton, we've been to Rome.

ANDY: So Compton's like, "Maybe." Juarez is like, "Maybe." Dayton is like, "Maybe."

ROSS MCNUTT: There's a whole lot of maybes out there.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And what McNutt and his team are doing now—and this is actually what they were doing when we went to visit them—they're analyzing ...

ALEX BLASINGAME: What we're doing here in Dayton is we are looking at a turnpike or something?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah, traffic in New Jersey. They're studying traffic problems.

ALEX BLASINGAME: We look at congested areas which are typically, especially in that part of the country, exits and on-ramps, any kind of junction in a highway.

ROSS MCNUTT: Well, sometimes you just want to scream.

ROBERT: Since we did that story, things have happened, Manoush.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Indeed they have.

ROBERT: And so I've invited you back here to fill us in on further developments, of which there have been gigantic ones—very recently.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yes. And McNutt says not just since we aired that episode, but because we aired that episode.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well, after this episode first went out, it turns out that there were a couple very wealthy philanthropists listening to Radiolab, and they picked up the phone, they called him and they said, "We would like to be the people that bankroll you giving this a try in an American city somewhere."

ROBERT: So they—they just said, "We'll write you a check. If you can land the city, we'll give you the money?"

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Pretty much.

ROBERT: Wait a second. Who are these people?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: They are Laura and John Arnold. They're young. They're in their early 40s. They're in Texas. And by the time that they contacted McNutt, he had already done—as we said, he'd already done a very extensive look at cities across the nation, looking for the one that had the biggest crime issue, and as he puts it, the strongest political leadership, somebody who would be willing to put up with the firestorm that would inevitably ensue. Baltimore fit the bill. It had a mayor who said she was very tough on crime. Shootings were actually up in Baltimore by 72 percent last year. So he went back to Baltimore and said, "If I can get the money for this, are you game?" And they were like, "Sure."

ROBERT: So the rich folks were willing to give money to the mayor of Baltimore to put a plane in the sky to take pictures of Baltimore for a discrete period?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: No, not quite. So it didn't go to the government or any elected officials. Nobody needed to sign off on this in the city of Baltimore other than the police commissioner, which is why he was able to do it without telling any of the city council members or the mayor, or ...

ROBERT: Wait a second. Wait a second.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: So Baltimore's police department, without telling the mayor or the city council or anybody, decides to contract with this fellow ...

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah.

ROBERT: ... supported by two people in Texas, to put a plane in the sky to gaze down at Baltimore and everyone in Baltimore. And they just don't mention this to the mayor.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah.

ROBERT: Did McNutt move to Baltimore and do this?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Oh, yeah. He moved to Baltimore. And they set up across the street from the police station, and had about a dozen analysts sitting there for two months, looking at everything that was going on in Baltimore.

ROBERT: So they did see some stuff during this period? Like, give me an example of something bad that happened that they—that they saw.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So here's one that we know about, which is that there was an elderly brother and sister. The woman is 90 years old, the brother is 82. And they were near this bus stop, and they actually got in the line of fire. They got gunned down by a shooter. And so they end up tracking a couple cars, but then later they think—the police say actually, we think he got away on foot. I think it was a witness on the ground who said that they thought that he had left on foot.

ROBERT: Oh.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And so rewind, and they see a dot scrambling to get away from the scene. It goes down the street, it passes a Subway sandwich shop. It goes between these two houses, stops at a car that's parked, and then it ends up at, they later discover, the home of a woman. And turns out her boyfriend is somebody who has a long criminal record. And so there are over 700 CCTV cameras on the streets in Baltimore. And so the idea is that it's sort of a support mechanism, right? Like, they get the high level, then it goes to the street, then you've got the officers on the ground.

ROBERT: I get it. So if the shooter shoots and then gets into a car and goes down Elm Street, you have cameras down on Elm Street, and you can see maybe the car and then the driver's license and maybe even capture the face.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Exactly.

ROBERT: And did they eventually arrest this person?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So he crossed state lines, and the feds picked him up.

ROBERT: Okay. So they've made the arrest. They go into court and they say to the judge, "Okay, we obtained information about this suspect in part through a spy airplane." Does the stuff that they gather during this few months, is that now going before judges and becoming evidence in arrests and in prosecutions?

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Well, not yet. We talked to the state's attorney's office. They got a briefing about a month ago from the police about what McNutt had been up to. And they also told us that there are five open and pending cases where this surveillance technology was used, police are using it. And they say—this is the state's attorney's office—that they're looking forward to learning more about what McNutt actually does, and that they are trying to determine whether, in fact, all those pictures could be used in some way at trial. But they're not ready to say yes, this absolutely will pass legal muster in a trial.

ROBERT: God, this is—the other objection that I guess I was thinking about was that the defense, as a matter of justice, as a matter of the Fourth Amendment, well you know this is gonna come up at some point.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah.

ROBERT: Then the defense lawyers would say, "Wait a second. This evidence against my client was obtained without not only his or her permission, but without anybody's permission. And the entire town is now in effect searchable during—on sunny days. And did the Founding Fathers want that to happen?"

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: To be honest, the Supreme Court hasn't seen a ton of these mass surveillance cases. But actually, Robert, I mean, I happen to have the Fourth Amendment here, and I want to read it to you.

ROBERT: It says you can't—the searches and seizures are prohibited.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized."

ROBERT: So by that token it would say: people to be searched: everyone in Baltimore; places to be looked at: every place in Baltimore; oaths to be obtained ahead of time: blanket. That's a pretty radical thing.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. And when you put it like that, no wonder there's very likely to be an inevitable, big, legal, public debate over whether this is the answer to Baltimore's crime problem. McNutt says he thinks very, very soon the police are going to release an evaluation report looking at the effectiveness of his planes. He thinks that whatever Baltimore decides, that's gonna set a precedent for mid-size cities that are struggling across the United States.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And I'm Manoush Zomorodi from Note to Self. You can go to Radiolab.org for more information about the McNutt. And also please, I hope you'll check out NotetoSelfRadio.org. Special thanks to Alex Goldmark, also to Dan Tucker and George Schulz.

ROBERT: By the way, the piece that we just listened to was produced by Andy Mills. He has produced any number of Radiolab stories over the years, and he has decided to move to the New York Times. He's been a tremendous boon to us. Over and over again, he's brought a worldview and a sensibility that we didn't have before he came, not really. And now he's gonna work for that obscure newspaper. But nevertheless, we wish him all the best. And thank you Andy, so much. And thanks, of course, for listening.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: My name is [scrambled], and I live on [scrambled] in Dayton. I'm here to register my concern regarding the airborne surveillance that was discussed earlier.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lord of the Rings: A great eye, lidless, wreathed in flame.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman #2: I'd also like to register my concern with the so-called surveillance program. This was the stuff of science fiction when Orwell wrote 1984.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman #3: What policies does Dayton have in place to prevent using the data in a racially-biased way?]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To go to the next message, press '6.']

[MANOUSH ZOMORODI:  Hey guys, it's Manoush, the host of Note to Self, calling you from the eighth floor at WNYC studios. And I just think you need me to tell everyone that Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Soren Wheeler is senior editor. Jamie York is our senior producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell, David Gebel, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack and Molly Webster. With help from Nigar Fatali, Alexandra Lee Young, Charu Sinha, W. Harry Fortuna and Percia Verlin. Wow, they even make my name sound easy. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Andy Mills, we will miss you. Bye!]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.