Attack Surface (Drones surveilling protest) | Database of Machine Vision in Art, Games and Narratives

Brief description

Numerous drones fly overhead at protests. Some are police drones, some are run by the protesters, some belong to the press. Civilians fly drones to livestream the protests or to surveil police tactics so they can let the protesters know how to counteract or evade control. The police and government contracts use drones for visual surveillance and for fake cellphone towers that suck up information about the protesters' phones. In one scene, Carrie Johnstone, one of Masha's bosses in the private sector surveillance industry, calls Masha and informs her that she is watching her through the drones (p. 255). In another, Masha observes civilian drones programmed to harry police drones by learning their patterns and obstructing their paths.

Pull Quotes

“I’ve seen Mr. Yallow’s traffic while you and I were chatting and I can see that he was doing his customary headless-chicken impression. But I also see that you are with him—”

I looked up at the drones overhead. How many were fielded by protesters documenting the action and helping to slip the kettles, and how many were OPD’s, supplied by Zyz? (And how many protester drones were feeding OPD, thanks to some kind of hack supplied by Zyz?)

I resisted the urge to give the sky the finger.

“Glad to hear you’re still looking out for me.” (p. 255).

The sky was alive with the red lights of zipping drones, and some of them probably belonged to the protesters livestreaming to the web and people playing the protest home game, watching the police formations and marking clear routes through them. (p. 245).

There were drones overhead; some were police drones, some were civilian drones, some were press, and some were police pretending to be civilian or press. I could tell the police ones by the little dirtboxes on their bellies, fake flying cell-phone towers sucking up the identities of every phone within range; some had nozzles for spraying pepper spray. At least, I hoped that was pepper spray, and I hoped those were cop drones. If there was anything scarier than participating in a civic disturbance with police gas-drones buzzing overhead, it was participating in a civic disturbance haunted by overhead gas-drones operated by anonymous parties unknown.

Some of the civilian drones were harriers, deliberately locking onto the cop drones and obstructing their path, triggering their collision-avoidance and making them swerve and buck, consuming battery. That was a new one on me. Must be a Bay Area thing, some machine-learning kids with too much time on their hands, training a classifier to identify and chase cop drones. I saw a couple of collisions and near-collisions and heard a lot of shouting as the drones conducted their aerial warfare overhead. Nothing fell out of the sky … yet.

“Shit’s getting real,” Marcus sang.

“Don’t be an ass, darling,” Ange said cheerfully and dragged me through the crowd. (p. 333).